The Biden prisoner exchange deal

The New Neo Posted on by

The non-art of this prisoner exchange deal:

Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who was held for months in Russian prisons on drug charges, was released Thursday in a one-for-one prisoner swap for international arms dealer Viktor Bout, bringing an end to an ordeal that sparked intensive high-level negotiations between the U.S. and the Kremlin to secure her freedom…

To secure Griner’s release, the president ordered Bout to be freed and returned to Russia. Mr. Biden signed the commutation order cutting short Bout’s 25-year federal prison sentence.

Notably, the Griner-for-Bout exchange leaves retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan imprisoned in Russia. Whelan has been in Russian custody for nearly four years. He was convicted on espionage charges that the U.S. has called false.

Griner’s charges were not false, although her sentence was ridiculously long compared to her offense. Her ordeal has lasted months, whereas Whelan has been incarcerated almost four years on false charges. And of course, Griner is a black lesbian professional basketball player whereas Whelan is a white man and former Marine.

Biden and officials mentioned Whelan this way:

“We’ve not forgotten about Paul Whelan,” Mr. Biden said Thursday, adding “we will never give up” on securing his release. U.S. officials told reporters that it became clear in talks with the Russians that the prospect of securing the release of both Griner and Whelan in exchange for Bout was a nonstarter, with one saying the U.S. had was “a choice between bringing home one particular American — Brittney Griner — or bringing home none.”

That is written so poorly it’s impossible to tell what it means – although maybe that’s the point. It seems Biden is saying Russia wouldn’t release both and so they had to settle for one. And another official seems to be indicating that the Russians took Whelan off the table in the negotiations, and perhaps that’s even true although it’s hard to trust anything this administration says. This article indicates the same – that the Russians have refused to negotiate for Whelan’s release, perhaps because he’s held on (false) espionage charges rather than drug charges as Griner was.

So, if that’s the way it actually went, instead of holding out the Biden administration gave in and did what Russia is purported to have wanted and gave up Bout in order to get Griner and not Whelan. And Bout is another kettle of fish entirely:

Bout, who was most recently held at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Agency in Thailand following a sting operation in 2008. He was convicted of conspiring to kill Americans and began his 25-year sentence a decade ago.

Whelan’s family mentioned that this is the second time Whelan has been passed over in a deal. I wonder who the Russians are saving him for.

ADDENDUM: More on Bout here:

Part of his 2012 conviction in a New York federal court was for attempting to buy and sell antiaircraft missiles to terrorist organizations for use against passenger jets…

“He was finally brought to justice in an American court,” successful prosecuting attorney Preet Bharara said at the time, “for agreeing to provide a staggering number of military-grade weapons to an avowed terrorist organization committed to killing Americans.”

He was convicted ten years ago, and Russia has been trying all that time to get him released. Seems like they just succeeded. Perhaps Griner was convicted for that very purpose – to serve as bait for this big fish. I think that’s exactly what happened, and it was irresistible to the Biden crew.

How the FBI got the Hunter laptop story suppressed while attempting to preserve plausible deniability for itself

The New Neo Posted on by

You can’t call the FBI dumb. It was clever – very very clever.

The story is somewhat complex, but Miranda Devine of the NY Post has done good reporting on this from the start. I highly recommend reading her latest in its entirety. Some excerpts:

The extraordinary revelation for the first time lays bare how the FBI was involved in pre-bunking the story of the laptop, which had been in the bureau’s possession for almost a year.

“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” said Roth in a Dec. 21, 2020, declaration to the Federal Election Commission.

“I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

“Pre-bunking.” That’s a useful term.

More:

The FBI also warned Facebook to be on “high alert” for a “dump” of “Russian propaganda” before the 2020 election, in terms specific enough that it “fit the pattern” of The Post’s story, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan in August.

Facebook also censored The Post ahead of Twitter’s throttling of the story in October, pending “fact checks” that never appear to have been done.

The FBI agent who organized those weekly meetings with Big Tech was Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, whose postgraduate thesis claimed that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help former President Donald Trump…

It looks very much as if the FBI pre-bunked a story it knew was coming about Hunter Biden. But how would it know The Post was going to publish the story in October 2020?

