How Adolph Is Vladimir?

October 1, 2022

There’s a major reason why the world in 2022 is like the world in 1939

By Vince Coyner at American Thinker:

Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniac. Vladimir Putin is a criminal. All those things are true. Similarly, Adolf Hitler was a bad guy, a megalomaniac, and a criminal. But Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler and Russia in 2022 is not Germany in 1938/39. But in both cases, the future of the world hung on / hangs in the balance. But maybe not in the way you think….

Much of the western world was already engaged in war in December 1941 when the United States joined the fight. Most of Europe and much of North Africa were under the boot of the Nazis. Meanwhile, the Japanese continued their control over Korea and had already invaded French Indochina (today’s Vietnam) and large parts of China. German U Boats were prowling the seas sinking ships around the world from belligerents and non-belligerents alike. There was a world war going on; we just weren’t active, frontline participants before Pearl Harbor. However one looks at that period, the world as we know it was under a fierce attack that eventually would have enveloped the rest of the world, including the United States.

In February 2022 none of that was true. Sure, Russia invaded Ukraine after invading Georgia in 2008 (then leaving after six months) and annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. And sure, Vladimir Putin has been saber-rattling about reconstituting the lost parts of the USSR. But the world in 2022 was not like in 1938/39….

NATO didn’t exist back then. The UN didn’t exist then. More importantly, the economic integration of European nations to one another and the rest of the west didn’t exist to the extent it does today. Lastly, in the late 1930s, the Nazis had the most powerful military on the planet, while today Russia’s troops are rightly seen as inferior to most they would face in the West.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the world was not on the brink of anything resembling a world war.

If you took a time machine and went back to February 2022 and asked the American people if they’d be willing to spend more than $50 billion and send the world into an economic tailspin if Russia invaded Ukraine, my guess is they would have said no. They might have talked about bulking up NATO forces, they might have talked about sanctions, but I doubt they would have supported propping up a corrupt regime in a notoriously corrupt nation with tens of billions of dollars that taxpayers already struggling under the weight of inflation and economic malaise would have to pay. Nor would they have wanted to bring America and the world to the brink of a nuclear cataclysm.
But here we are, six months later, exactly there, with Vladimir Putin opaquely threatening to use nuclear weapons and the leader of Ukraine goading the United States to strike first with its nuclear weapons.

What is saddest about all this is it didn’t have to happen. A new piece in Foreign Affairs states, “[I]n April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.” So essentially, in April, less than two months after the beginning of the war, the parties involved were close to agreement with returning to the status quo of what existed the day before Russia invaded. But the agreement collapsed. Why? Two words: Joe Biden.

Pravda, a Russian mouthpiece, claims that Boris Johnson tried to block any peace negotiations. Again, that’s Pravda, but it comports with known facts and Johnson never denied saying in private what he’d already said in public.

So, essentially, the combatants had resolved their conflict, only to have the west appear saying it would rather have more war. The “they” in that statement is telling. Johnson was no doubt acting on behalf of the man who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”; that is, Joe Biden.

At the very moment when a fragile peace could have been worked out and negotiators begun to solve the differences between Russia and Ukraine, Joe Biden steps in and does what he does best, mess things up. The timeline here is interesting. Even though, on March 10, the US promised Ukraine $13 billion and, on March 26, Biden told the world that Putin “cannot remain in power,” the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were still able to come to an agreement on a peace deal. And staggeringly, Joe Biden scuttled it.

Here we are in September, and much of the world is in recession, prices for everything are up dramatically, the US has provided Ukraine with upwards of $60 billion in aid, and Europe is facing energy shortages and skyrocketing prices just as winter approaches. And now nuclear war is in the air.

All of this because Joe Biden wants revenge on Russia for something it didn’t even do.

Most certainly Russia tried to influence the 2016 elections in the US, but even the Washington Post, the Democrat mouthpiece, states that Russia’s “efforts were small in scope, relative to homegrown media efforts” and, instead, blames “Fox News and the insular right-wing media ecosystem it anchors.”

