Incompetence or deliberate destruction?

 

Brian Lonergan at American Greatness points out the distinction between rank incompetence and deliberate destruction.  He cites the illegal immigration crisis at our southern border to make his case. Here’s a short extract:

. . . The tone was set even before January 20, 2021. In Democratic primaries the year before, candidate Joe Biden openly urged foreign nationals to “surge the border” if he were elected. This was followed by a blitz of executive orders on his first day in office. Many of the Trump border policies were ended, including those opposing sanctuary policies, preventing illegal aliens from being counted in the census, and authorizing construction of the border wall.

Did any of those Biden executive orders make things better for Americans living in America? Of course not. They only helped foreign nationals and extremist anti-borders groups with an agenda to weaken the United States. You, the anonymous, hard-working, taxpaying American citizen or legal resident, get to suffer the consequences.

The noxious tentacles of these policies are so long and intricate, it would take volumes to document and untangle all of them. The outcomes include more violent crime in the United States interior, death and suffering among those making the dangerous journey through Mexico, and a seemingly endless flow of people crossing our border about whom we know virtually nothing related to their backgrounds or intentions. What leader of a nation would allow this, much less intentionally cause it?

His brutal conclusion:

This is not incompetence; it is sabotage.

Read the rest here.

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Victor Davis Hanson: “The Nihilism of the Left”

 

Victor Davis Hanson posted “The Nihilism of the Left” at American Greatness, and he concludes:  

The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda. The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home. 

In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States. 

VDH’s full article is here.  Let us hope that what we are witnessing is indeed “a rare laboratory experiment” that can fail and be replaced by experiments that have worked – you know, a constitutional republic.

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Malkin: No vetting of Afghan "refugees"

At Heartland Daily New, Michelle Malkin reports that “There Is No Vetting of Afghan Refugees.  A few excerpts:

. . .

How much of an illusion is the “multilayered,” “biometric” and “biographic” vetting of Afghan refugees?

Over the holidays, with almost zero news coverage outside the Washington Examiner and New York Post, a Senate Republican memo reported that “almost none of the 82,000 people airlifted from Kabul in August were vetted before being admitted to the United States, despite claims to the contrary from the Biden administration.”

The memo reportedly noted that “Afghans without any identification or records were approved for travel to the United States as long as their fingerprints or other biometrics were not already in a U.S. Government database and connected to derogatory information (e.g., a known terrorist, terrorist affiliate, or criminal). Federal officials relayed that few Afghans know their birthday, which has resulted in a number of evacuees’ date of birth logged as January 1.”

In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Republican lawmakers had been pressing the Biden administration on “how many Afghans traveled without any paperwork.” No answers yet. . . .

. . .

In early November, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, revealed in a floor speech that “there are at least 10 evacuees who made it past all this screening into the United States prior to the national security concerns being raised and causing them currently to be detained in federal facilities as a national security threat. That’s 10. We don’t know how many more there are.”

Open borders plus bleeding hearts equal a demographic nightmare. Homeland security is a joke. There is no vetting. 

Ms. Malkin’s complete report is here.  And this blog reported last month on Afghans arriving in Cleveland on military transports.

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See No Jihad

art credit: 123rf.com

IMHO, Andrew McCarthy is one of the go-to columnists on matters jihad. Back in January, when McCarthy wrote his short piece for the Conservatives Against Trump issue of National Review online, I shook my head in disappointment. Here’s a short quote:

A president may not have to be good with names to oppose [the jihad agenda] effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

Donald Trump does not have a clue about any of this,  careening wildly from vows to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.

I wonder if Mr. McCarthy has reconsidered his opinion. I’d like to think that back in January, he was towing the NR anti-Trump line half-heartedly, but maybe he still thinks Trump has no clue. 

However, in view of McCarthy’s analysis today of the jihad attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota, it would be difficult to square his Never Trump position with the presidential race. Today, Trump is the candidate speaking in plain English about the threat of jihad to Americans and about screening those who would enter the United States from overseas. Here’s McCarthy on the latest spate of jihad attacks on US soil:

In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.

In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

. . .

Here is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S., Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit it in the light of day.

The attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack — a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and kill for the cause.

Pro-American Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation of them in modern life.

If we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose. Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly about, and understanding, what we are up against.

Read the rest here. (And Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is meeting with both presidential candidates during his visit to New York and the United Nations this week.)

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Donald J. Trump's Statement On America’s Future

Whether you watched the Clinton Coronation ceremonies or not, you will not want to miss Mr. Trump’s response to the DNC this past week:

Donald J. Trump Statement On America’s Future [from his website]

At Hillary Clinton’s convention this week, Democrats have been speaking about a world that doesn’t exist. A world where America has full employment, where there’s no such thing as radical Islamic terrorism, where the border is totally secured, and where thousands of innocent Americans have not suffered from rising crime in cities like Baltimore and Chicago.

In the Democrats’ fantasy world, there is no problem with Hillary Clinton maintaining an illegal, exposed server full of classified information that could have been hacked by any foreign enemy, and in which Hillary Clinton risked prison time to delete 33,000 emails that were simply about yoga and wedding planning. In this world, there is no Hillary Clinton disaster in Syria, Libya and Egypt, ISIS doesn’t merit a mention, Iran isn’t on the path to nukes, convention stages don’t need American flags, and our great men and women of law enforcement, our police, do not need to be honored.

I propose a different vision for America, one where we can break up Washington’s rigged system, and empower all Americans to achieve their dreams. In our vision, we will put America First.

If we deliver this change, the future is limitless and we will Make America Great Again for everyone.

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