Well, the FBI was spying on Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s online cloud, under the pretext of an investigation into alleged foreign agent registration violations, a probe which conveniently was dropped this year.

The covert surveillance warrant on Giuliani gave the FBI access to emails in August 2020 from Delaware computer repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac disclosing information damaging to Joe Biden from the laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at his store in April 2019.

The FBI also had access to my [that is, Miranda Devine’s] messages with Giuliani in October discussing when The Post would publish the story.

The FBI knew exactly what it was doing. I bet that the owner of the computer repair store where Hunter had dropped off his computer regrets ever giving it to the FBI. Fortunately, he kept copies of its hard drive, and that’s the only reason the story ever saw the light of day.

For more on the same tale, please see this by Byron York.

What a den of partisan corruption the FBI is. The saddest thing about it is that half of the country either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or applauds all of this.

NOTE: Oh, and then there’s James Baker’s involvement in “vetting” the Twitter email release. Another must-read.

Divided party, united party

The New Neo Posted on by

The divided party is the GOP and the united party is the Democrats.

Oh, I know the Democrats aren’t really united. Not completely – just nearly completely. In recent decades and especially since Obama became president, they have purged their moderate wing and become almost wholly leftist. And the ones who aren’t leftists vote with the leftists anyway in an impressive demonstration of iron party discipline – except for, on very rare occasions, senators Manchin and Sinema.

It’s not only the huge number of leftists in the party that have allowed them to control their members so well. It’s the fact that once leftists reached critical mass they elected Congressional leaders who were determined to take the party further in that direction. And of course it helps to have the MSM, the press, and education and so many other cultural institutions on their side. There is also a Democrat voting public that accepted all of this – or was ignorant of how leftist some of their representatives were because they hid it in moderate rhetoric while voting leftist.

The GOP is very different. The party has been split for ages, and though there are more conservatives now than there were earlier, they are not a majority much less a powerful critical mass. That’s one of the reasons why someone like McConnell – not a conservative – keeps becoming Leader. No conservative challenger has a strong enough voting bloc to mount anything like enough votes against him.

Those who complain of a uniparty are not quite correct, in my opinion. The Democrats are a uniparty unto themselves. The Republicans have a GOPe wing that is large, however, that sometimes holds firm against the Democrats but too often is willing to betray the conservative GOP base and even the moderate GOP base and go along with Democrats. I’d call that wing a sometime uniparty. But there is a sizeable and stalwartly conservative wing that has not been “purged” and is not part of a uniparty. These two Republican wings have a lot of trouble working together.

Until the conservative wing of the GOP reaches its own critical mass it won’t be able to dethrone the McConnells of the political world. And if the conservative wing broke off to form a third-party at this point, it would have even less power than now because there’s just not enough of them or enough general support. That’s the dilemma.

More post-Georgia-runoff musings

The New Neo Posted on by

Fewer people on the right and left voted in the Georgia runoff than in the general – why? Yes, I know that’s pretty much always true of runoffs, but this was no ordinary runoff. Are people more interested in their state elections, for posts such as governor and state legislators, than in the direction the federal government goes for the next two years? Or have many people on the right in Georgia just not been paying attention? I know the turnout yesterday (and in early voting) was large for a runoff – but still, winning depends on turnout, and a little more for the right might have done the trick.

Or is it because they think the Senate is lost anyway? Do they not realize numbers matter even then? Or did the continued “leadership” of GOPe leader McConnell turn them off? Did depression after the 2022 general turn them off? Or is it possible they actually listened to Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan who bragged about not voting for Walker or Warnock?

Or all of the above?

I’ve seen people commenting in sites around the conservative blogosphere angrily and morosely saying that Georgia is now a blue state. Untrue. It is decidedly purple – or, rather, it’s layered, with a purple outer (federal) layer and a red inner (state) core:

The Republican Party controls the [Georgia] offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature.

What’s more, Georgia has 14 members of the US House, and in the 2022 election nine of the winners were Republicans and five were Democrats, for a gain of one GOP seat over the 2020 reults.