And there we have it. The world of 2022 is looking a bit more like the Europe of the late 1930s and on the brink of nuclear war because of Joe Biden’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. However, rather than being some troll on Twitter reposting Democrat memes from his Mom’s basement, Joe Biden is the leader of the free world and is expressing his TDS by sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, sending the world into a global recession and threatening Russia to the point where its leader threatens to use nuclear weapons.

On literally every single issue of consequence today Joe Biden is wrong. On the single biggest issue of today, Joe Biden has not only been wrong but catastrophically so. At the moment the world should be finding ways to pick itself up from the economic body blow of COVID lunacy, the world is watching Putin hover his shaky finger over the nuclear button and wondering how many Europeans will freeze to death this winter because they don’t have enough energy to heat their homes.

In 2022 if the world finds itself in a nuclear conflict, Vladimir Putin will bear some of the blame, but he will share that with the feckless Joe Biden. Putin’s a thug, and Biden’s a dunce, and everyone knows it. Most of the blame however will sit squarely on the shoulders of the purported “81 million” Americans who were so angered by “mean tweets” that they put into the most powerful office in the world someone demonstrably not capable of running a lemonade stand. But at least, like Neville Chamberlain, they had good intentions.

“Why does a congressional committee care what Ginni Thomas ‘believes’”?

OCTOBER 1, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

THE HARASSMENT OF GINNI THOMAS

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is a lawyer and conservative activist. She was called to testify before the “January 6 Committee” on Thursday. The first question is: about what? As to what purported criminality is she a witness?

NPR says that the committee’s chief focus was Thomas’s communications with John Eastman, quoting California Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar:

“I’ll say broadly that the committee has been very clear that we’d like to hear from Ginni Thomas, her discussions and coordination to Mark Meadows and specifically to John Eastman,” he said.

Eastman is a law professor who had an interpretation of the Constitution and applicable federal law under which President Trump may have been able to legally challenge Joe Biden’s purported election victory. That didn’t happen, obviously, but so what? Is it somehow illegal to discuss legal ways of challenging alleged election results? Election challenges happen all the time, and occasionally they succeed.

Jonathan Turley, like Eastman a law professor, asks, “Why does a congressional committee care what Ginni Thomas ‘believes’”? Good question! Liberal media have accused Thomas of some kind of thought crime:

Now the media is breathlessly reporting that “Ginni Thomas tells Jan. 6 panel she still believes false election fraud claims,” as if it were a public confession of a reactionary resisting reeducation. On CNN, anchor Jake Tapper declared to viewers that Thomas has not changed her mind and remains “untethered from all of the facts and evidence.”
***
Select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) left the voluntary interview with the Committee to report, according to Politico, “she still believes false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.”

Since when is America a country that criminalizes thoughts? Many millions of Americans share Ginni Thomas’s concerns about election integrity–a majority, in fact, according to many polls. As I have said before, I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I know for sure that they tried hard to steal it. Much could be written on this subject, but Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged is a good place to start.

Why are Democrats so desperate to ban any suggestion that the 2020 election may not have been entirely on the up-and-up? After all, the Democrats themselves claimed that the 2000, 2004 and 2016 presidential elections were invalid and that the Republican presidents elected in those years were “illegitimate.” So what has changed?

Party designation, obviously; but beyond that, I think Democrats are sensitive about the fact that criticisms of what happened in 2020, often under the guise of a “covid emergency,” are valid. Laws were illegally and unconstitutionally changed so as to weaken ballot integrity in many states. The Democrats deliberately opened the door to voter fraud. Now, we probably will never know whether the margin of fraud was decisive in the presidential election, or not.

Professor Turley adds this:

None of the media even raised the question of whether such interviews could be viewed as harassment or pressure on a member of the Supreme Court.

Good point. One can imagine the outcry if a Republican-led committee interrogated the spouse of a Democratic Supreme Court Justice in a hearing, over which hovered the potential for criminal charges. For disagreeing with Republicans! That, of course, would never happen. But, with Democrats in control of the absurd “January 6 Committee,” that is exactly what just took place. Americans of all political stripes should be outraged.

