Opinion
By Jeff Childers
03-07-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your post today is late, since I am currently stationed in Las Vegas, a full three hours behind East Coast time. Today’s roundup includes: Haley drop out; Trump smashes Super Tuesday heading for the now-inevitable nomination and meets with Elon Musk; Biden set to deliver the latest State of the Union ever; Zelensky’s wife bails on Biden; Biden finally builds a border wall, just not the one you think; Florida Sheriff breaks open DHS-facilitated sex trafficking organization; Biden Admin admits program to fly illegals straight from their countries to 43 US cities; more shocking developments as the Ukraine project continues unraveling at warp speed.
Special thanks to C&C’s awesome commenters who are keeping the comments section lively. If you haven’t dipped into the comments before, you might consider trying it out during this vacation period. Either way, C&C will be back to its regular schedule soon.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 CNN ran a story yesterday headlined, “Biden and Trump dominate Super Tuesday as Haley exits race.”
Out of Super Tuesday’s sixteen states, the only close race was Vermont, which preferred Haley — at least when you count the opportunistic democrat switch voters. Nikki won only Vermont and D.C. (which I’m starting to think stands for “Defective Citizens.”) For his part, Biden got whipped in the US territory of American Samoa, where he lost to some guy named Justin or Jonathan something, I can’t remember. Those Samoans have a spark.
Anyway, neocon darling Nicki Haley exited Stage Left, buh bye, crushing another democrat hope for an anti-Trump miracle:
In January and February alone, Nikki Haley vacuumed up $33 million donation dollars out of democrats and Never-Trumpers. Haha! I have this secret fantasy that Nikki and Trump planned the whole thing, to trick the most rabid anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats into throwing their money down a giant South Carolina septic tank.
It’s not like they haven’t worked together before. Nikki was Trump’s Ambassador to the U.N. I’m just saying; it’s a nice fantasy, don’t ruin it.
Announcing her withdrawal, Nikki stopped short of actually endorsing President Trump, but she did wish him well. So. Onwards.
🔥 Meanwhile, as Trump was sweeping the Super Tuesday field and effectively cementing the Republican nomination, Reuters reported that “Trump meets with Elon Musk and Republican donors in Florida.” Corporate media painted the meeting as a desperate move by Trump to raise cash, which was made-up nonsense and liberal hopium. Beyond that, the story has intrigued many.
Entrepreneurial billionaire Elon Musk was a lifelong California democrat. Then he and his green companies got mugged by pandemic overreach. Now he’s a Texan, and if you follow his Twitter posts, he sounds as conservative as anyone. Elon recently bought Twitter, the only possible way for Trump to counter the government-controlled corporate media and make a legible electoral case to independents and nonpartisan democrats.
Not to mention that, without Twitter, it is likely that 2024’s disclosures would be much more muted.
That Trump and Musk are now openly meeting is fascinating.
🔥 Tonight, Joe Biden sets yet another humiliating record as the SS Biden loudly scrapes the bottom again. Fox News ran the story under headlines like, “Biden heads into SOTU with dismal approval ratings as he battles 1 major issue that’s taken center stage,” and “Biden to deliver State of the Union speech at the latest date ever.” There’s a metaphor here somewhere; it’s so late it almost seems like part of an intentional ritual humiliation for the whole country. Slow Joe Biden is now the most laggardly president to ever deliver the SOTU.
Oddly, the chatter about Joe’s SOTU on conservative media mainly focused on the question of whether Joe Biden will mention Laken Riley’s brutal murder. That will never happen. Of course he won’t mention the young nursing student. Laken’s death by migrant is directly connected to Joe Biden, since he blasted open the border right after he invaded the Oval Office.
There’s no way her name will appear in Biden’s speech. Laken’s name reminds everyone of the bottomless disaster that democrat politics has become. Laken, Laken, Laken.
The speech is shaping up as a blame game. Roll Call predicted Biden will complain about both Israel and Hamas, blaming both sides since they just can’t cooperate on a cease-fire to remove Gaza’s civilians out of range of Israel’s bombs. Biden will blame Republicans for the border, for Ukraine, and for inflation. Biden will blame Trump for destroying democracy. And Biden plans to blame toddlers for everything else that’s going wrong.
Team Biden suffered a surprising SOTU setback this week, as Politico’s shocking headline explained yesterday:
Begging off by lamely and insultingly citing a previous engagement to speak to some orphans at a Ukrainian orphanage, Olena Zelensky’s office turned Joe Biden’s belated invitation down like a bedsheet. Olena will not be Joe’s last-minute political prop at his tardy SOTU speech.
To explain this, media is suggesting that Olena was cattily miffed because Biden is also hosting the widow Navalny, a Russian, who Olena has never liked. Reer.
