Biden momentarily discovers there was actually a reason for Trump’s policy choices

The New Neo Posted on by

And the reason was not that he was a mean old SOB.

The reason was that they made sense. At least, that’s what Biden appears to be saying here:

While speaking to reporters on the south lawn of the White House, Biden responded to a question concerning why migrants continue to enter in large numbers at the U.S.-Mexico border, despite him telling migrants not to come.

“Why do you think the message to the migrants, telling them to stay home, don’t come now, why do you think that hasn’t resonated yet? What more can be done sir?” the reporter asked.

“A lot more. We’re in the process of doing it now, including making sure that we re-establish what existed before, which was they can stay in place and make their case from their home countries,” Biden responded.

Biden was seemingly referring to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims were processed. Trump struck the immigration deal, which included the policy, in June 2019. However, the Biden administration ended the policy after taking office in January.

Will this actually happen? Was Biden just making that up in the moment? Did he know what he was saying? Will he remember what he said? And even if he knows and remembers and meant it, does he have the power to do it, or are other people in charge of decisions for what the White House prefers to call the “Biden-Harris” administration?

Israel’s stalemate continues

The New Neo Posted on by

Israel keeps having elections, but they keep having more or less the same result. That includes the latest one:

We still don’t have the final results of Tuesday’s election. It may take till Friday or even next week until the final vote count is official.

Only then will Israelis learn whether either political camp managed to eke out a narrow victory after three maddeningly inconclusive election cycles.

The exit poll numbers were so astonishingly close — and, in the fundamental divide between the Netanyahu camp and its anti-Netanyahu rivals, so unchanged from the last three elections — that the slightest shifts in numbers for small, marginal parties may yet tilt the entire political system one way or the other…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu achieved one major success on Tuesday: Right-wing rebels Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett, who just two months ago could have combined their slates’ showing in the polls to form a party larger than Likud, had fallen so steeply by election day that their combined strength is now less than half of Likud’s…

According to exit polls, every member party in the outgoing government except Shas shrank in size. Likud dropped from 36 seats to 30 or 31. Netanyahu pulled out all the stops in his voter outreach and mobilization efforts, campaigning ferociously for three long months — but ended up right where he started.

Much more at the link.

My eyes tend to glaze over when trying to understand Israeli politics and elections. Apparently I’m not alone in this.

The Democrats are not dumb – they have a plan

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this today from OregonMuse at Ace’s [emphasis mine]:

[Does the left] really want a country where only the police and military have firearms? I don’t think they realize the implications. I know they fantasize about this in a “gee, wouldn’t it be nice if…” sort of way, but they never stop to think about what if we had this sort of mass confiscation of privately owned firearms during the Obama years. So there is no private gun ownership and the only firearms in the country were carried by the police and military. And then, in 2017, all of the firearms in the entire country would ultimately by controlled by Donald Trump.

Is that really what they want?

As I said, progressives don’t realize what they’re asking for by implementing these powerful, sweeping, laws. They don’t understand that this is exactly what the founders of America did not want, that is, the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Yes, it may be more efficient, but if ‘efficiency’ is what they were after, they would have invested all power in the chief executive and that would be that. Progressives need to ask themselves, what if the men whom they want to have this power are voted out of office and replaced a party that hates them? As a self-defense instructor once told me, “never bring a weapon to a fight that you don’t want taken from you and shoved up your butt.”

Progressives would do well to learn this.

A couple of years ago I might have agreed. But no more. It has become abundantly clear that one thing has changed, and it changes the whole equation, and that’s the fact that Democrats are determined to make an opposition win impossible from now on.

They’ve not even been secretive about it, although I don’t know how many Americans are aware of the plan. Through a combination of the federalization of voting rules that allow them to cheat in areas where it matters – even if states are against it, the idea is that they will have no power to stop it in federal elections – as well as creating new wholly Democratic states and packing SCOTUS if necessary, they plan to make a win by the right impossible in the future.

To do this, they must nuke the filibuster. Whether Joe Manchin and/or Krysten Sinema will actually stand in their way remains to be seen. But if the filibuster can’t be destroyed this time, there’s always next time, or they may be able to accomplish what they want to accomplish through the mechanism of executive orders. But their plan is to accomplish it whatever way possible, and they think it’s possible.