“VLADIMIR PUTIN IS A BAG GUY!”

October 1, 2022

There’s a major reason why the world in 2022 is like the world in 1939

By Vince Coyner at American Thinker:

Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniac. Vladimir Putin is a criminal. All those things are true. Similarly, Adolf Hitler was a bad guy, a megalomaniac, and a criminal. But Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler and Russia in 2022 is not Germany in 1938/39. But in both cases, the future of the world hung on / hangs in the balance. But maybe not in the way you think….

Much of the western world was already engaged in war in December 1941 when the United States joined the fight. Most of Europe and much of North Africa were under the boot of the Nazis. Meanwhile, the Japanese continued their control over Korea and had already invaded French Indochina (today’s Vietnam) and large parts of China. German U Boats were prowling the seas sinking ships around the world from belligerents and non-belligerents alike. There was a world war going on; we just weren’t active, frontline participants before Pearl Harbor. However one looks at that period, the world as we know it was under a fierce attack that eventually would have enveloped the rest of the world, including the United States.

In February 2022 none of that was true. Sure, Russia invaded Ukraine after invading Georgia in 2008 (then leaving after six months) and annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. And sure, Vladimir Putin has been saber-rattling about reconstituting the lost parts of the USSR. But the world in 2022 was not like in 1938/39….

NATO didn’t exist back then. The UN didn’t exist then. More importantly, the economic integration of European nations to one another and the rest of the west didn’t exist to the extent it does today. Lastly, in the late 1930s, the Nazis had the most powerful military on the planet, while today Russia’s troops are rightly seen as inferior to most they would face in the West.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the world was not on the brink of anything resembling a world war.

If you took a time machine and went back to February 2022 and asked the American people if they’d be willing to spend more than $50 billion and send the world into an economic tailspin if Russia invaded Ukraine, my guess is they would have said no. They might have talked about bulking up NATO forces, they might have talked about sanctions, but I doubt they would have supported propping up a corrupt regime in a notoriously corrupt nation with tens of billions of dollars that taxpayers already struggling under the weight of inflation and economic malaise would have to pay. Nor would they have wanted to bring America and the world to the brink of a nuclear cataclysm.

But here we are, six months later, exactly there, with Vladimir Putin opaquely threatening to use nuclear weapons and the leader of Ukraine goading the United States to strike first with its nuclear weapons.

What is saddest about all this is it didn’t have to happen. A new piece in Foreign Affairs states, “[I]n April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.” So essentially, in April, less than two months after the beginning of the war, the parties involved were close to agreement with returning to the status quo of what existed the day before Russia invaded. But the agreement collapsed. Why? Two words: Joe Biden.

Pravda, a Russian mouthpiece, claims that Boris Johnson tried to block any peace negotiations. Again, that’s Pravda, but it comports with known facts and Johnson never denied saying in private what he’d already said in public.

So, essentially, the combatants had resolved their conflict, only to have the west appear saying it would rather have more war. The “they” in that statement is telling. Johnson was no doubt acting on behalf of the man who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”; that is, Joe Biden.

At the very moment when a fragile peace could have been worked out and negotiators begun to solve the differences between Russia and Ukraine, Joe Biden steps in and does what he does best, mess things up. The timeline here is interesting. Even though, on March 10, the US promised Ukraine $13 billion and, on March 26, Biden told the world that Putin “cannot remain in power,” the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were still able to come to an agreement on a peace deal. And staggeringly, Joe Biden scuttled it.

Here we are in September, and much of the world is in recession, prices for everything are up dramatically, the US has provided Ukraine with upwards of $60 billion in aid, and Europe is facing energy shortages and skyrocketing prices just as winter approaches. And now nuclear war is in the air.

All of this because Joe Biden wants revenge on Russia for something it didn’t even do.

