War Is In the Air

Ukraine, Israel, The Border, The Locker Room

Speaker Mike Johnson is getting a lot of heat for bringing spending bills on various controversial issues to the floor for a vote. I like bills to get votes. People have to take a position, and you learn.

I hope some people are watching and learning.

Starting from the bottom. Today, the Secretary of Education gave the green light for boys to rape girls in their locker rooms and bathrooms. That’s blunt but that is essentially what he did.

I agree strongly with Megyn Kelly. Click the link. Listen to her. She is not wrong. If you are a Republican Never Trumper, you have to pull the lever for Trump if you value women’s rights at all. If you don’t, you are conscious-less.

I had daughters who are now old enough to have kids of their own. I share Ms. Kelly’s opinion.

The Biden Administration isn’t Democratic. This is not a difference of opinion. They are Marxists. Call them what they are.

The House sent impeachment articles to the Senate and the Senate filed them in their circular file. Who is shredding the Constitution now? Here is the Impeachment Clause. (bold is mine)

Article II, Section 4:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The Constitution gives Congress the authority to impeach and remove the President,¹ Vice President, and all federal civil officers for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.² This tool was inherited from English practice, in which Parliament impeached and convicted ministers and favorites of the Crown in a struggle to rein in the Crown’s power.

Congress’s power of impeachment is an important check on the Executive and Judicial Branches, recognized by the Framers as a crucial tool for holding government officers accountable for violations of the law and abuses of power.³ Congress has most notably employed the impeachment tool against the President and federal judges, but all federal civil officers are subject to removal by impeachment.⁴ The Senate has also concluded (by majority vote) on various occasions that an official impeached while in office remains subject to trial, conviction, and imposition of the penalty of disqualification even after he or she leaves office.⁵ The practice of impeachment makes clear, however, that Members of Congress are not civil officers subject to impeachment and removal.⁶

While judicial precedents inform the effective substantive meaning of various provisions of the Constitution, impeachment is at bottom a unique political process largely unchecked by the judiciary. While the meaning of treason and bribery is relatively clear, the scope of high crimes and misdemeanors lacks a formal definition and has been fleshed out over time, in a manner perhaps analogous to the common law, through the practice of impeachments in the United States Congress.⁷ The type of behavior that qualifies as impeachable conduct, and the circumstances in which impeachment is an appropriate remedy for such actions, are thus determined by, among other things, competing political interests, changing institutional relationships among the three branches of government, and legislators’ interaction with and accountability to the public.⁸ The weight of historical practice, rather than judicial precedent, is thus central to understanding the nature of impeachment in the United States.

The Senate is compelled to hold a trial. They didn’t. That’s unconstitutional. It also makes the unelected bureaucrats that run our country emboldened.

Iran struck Israel on October 7th with its proxy terror machine. It has repeatedly attacked Israel prior to that day. Iran itself attacked Israel this week and inflicted little damage thanks to Ronald Reagan and his ideas around Star Wars. Iron Dome stopped many of the missiles aimed at Israel.

Israel struck back last night. But, I don’t think that most people have the expectation that it’s one and done. Biden has pulled away from allying with Israel. It’s the wrong strategy of course. Why? For many reasons, the most being Israel is the most westernized nation in the Middle East. All Biden has to do is say that we will supply them with all the weapons they need and most of this stuff would stop.

If you are Jewish and you vote Democratic, you are just dumb. They are siding people who not only hate your guts but want to eliminate you from the earth. Don’t try to rationalize it, or think about it. Don’t try to find an answer in some secular publication with a multi-spider webbed and several-pronged strategy that won’t work. As Denny Green said after Devin Hester stole a win from him, “They are who we thought they were.” Cold-blooded heartless killers.

This brings me to Ukraine.

I have been an opponent of spending a ton of money to defend Ukraine. I have been vocal in my opposition. Why? No one could explain clearly the strategic value other than Putin is a bad guy and must be stopped. There are a lot of bad guys in the world who need to be stopped. Stopping them gets expensive, not only in actual dollars but often in American blood.

This is especially acute when you see the steep slope of incline on the indebtedness of America. That debt is inflationary and fighting more wars is inflationary.

I hear people who were on my side of the issue talk about the bloodthirstiness of the American Military Industrial Complex. Lobbyists and defense contractors that simply want more money. I hear that and I get it. I certainly am empathetic to that point of view given the actions since 9/11 culminating with the terrible way Biden exited Afghanistan. What a disgrace.

It’s more than hard to be for sending a lot of money to Ukraine when you know full well the government is corrupt as hell. Reminds me of Vietnam and we know how that turned out.

I have a very good friend who is a municipal financier. He says on a relative basis, funding Ukraine isn’t that expensive.

Biden totally screwed up on Ukraine and Iran. He’s an idiot. If you believe America should have a strong foreign policy, you have to vote out the knuckleheads, nincompoops, and morons that took over in 2020. Trump is your only choice.

I read a couple of articles in the WSJ today. One is here. The other is here. Some salient quotes since I know they are behind a paywall.

In the event that Russian forces can’t take Kyiv, they could nevertheless conquer more territory in the east and south. The Russian army could capture the remainder of Luhansk oblast and push west to take territory in Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts. In the south, the Russian army could advance in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, retaking the city of Kherson among others.

A partial Russian victory would create a rump Ukrainian state with a broken economy, while Russia could grow stronger with greater natural resources, industrial strength, and agricultural wealth. Since January, it has already seized more than 139 square miles of territory—an area roughly the size of Las Vegas.

A Russian victory would send shock waves across the globe, stoke the appetites of its allies in China and Iran, and eviscerate U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization credibility and deterrence. It would also embolden Mr. Putin, who sees himself as a modern-day Peter the Great, and put in serious danger Poland, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic states and other U.S. allies and partners that border Russia.

If you sacrificed Ukraine, do you think Putin would stop? How much does it embolden other enemies? How much does it put in jeopardy the trust that countries like Poland and the Baltic's have in their relationship with the US?

The other article by Holman Jenkins is good was well.

I concur with the one clear sentence fragment Donald Trump has spoken on ending the Ukraine war: It would take threatening Vladimir Putin with bigger Western arms support than has yet been put forward. In theory the aid bill could already have passed if Mr. Trump endorsed it. Why hasn’t he? To curry favor with isolationists? Because he’s secretly in league with Mr. Putin? No, because if it was enacted as a Republican bill, Republicans would become co-owners of a Biden policy they don’t control, which they understand perfectly well points to a messy outcome, neither victory nor defeat in Ukraine.

The unspoken Biden codicil, moreover, has also been plain, glaring, a subject of columns here for two years: Help Ukraine defend itself but not too well, amounting to a U.S. assurance to Mr. Putin that he will be able to retain parts of Ukraine.

A realistic and desirable outcome still seems to me a negotiated cease-fire, conceding none of Ukraine’s post-1991 territory, in which a thriving, battle-tested Ukraine becomes a formidable asset to the West’s long-term security against a decaying yet dangerous Russia.

If you believe in a negotiated cease-fire, then we have to fund Ukraine. I don’t love that idea. Why would Putin stop? Marxists never stop, they hibernate. As my friend who is an expert on military things says, now is the time to crush Putin. That means more than just dollars. It means enabling air power and risking something broader. If we have any semblance of intelligence, you might be able to get a read on the morale of the Russian conscripts, and the morale of the Russian people. If you know they’d break in favor of the opposition if Putin started losing badly, your decision is simple.

Not an easy one, but maybe the best of a handful of bad choices.