Not only possible, but necessary. No longer will they ever trust in the will of the American people. The American people betrayed them in 2016, and that’s when the determination grew on the part of the left to make that impossible in the future.

So OregonMuse’s question, “what if the men whom they want to have this power are voted out of office and replaced a party that hates them?” is one they used to ask and that held them at least somewhat in check. But they feel they no longer need to ask it, because they aim to succeed in making that outcome impossible.

As part of that endeavor, demonizing half the country – their opponents – as dangerous revolutionary insurrectionists and seditious traitors who must be arrested or at least silenced, is necessary. They are well on their way towards doing that.

Poison pen trolls

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a particular type of troll I’ve had visit here off and on over the years, and I’ve noticed a few more lately. Their modus operandi is to come onto a blog on the right and say something that sounds like a caricature of what they think the right is all about – something violent and/or racist and/or hateful in some basic way.

But the statement doesn’t ring true. It just doesn’t sound like any commenter here, nor does it sound like comments I’ve read on the right side of the blogosphere for years. It is as fake as a Halloween costume.

The purpose? My guess is that the idea is to slip it by the blogger and then accuse the blogger of hosting a hate site if enough of these poison pen comments accumulate. Maybe these days, just one is enough. Bloggers aren’t usually thought to be responsible for the comments on their forums, but I’ve seen enough to know that’s not always the way it works and certainly not the way it always will work.

The hoped-for narrative in the Boulder shooting collapses, so the narrative will focus on gun control

The New Neo Posted on by

Some new information is emerging about the Boulder shooter:

Of course, that can be blamed on Trump too, can’t it? If Trump weren’t so hateful, this guy wouldn’t have had to kill ten people.

More:

It’s too bad he wasn’t among the protesters on January 6th who entered the Capitol and were charged with trespassing. If he had been, there’s a good chance he might have already been in a federal prison by now.

From that Times article:

When he was a senior at Arvada West High School, Mr. Alissa was convicted in 2018 of misdemeanor assault against another student in a classroom, and told the police at the time that it was in retaliation for insults and ethnic taunts. Fellow students recall him as having a fierce temper that would flare in response to setbacks or slights…

Court records show he was born in Syria in 1999, as did a Facebook page that appeared to belong to the suspect, giving his name as Ahmad Al Issa; the page was taken down within an hour of his name being released by the authorities. Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney, said the suspect had “lived most of his life in the United States.”

I wonder under what program his family came here, and when, and why they’re not saying.

It will now be all about gun control and nothing else from the Democrats. For example:

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert are facing backlash for offering their “prayers” to victims in Boulder despite pushing for gun rights in the aftermath of the recent mass shooting.

Mr Cruz launched into a staunch defence of firearm ownership at a hearing on Tuesday, falsely accusing Democrats of trying to take guns away from “law-abiding citizens”.

Falsely accusing (as with the MSM’s near-constant use of the terms “baseless,” “debunked,” etc. – we must be spoon-fed the MSM’s opinions masquerading as news). And note the scare quotes around the word prayers.

More:

“Every time there is a shooting, we play this ridiculous theatre where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” [Cruz] said…

Mr Cruz went on to defend his offering of thoughts and prayers to those impacted by the shooting, a gesture which critics often condemn as hypocritical when coming from members who support gun laws…

On Twitter, the senator faced backlash for the comments, with one user telling him: “shove your thoughts and prayers”.

“You care more about keeping the gun lobby on your donor list than you do about any gun victims,” they added.

Much more at the link. And the artcle (which is in the British paper The Independent) refers to Lauren Boebert as “controversial QAnon representative.” Do the Brits think we have a parliamentary system and Boebert is a representative of the Q-party? This seems to be the actual story on Boebert and QAnon – pretty weak sauce, to say the least.

Why is ObamaBidenHarris so keen on Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This topic has been discussed recently in a comment thread, but I assume most people didn’t see it and so I’m highlighting the issue by giving it its own post.

Also, that’s not a typo in the title. I keep trying to figure out what to call this administration, and that’s what I’ve fastened on for the moment, abbreviated to OBH. The names are in their order of succession.]