Most certainly Russia tried to influence the 2016 elections in the US, but even the Washington Post, the Democrat mouthpiece, states that Russia’s “efforts were small in scope, relative to homegrown media efforts” and, instead, blames “Fox News and the insular right-wing media ecosystem it anchors.”

And there we have it. The world of 2022 is looking a bit more like the Europe of the late 1930s and on the brink of nuclear war because of Joe Biden’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. However, rather than being some troll on Twitter reposting Democrat memes from his Mom’s basement, Joe Biden is the leader of the free world and is expressing his TDS by sending billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, sending the world into a global recession and threatening Russia to the point where its leader threatens to use nuclear weapons.

On literally every single issue of consequence today Joe Biden is wrong. On the single biggest issue of today, Joe Biden has not only been wrong but catastrophically so. At the moment the world should be finding ways to pick itself up from the economic body blow of COVID lunacy, the world is watching Putin hover his shaky finger over the nuclear button and wondering how many Europeans will freeze to death this winter because they don’t have enough energy to heat their homes.

In 2022 if the world finds itself in a nuclear conflict, Vladimir Putin will bear some of the blame, but he will share that with the feckless Joe Biden. Putin’s a thug, and Biden’s a dunce, and everyone knows it. Most of the blame however will sit squarely on the shoulders of the purported “81 million” Americans who were so angered by “mean tweets” that they put into the most powerful office in the world someone demonstrably not capable of running a lemonade stand. But at least, like Neville Chamberlain, they had good intentions.

AMERICA’S SLIME BIDEN AT WORK!

New York Times Helps Biden Pretend He’s Fixing Border Asylum Scam, When He’s Literally Making It Worse

BY: EDDIE SCARRY at the Federalist:

SEPTEMBER 30, 2022

For a fleeting moment, I was almost convinced by The New York Times that President Biden has taken even an infinitesimally small step in trying to manage the appalling numbers of illegal migrants flooding into the U.S. at the southern border. But per usual, anything read after the first three paragraphs of any immigration article at the Times will show that Democrats never care to do anything meaningful to halt illegal border crossers.

The story in question on Tuesday, no doubt the product of one quick call from an administration official to a couple of friendly reporters, declared at the top that “after months of debate in the White House, the Biden administration has begun to address a small slice of the problem: the woefully backlogged process to decide who qualifies for asylum, or protection from persecution, in the United States.”

The backlogged asylum litigation — which remains close to 1 million cases, each one taking an average of nearly five years to resolve (when the illegal border crosser actually bothers to show up for court) — isn’t “a small slice of the problem.” It’s the biggest problem. Protection for asylum seekers is intended for foreigners persecuted by their governments for political or religious beliefs. It wasn’t supposed to be a back door for all of South and Central America’s destitute to come here for jobs and welfare.

But word has gotten out south of Texas that Washington doesn’t really care. Both Republicans and Democrats have for years sat on their thumbs as impoverished Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans have dumped themselves by the hundreds of thousands into the care of the American taxpayer. More recently, it’s Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans. The surest way to buy time in the U.S. after breaking in illegally is to claim asylum. And it’s just enough time to disappear into the country (even with those very serious and stern court order papers destined for an outdated address).

The Times report went on to say that the Biden administration is attempting to process asylum seekers “faster” by giving the power to determine the validity of their claims to a number of officers who can make a decision quicker than it takes for the case to reach an immigration judge in court.

“Migrants will be interviewed 21 to 45 days after they apply for asylum, far faster than the years it can take in the existing immigration court system,” the report said. “A decision on whether the migrant is granted asylum must come quickly — within two to five weeks of the interview.”

The Times asserted that only a quarter of the 99 asylum seekers evaluated under the new rules were granted permission to stay. The rest were told to pack their bags and get the heck out.

Just kidding! The ones denied asylum status were then simply thrown into the mix of other migrants to appeal their cases in normal court proceedings.

In other words, it’s now easier to gain asylum status by illegally invading the country.

(By the way, 99 asylum seekers is almost .05 percent of the total number of migrants who illegally crossed the border in just August. There’s that Biden efficiency we’ve come to rely on!)