Maybe. All we know is Olena said ‘nyet,’ or however it goes in Ukrainian. But let me ask you this: is there any way she would’ve declined Biden’s SOTU invitation if Ukraine was still counting on US aid? To me, Olena’s slight signals a serious shift in the politics between Ukraine and Washington, and not anything good for Ukraine.
Finally, good news! Biden has come around on border walls. They’ve already started, they are building a border wall around the Capitol in advance of Joe’s big speech. A wall might not keep out random citizens from other countries, but it obviously keeps stops regular Americans from getting close to the people who are supposedly making decisions on their behalf. It’s not a good look.
🔥 Media yesterday was full of stories about Kathy Hochul’s announcement about militarizing New York’s Subways. The New York Times ran the story, headlined “National Guard and State Police Will Patrol the Subways and Check Bags.” It’s a stunning deployment of 1,000 militarized personnel, 750 National Guardsmen and 250 specially-trained police.
CLIP: National Guard already deployed in subways (2:13).
Replacement Governor Kathy Hochul explained the near-instantaneous deployment was to ensure average New Yorkers don’t smuggle any deadly weapons* around in their purses and handbags, which makes subway riding less safe. (*Like something with which to defend themselves.) So Kathy had a brainstorm: let’s start checking everybody’s bags who rides the subway.
With the military.
“Making subways safer” was the dumbest explanation ever. They went straight from “stopping and frisking is racist” to “let’s make every grandma dump out her purse.” If the 4th Amendment prohibits stopping and frisking, I’m pretty sure the 4th Amendment applies here, too.
It’s weird. Why is the military involved? It kind of looks like they got a credible terrorist threat or something, but they’re lying about it and, to satisfy woke demands, they are pretending they have to check everyone instead of using common sense.
🔥 The Hill ran a story yesterday headlined, “Defense attorney details Fani Willis relationship probe to Georgia Senate committee.” Georgia’s Ethics Committee convened yesterday and asked its very first witness, lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, the right questions about witness tampering and intimidation.
The Committee seemed both very interested and very informed. At some point, they will call Fani, and then we’ll see some fireworks.
🔥 Florida’s most famous Sheriff, Polk County’s Grady Judd, gave one of his famous press conferences last week, taking on his biggest criminal yet: the United States Federal Government. ‘Grady,’ as we like to call him here in Florida, started by describing the recent arrest of a sex-trafficking ring from New York City.
CLIP: Grady Judd accuses DHS of facilitating sex trafficking (6:02).
Locally, the ring was enforced by one man, pictured above right, who ‘ran’ the girls, including three young ladies who serviced customers under threats of punishment and for lots of cash. The three girls are now cooperating. They told Grady’s investigators they fly around the country to major metro centers — for free — where they attend sex appointments scheduled by the real bosses in New York.
DHS gave the girls and their handlers a card or a paper that they can show to get through airport security and board airplanes without buying a ticket.
In the clip, Grady emphatically explained:
“It’s a mess. And it doesn’t have to be. If we can deal with it and catch it on the local level, they can deal with it upon the federal level. Shame on all of them, every one of them, for not gettin’ together and saying you know, there are things bigger in this country than my individual politics.”
🔥 Grady’s local detective work reminded me of another shocking story that broke this week as reported by the UK Daily Mail, headlined “Biden administration ADMITS illegal migrant secret flying program.” Under this remarkable federal program, illegal immigrants are being flown across the U.S. border on chartered flights without passing through customs or having to deal with border patrol or being inconvenienced at all. For free.
Well, free for them, but we are paying for their tickets through our taxes, of course.
So far, according to what DHS would disclose, at least a third of a million illegals have now been directly delivered to 43 undisclosed US cities on nonstop flights originating from an unknown number of unidentified foreign airports.
What foreign countries? Which US cities? How many migrants to each city?
DHS refused to provide any of those details, citing “national security” exceptions. The federal government’s lawyers explained that, if they told which airports and countries were involved, then anybody could show up, and the lines would get longer than the line at Disney World during Spring Break for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. It would just spoil everything for the illegals.
Famous Cold-War historian Robert Conquest once quipped, “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” Just saying.
🔥 The most astonishing, unexpected, and portentious Proxy War news of the week, maybe of the year, maybe since the Proxy War started, was covered by the Associated Press Tuesday under the headline, “Victoria Nuland, third-highest ranking US diplomat and critic of Russia’s war in Ukraine, retiring.” Here’s Nuland, announcing her retirement:
Whoops! Sorry, my bad. I have no idea how that one got in the rotation. Here is Russia-hating, Ukraine-government-toppling, deep-state royal ‘Toria Nuland:
Before diving into the details about this top-ranked deep-stater, it’s fair to say nobody saw Nuland’s resignation coming. Three weeks ago, Nuland was lobbying Congress for the $61 billion aid package. Two weeks ago, Nuland’s war plans were still going full speed ahead. For example, here’s a CNN headline from the last week of February:
I guess she won’t be tightening that noose after all. Instead of hanging Putin, suddenly and unexpectedly, Nuland is leaving the building.