Part of the reasoning of OBH in enabling Iran is that, if the right hates the mullahs, then the mullahs must not be so bad. If Bush called Iran out as part of an axis of evil, well then it must be pretty good. Also, helping Iran is a way to unify with much of western Europe, which has long been willing and eager to do business with the country.

In addition, like all good post-1967 leftists, Obama hates Israel and Netanyahu also. (Do Biden and Harris? They certainly have been acting like it.) Iran hates Israel. Therefore, the enemy of my enemy is my friend – at least, potentially.

Leftists have a long history of allying with the mullahs for strategic reasons, strange though that may seem, and it began before the revolution. At the time, the left thought it would prevail over the mullahs in forming the succeeding government, and although that didn’t work out for them (au contraire; many were purged), that was over forty years ago. I wonder how many leftists today are even aware of it.

Then there’s the fact that George Bush, Obama’s predecessor, was fairly tight with the Saudis. So still another reason to try to empower Iran was to stick it to the Bushes. Now, of course, there’s an additional motive: to stick it to Donald Trump, Obama’s successor. Obama will get the last laugh on both of them this way. Biden has the same motives, if he’s even mentally competent enough to be a significant part of the decision-making process.

The next motive is one I think is actually quite important to them, and it’s ego. George Bush said that Iran was part of the axis of evil. I believe that Obama, even before becoming president – when he’d make remarks about how he, unlike the previous administration, was going to try to talk with Iran – thought that he could work miracles there and be lauded to the skies for it if he signed some sort of peace treaty. The cost of that treaty in terms of what we would give up and what Iran would get, whether the treaty was real or a headfake by Iran, whether the American people wanted it or not – none of that was a consideration so much as how everyone (particularly in Europe) would think he was the Light Bringer if he could pull it off.

And so Obama moved mountains to make it happen, and then he had to live through seeing it all undone by Trump. Now the policy is both revenge on Trump and an attempt to prove that Obama was right after all. The same is true for everyone onboard in the Biden administration who was originally with Obama. It’s a Restoration.

The NY Times has a Bee in its bonnet

The New Neo Posted on by

The New York Time has accused the right-wing humor site Babylon Bee of having “trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.”

Ha ha ha NY Times; that’s a good one. A real knee-slapper!

Oh, you say you’re not trying to be funny? That wasn’t a joke? That’s considered serious analysis these days at the Times.

Actually, though, it’s the NY Times that traffics in leftist propaganda under the guise of objective news. “Misinformation” is the Times’ middle name – including this misinformation about the Babylon Bee.

Apparently, the Bee is considering suing the Times.

Mass shooting in Colorado market

The New Neo Posted on by

There was a terrible mass shooting yesterday in Boulder:

Police on Tuesday identified a 21 -year-old man as the suspect who opened fire inside a crowded Colorado supermarket in an attack that killed 10 people, including an officer, and sent terrorized shoppers and employees scrambling for cover…

Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold identified the slain officer as Eric Talley, 51, who had been with the force since 2010. He was the first to arrive after responding to a call about shots fired and someone carrying a rifle, she said.

“He was by all accounts one of the outstanding officers of the Boulder Police Department, and his life was cut too short,” Dougherty said…

The other dead ranged in age from 20 to 65. They were identified as Denny Strong, 20; Neven Stanisic, 23; Rikki Olds, 25; Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; and Jodi Waters, 65.

That was pretty much all we knew late last night. But aside from the terrible human toll, in these incidents there is always the angle for which the MSM and the Democrats search: how to blame this on the right?

That’s the sad reality of press and politics today. Sometimes the shooter really is someone whose affiliation could be roughly characterized as “the right” – or what the media labels the right, which tends to be various fringe groups. Sometimes the person is on the left, and then the MSM and the left focus more narrowly on gun control and perhaps how Donald Trump drove him to it (it’s almost always a “him”).

So blame the weapon and talk about more gun control. That argument is actually usually applied no matter what the identity or motive of the shooter. Today we have learned the identity of this particular shooter:

Authorities said Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was from the Denver suburb of Arvada and that he engaged in a shootout with police Monday afternoon inside the Boulder store. The suspect was being treated at a hospital and was expected to be booked into the county jail later in the day on murder charges…

Investigators have not established a motive, but authorities believe he was the only shooter, Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said.