This would be like claiming to be pro-law enforcement by supporting the hiring of more police officers who have no authority to arrest suspected criminals.

Finally, in the 10th paragraph, the Times admitted the administration’s changes do absolutely nothing to mitigate the overwhelmed border. “The new rules … will not change the overloaded system for dealing with immigrants who do not claim asylum,” the report said. “And the challenge of how to quickly deport those denied asylum will remain.”

Cue the overhead lights and confetti. Surprise! You’ve once again been had!

It’s another reminder that Democrats don’t see the crush of migrants as a problem to be stopped, but as an opportunity (new voters) to be managed.

---

Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Liberal Misery: How the Hateful Left Sucks Joy Out of Everything and Everyone.”

The Labor Of Judge Silberman!

 OCTOBER 1, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

BRAVO, JUDGE SILBERMAN

Yesterday I briefly noted Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho’s keynote remarks at the Federalist Society’s sixth annual Kentucky chapters conference. With a little work I was able to obtain a copy of Judge Ho’s remarks. I hope to revisit them with a few quotes from the text in the next day or two or three.

In my comments I referred to Senior D.C. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman as my beau ideal of judge. Today’s Wall Street Journal includes the text of Judge Silberman’s September 20 Constitution Day talk at Dartmouth College in defense of free speech (behind the Journal’s paywall). The Dartmouth Review’s Matthew Skrod reported on Judge Silberman’s talk here.

Dartmouth has posted video of the Constitution Day event on YouTube (below). Dartmouth posted the video with this capsule bio of Judge Silberman:

Judge Laurence Silberman was appointed United States Circuit Judge in October 1985 and took senior status on November 1, 2000. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 19, 2008. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1957 and Harvard Law School in 1961. He served in the Army from 1957-1958. He has been a partner in law firms in Honolulu and Washington, D.C., as well as a banker in San Francisco. He served in government as an attorney in the National Labor Relations Board’s appellate section, Solicitor of the Department of Labor from 1969 to 1970, Undersecretary of Labor from 1970 to 1973, Deputy Attorney General of the United States from 1974 to 1975, and Ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1975 to 1977. From 1981 to 1985, he served as a member of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament and the Department of Defense Policy Board. He was appointed by the Chief Justice to a term (1996 to 2003) as a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s Review Panel. He took a leave of absence from the bench to serve as Co-Chairman (2004 to 2005) of the President’s Intelligence Commission. He was an Adjunct Professor of Administrative Law at Georgetown University Law Center from 1987 to 1994 and in 1997 and 1999, at NYU from 1995 to 1996, and at Harvard in 1998. From 2003 to 2019 he taught at Georgetown University Law Center as a Distinguished Visitor from the Judiciary and was awarded the Charles Fahy Distinguished Adjunct Professor Award for the 2002–2003 academic year.

Judge Silberman was introduced by Rockefeller Center senior lecturer and policy fellow Charles Whelan. Judge Silberman’s talk runs about 25 minutes. It perfectly complements Judge Ho’s remarks and seems to me well worth the time.

Quotable quote: “I am shocked at the recent challenges to free speech in our academic institutions—particularly the Ivy League. For example, recently at Yale Law School, students attempted to stop, then drown out, a public dialogue between a conservative and a liberal lawyer. They were both supporting untrammeled political speech. The administration’s response was to vaguely gesture at the importance of free speech but also to celebrate “respect and inclusion”—whatever that means. The dean sent a letter calling the behavior “unacceptable,” but she did not so much as issue a slap on the wrist to the students who were hostile to free speech.”

One more: “A common thread of these incidents at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, U Penn and Dartmouth is that university authorities, in discouraging unfashionable speech, do not do so explicitly. Rather, they perform an ‘Ivy League Two Step.’ First, they pay lip service towards the value of free speech. Then they use alternative reasons as a pretext to shut down ‘objectionable’ speech. That, in some ways, is more dangerous than a frontal attack.”