If career security-state workers are the essence of the ‘deep state,’ then Victoria Nuland is the Deep State’s own avatar. Nuland has never held down any job outside of government. She’s worked for the State Department for 35 years, apart from a brief interregnum during Trump’s Presidency. She’s worked for six different Presidents and ten Secretaries of State in both Republican and Democrat administrations.
But Nuland wouldn’t work for Trump; she ‘retired’ in 2017 (for the first time). For four years she safely nestled into a liberal DC think tank, and spent many relaxing months touring the alphabet networks as a geopolitics expert, publicly whining about Trump’s policies on Russian and Ukraine. Her retirement didn’t take.
Right as soon as Biden evicted Trump in 2021, like a particularly nasty invasive species of poisonous toad, Nuland hopped right back into government. It was like when the Australians neutered all those wild cats and then the rat population unexpectedly exploded. Having neutered Trump, they opened the State Department’s back screen door and — holy giant frogs! — there she was, right on the steps, fat and happy, a pink little mouse tail dangling out of the corner of her cavernous mouth.
Specifically, they found Nuland suddenly squatting in the office of the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the third-ranking official in the State Department, and the highest-ranking member of the United States Foreign Service. Just like that, she was back, another unpleasant development that the Russians surely noticed.
But the Proxy War pulled Nuland into the public’s eye for the first time. Before the Russians invaded Ukraine, she’d remained largely invisible, pulling strings from behind the deep state curtain. For decades, Nuland had been quietly hopping all over Ukrainian politics, gobbling up political enemies and gulping down small, innocent Eastern European impediments, both before and after her career’s unfortunate Trump-caused interruption.
It’s hard to overstate the sea change that Nuland’s resignation signals at the State Department. Career propagandist Anthony Blinken penned a nauseating eulogy for the toadlike State Department professional’s 35-year career, uploaded this week to the State Department website. Behold this revolting, hagiographic paragraph, which described Nuland (Victoria, “Toria”) as if she were dead or something:
[I]t’s Toria’s leadership on Ukraine that diplomats and students of foreign policy will study for years to come. Her efforts have been indispensable to confronting Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marshaling a global coalition to ensure his strategic failure, and helping Ukraine work toward the day when it will be able to stand strongly on its own feet – democratically, economically, and militarily.
Wow. Ensuring Putin’s strategic failure? How, exactly, has Putin strategically failed? When — exactly — can Ukraine expect to stand strongly on its own feet, democratically, economically, or militarily?
The truth is, Nuland is inextricably connected to the entire odious Ukrainian project. It could even be called her brainchild. It is a poorly-concealed secret that Nuland coordinated Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan coup, which started the whole ball of war rolling. A lifelong Russia hawk — she deeply hates everything Russian — Nuland must also have known what the CIA was up to in Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are now dead as a direct result of Toria’s own political ambitions for Ukraine.
According to the announcement, pending permanent replacement, Under Secretary of State for Management John Bass will take Nuland’s place. It is highly suggestive that Bass was personally involved in the US surrender in Afghanistan; he was literally stationed in Kabul in 2021 during the troop withdrawal as a logistical coordinator. In other words, John has recent experience helping get US assets out of theatre before it is overwhelmed by the enemy.
Who knows. We won’t speculate further, except to observe that, given Nuland’s hasty, unplanned exit, it seems clear an irreconcilable difference of opinion must have arisen. Maybe Nuland’s resignation was even requested. The alternative is that despite surviving internal State Department politics for three and a half decades, Nuland finally had enough, and quit right in the middle of achieving her lifelong ambitions and at the worst possible time for Ukraine.
Whichever, they cannot possibly replace the institutional knowledge of someone like Nuland. So a major shift in US policy toward Ukraine seems inevitable, whether officially-announced or not. Maybe that’s why Olena Zelensky turned down Biden’s State of the Union invitation, and not actually because of any catfight with the widow Navalny, as amusing as that mental picture would be.
I must run; the Covid Litigation Conference calls.
Have a terrific Thursday! Sorry for the delay, East Coast C&Cers, and I apologize for any typos or mistakes; I’m still jet lagging. Hop on back here tomorrow morning (or afternoon, whichever) for another delicious roundup as I adapt to West Coast time.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