And yet Warnock won, and Georgia’s other senator (Osoff) is a Democrat as well. Georgia is not the only state like that – for example, New Hampshire has a similar but even more dichotomous pattern with – in New Hampshire’s case – two senators and two US House members who are Democrats, and all state entities controlled by Republicans. Why? Do the residents of these states think that Congress members are too distant to matter, compared to state officeholders? They should think again. Do voters in those states think that the state officials affect their pocketbooks more directly, and so they elect more fiscally responsible Republicans at that level and save the virtue-signaling voting for their national candidates?

I wrote prior to the November 2022 election that I thought New Hampshire’s incumbent Hassan was vulnerable but that Bolduc was a fairly extreme candidate who was not a good fit for the state, with little ability to appeal to more moderate voters there. However, no better candidate had presented him or herself in New Hampshire and so although Bolduc won the primary in a state that is not especially Trump-friendly, he lost the general. The situation with Warnock and Walker in Georgia was different in its details, but similar in its result – Warnock was somewhat vulnerable there, but Walker was not the person to do capitalize on that.

Remember Pearl Harbor

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a previous post.]

Today is the eighty-first anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its very ancient last legs and nearly gone. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”

I was reminded of this a few years ago while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long-ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.

Back on the 75th anniversary there were still quite a few WWII veterans alive:

The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have data on veterans of individual battles, and an alumni association for the battle disbanded in 2011, at the 70th anniversary, when it believed just 8,000 of the 84,000 uniformed Americans on Oahu during the attack remained alive. Since 2011, roughly half of veterans of World War II who were alive then have died, according to VA projections, leaving fewer than 700,000 alive today. Roughly 400 American WWII veterans die each day.

Obviously the number of Pearl Harbor veterans alive was small then and has only gotten smaller since that was written—as it will every year until the number is zero. And then, we will still remember? In fact, do most of us remember Pearl Harbor even now?

I’m not really sure what our younger generation today remembers, or wishes to remember – or through what strange leftist prism it will be taught to remember that day if it’s taught at all.

Here’s a post I published fourteen years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated.

Here’s just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, because we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

“Righteous might.”

Here’s the speech itself:

The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. That draft read “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. He also changed “simultaneously and deliberately attacked” to “suddenly and deliberately attacked.”

Wise choices by FDR.

Open thread 12/7/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to do some of this but definitely not all of it. I notice that this dancer has long toes and a long toe box. I have short toes and had a short toe box. Each situation presents its challenges.

Warnock wins re-election

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course he did. Of course he did.

Although I knew this election was going to be happening Tuesday, I couldn’t bring myself to analyze it ahead of time because a Warnock win seemed a foregone conclusion. It felt as though we’d seen this movie before.

And indeed we had – only this time it brings the Senate to 51 Democrats to 49 Republicans instead of 50/50 with a Kamala Harris tiebreaker for the Democrats.

I don’t even think fraud was needed for Warnock to win. Herschel Walker just wasn’t the candidate to beat him, and on election night 2022 when it became clear there would be a runoff it also became clear that Warnock would win it. Money had poured in to support him, in a ratio of three to one. And although McConnell’s super PAC threw in money for Walker in the runoff, it didn’t meet Warnock’s total and at any rate maybe money wasn’t the issue.

Whatever it was in Georgia that got voters out for the Kemp win in November wasn’t operating for Walker in December, despite Kemp’s endorsement. Personality? Troubling past and family members who aired it prominently? Lack of incumbency? And it seems that Warnock’s leftism didn’t trouble the voters much if at all, nor did other accusations that surfaced against him.

So, what difference does it make if the Senate is 51-49 versus 50-50 with a tiebreaker? For one thing, it would take two Democrats defecting instead of just one to stop a judge from being approved. Or, the same if they wanted to vote on the filibuster – they’d need two “nay” votes against ending the filibuster instead of one.

Of course, the GOP now has the House, which means it will be harder to pass anything – I think. The problem is that the GOP holds it by such a small margin that if (and when?) any House members decide to do that bipartisan reach-across-the-aisle thing, watch out. Whoever becomes Speaker – and for the moment I’ll assume it will be McCarthy, although he has a challenger in Andy Biggs – had better be made of sterner stuff than previous behavior indicated.