The shooter’s name must have been a bitter, bitter disappointment to the MSM and the Democrats. But that doesn’t mean the incident still can’t be exploited for their purposes. After all, a firearm was used – reportedly an AR-15 (no official word on that yet, though):

Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat whose district includes Boulder, said Tuesday on “CBS This Morning” that “enough is enough” when it comes to political impasses that keep gun control laws from passing Congress.

I’d like to hear which particular law Neguse and the rest think would have stopped this killing. Do they really believe that gun control laws deter a killer from obtaining such a weapon? And if they cite a new federal law or laws they want passed, it had better be one that isn’t already in place in Colorado. But I know that logic has nothing to do with the politics of this.

The gunman’s brother has said that he was mentally ill and “very anti-social.” So we can’t jump to the conclusion that this was a political Islamicist terrorist shooting, although it may very well have been. The two things – mental illness and terrorism – are hardly mutually exclusive, either. It also has been reported that “a Facebook page appearing to be that of the suspect features posts with quotes from the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.” That doesn’t mean a whole lot, either, except that the suspect was probably a Muslim. But you can bet that if the shooter’s page had contained fundamentalist Christian material, the MSM would have little reluctance to tie the killer’s motive in with that.

How about the Biden administration, those Abraham Accords, Netanyahu, and Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

I detest the Biden administration’s unraveling of so many of the accomplishments of the Trump administration. I only hope that a lot of the positives of the last four years will survive nevertheless, or at least that people watching the Biden administration will finally perceive how pernicious the Democrats’ policies have become, before it’s too late to reverse the damage done.

Case in point:

…[A]s the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.

Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?

Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015…

But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal…

…For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.

Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords.

It gets a bit tiresome to keep saying it, but this was all very very predictable in any Biden administration. They still consider the Iran deal of the Obama years their crowning glory, and they can’t wait to go right back to it or something similar – or even worse. If many Americans didn’t realize that, then they haven’t been paying attention.

[NOTE: I notice that I keep forgetting to click on the “Biden” category when I do many of these posts about policies of the present administration. I think that’s because I don’t think he’s completely in charge, although I do think that in most cases Biden supports the program with whatever powers he still retains. He certainly appeared to support them during the Obama years, when he was supposedly in full posession of his faculties.]

Just another reason they hate Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

He makes the Democrats and the MSM look foolish when they predict disaster and his policies are successful, and then he points out their own failures in a way that’s clear and direct enough for nearly anyone to understand. They don’t mind lying, and they do it regularly, but he makes them reach so far down into the preposterous with their lies that I bet it makes at least some of them just a tad bit worried about how stupid and transparent their lies have to be.

Although of course there’s strength in numbers. If they lie together, and if they block the truth when anyone tries to tell it, then they have a better chance at success in their propaganda efforts. They’ve certainly been successful beyond what I would have thought possible in America just twenty short years ago.

An example of Trump’s latest is his take on the Biden administration’s border efforts vs. his own:

We proudly handed the Biden Administration the most secure border in history. All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot. Instead, in the span of a just few weeks, the Biden Administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster. They are in way over their heads and taking on water fast,” the former president declared.

“The pathetic, clueless performance of Secretary Mayorkas on the Sunday Shows today was a national disgrace,” Trump argued. “His self-satisfied presentation—in the middle of the massive crisis he helped engineer—is yet more proof he is incapable of leading DHS. Even someone of Mayorkas’ limited abilities should understand that if you provide Catch-and-Release to the world’s illegal aliens then the whole world will come.”

Trump claimed that Mayorkas had issued a “gag order” on America’s “heroic border agents and ICE officers.” He argued that the Biden administration is “engaged in a huge cover-up to hide just how bad things truly are.” He urged Congress to investigate the situation.

If you’re wondering about the “pathetic, clueless, self-satisfied” performance of Mayorkas, have a look here. And here are some leaked photos of the situation at the border – although I wonder how many people other than those on the right have seen them.

[NOTE: Trump is planning to return to social media on his own platform. Should be interesting.]