As for Biggs:

Biggs simply doesn’t have the votes to win, and there are dangers here:

Biggs…presumably has at least five votes. This puts Kevin McCarthy at a precarious 216 votes, two shy of what he needs to take possession of the Speaker’s gavel. Some fear that the five holdouts will give more moderate GOP members the chance to strike some kind of deal with Democrats that allows them to retain the speakership. All of this may just be a political ploy to force concessions from McCarthy in the new legislative session, but he only has 28 days to whip up the votes he needs.

The full House will vote for their new speaker on January 3, 2023.

Anyone else feeling a bit weary at this point? I certainly am.

Trump’s explanation

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump has attempted to explain what he meant and didn’t mean by his recent statement that caused so much controversy, about Twitter and the 2020 election. An excerpt:

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of their other HOAXES & SCAMS. What I said was that when there is ‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,’ as has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election, steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG. Only FOOLS would disagree with that and accept STOLEN ELECTIONS. MAGA!”

The original quote was this:

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

Before I try to give my take on it, I want to state that a vast number of people who detest Trump will always interpret anything he says in the worst possible light. That’s a given; he will not be treated fairly. But that’s all the more reason that he needs to be crystal clear. I don’t mean he needs to be mealy-mouthed; one can be forceful and direct and even strident and still leave oneself less open to misinterpretation (knowing of course that no matter how clear you are you will be misinterpreted, especially if you are Trump).

The problem is that Trump often fails to do that, which leaves the door wide open for his enemies. For the statements of Trump’s under discussion here, even many of his friends and previous supporters interpreted his words to mean something very radical about going past the Constitution. I believe I understand his correction, which I’d paraphrase this way [phrases I’ve changed are bolded):

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? What is the proper remedy? Is there one? Because once A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude has occurred, it already has undone all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

I’m sure if Trump had said that it would have been heavily criticized as well, but I believe that at least it would have been clearer (that’s, of course, if I’m understanding his correction of what he meant).

But the horse has already left the barn. What the original statement sounded like gave his enemies a great gift. This is a longstanding problem with Trump – that his utterances or tweets are often phrased in a way that leaves him even more open to the worst interpretations by his enemies than they ordinarily would. He can say all he wants afterwards about what he really meant, but the damage is done and it turns a lot of moderates against him as well.

As for the notion that a corrupt election undoes the Constitution and the rest, I don’t think it actually does. The rules are still there, it’s the people in charge who are corrupt, and in the end rules are never anything without people of integrity to administer them. No rule can ever be written that protects us utterly. Just to take one example, all of Hitler’s tyrannical power was taken though constitutional means – including the legislature’s surrender of its own power to him. The German Constitution existed, but people hollowed it out. Maybe I’m making a point that’s pedantic and not especially meaningful – a tyranny accomplished by constitutional means abrogate the meaning and intent of the constitution, if not the constitution itself. But I think it’s important to understand the difference.

If you say that the US today doesn’t align with the Founders’ vision for its functioning, you’d be correct. But that happened long before Trump ran for president. It’s been getting worse, and polls indicate that many people know it.

I’ll close with this:

On being a Democrat voter

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Richard Aubrey” asks:

…[T]he dem/lib/prog and anti-Trump folks are…..strange.

If one mentions a fact inconvenient to their views, they’ll say, “Fox” or “Trump” with the self-satisfied air of intellectual triumph. Logic and facts are meaningless…

Shrug. “Faux news”.

I’m not talking about the Swamp, the fed bureaucrats, the MSM. I’m talking about ordinary people who, in other parts of their lives, seem to handle reality reasonably well.

Not getting it. But the left can’t succeed without a sufficient number of these folks. Where do they come from and why [do] they find such ideas so satisfactory?

I’ve dealt with versions of the answer many times, but I think it bears repeating. What might be called the “ordinary” Democrat voter – as opposed to activists or politicians or pundits – doesn’t seem to me to be all that hard to understand. Maybe it’s because, up to a couple of decades ago, I used to be one. Also, it’s the description of most of the people I know; some of them are people with whom I’ve discussed politics.

I think that what is going on with the vast majority is that people they basically trust – friends, family, the MSM, pundits, and more – have told them that certain sources are unreliable and mendacious (FOX) or mendacious and downright evil (Trump). They haven’t the time or interest to listen carefully to either Fox or Trump for themselves, and a few soundbites with commentary critical of FOX or Trump or others on the right can suffice to cement the idea in their minds. After all, it seems a self-evident truth to them, something that virtually all the smart and good people also believe.

Plus, if and when they do listen to a little bit, it’s through the filter of their already-held conceptions. A mind is a difficult thing to change, and it’s satisfying and validating to cling to preconceived notions that offer a convenient excuse to do so. Joining the supposedly virtuous and good also means that you yourself are virtuous and good.

There are so many benefits it’s easy to see them.

Those on the right who say “but isn’t it obvious how evil, mendacious, and destructive the left is?” My answer is simply no. To see that, you must be paying closed attention to those very things that have already been discredited in your eyes. It’s a hurdle to overcome, and although some do, most will not.

Trump as Lear, raging against the vast left-wing conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

And I mean really really vast.

Many many people think that Trump’s gone past the point of no return with this quote:

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION?,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, the Twitter alternative that he founded.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he added. “Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections.”

First I’ll observe that in the practical sense this was a case of Trump giving his enemies the rope with which to hang him, and they have gladly obliged. After all, what has been one of the most common refrains about Trump ever since he declared his candidacy in 2015? That he is a tyrant eager to suspend the Constitution. That is the way they framed January 6th, 2021 as well. This statement by Trump feeds into all of that. So it was stupid on that level; another case of Trump losing his touch in terms of the ability to skirt the line without quite going over it.

However, I see this as a continuation of Trump’s raging King Lear mode of which I’ve written before. Think about it. Trump had the most powerful and most stressful job in the world for four years – I mean that literally. All the while, they laughed at him and/or hated him, and did their best to bring him down through any means possible. Meanwhile, he was a very successful president in terms of what he actually did in the job, surprisingly so. I cannot even imagine the stress he was under all the time, and although he sometimes showed it he did not crack.

And then he lost the 2020 election after thinking he’d won it, and after those four long years of fighting against the extremely numerous and powerful forces arrayed against him. He has never forgotten and never forgiven. With the Twitter story, we now have even more evidence of what was done to him. Whether it’s a fraudulent election in terms of manufacturing votes, or merely blocking the truth and telling lies, it was terrible and he is enraged – deeply enraged and I actually believe heartbroken.

One of the things the left does best is to accuse the right of doing what the left is actually doing. That’s where Hillary Clinton comes in (the article is from February of 2016):

The “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton warned about in the 1990’s still exists, she confirmed on Wednesday evening — but now it’s out in the open and it’s “even better funded,” she said.

Clinton was asked about that infamous quote during a televised town hall hosted by CNN in Derry, New Hampshire.

“At this point it’s probably not correct to say it’s a conspiracy because it’s out in the open,” Clinton said. “There is no doubt about who the players are, what they’re trying to achieve… It’s real, and we’re going to beat it.”

Clinton first used that line in an interview with NBC’s Today Show in 1998 when talking about the political attacks that followed President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. “The great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” she said at the time.

And now there’s no question that a vast left-wing conspiracy successfully took Trump down in 2020. How can a person accept such massive injustice? Not only that, but such massive injustice with no redress?

I’ve said many times that with election fraud, it must be prevented because proving it is nearly impossible and remedying it after the fact is also impossible because there is not going to be a do-over in a presidential election. In addition, if there’s no fraud proven but only pressure by parties such as the FBI, the Constitution is mute on remedies – except impeachment and removal, which is a sort of one-size-fits-all remedy. However, those are political/legal acts of Congress requiring enormous agreement from both parties. In the current climate that will never happen to Biden, no matter what the offenses.

No wonder Trump is raging and searching for a remedy. But his questions and suggestions not only don’t provide a viable answer but tap into just about every criticism ever made of him. It has made his enemies ecstatic with glee, and I believe it shows that the years of persecution have taken their toll on him.

I’ll close with this from Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man!