Day: December 27, 2024

Is This The Scandal Of 2024?

There are many incidents in 2024 that we could say was the scandal of the year……but I think this situation hits the nail on the head….at least in my mind.

Looking back on 2024, Peggy Noonan has no doubt of the scandal of the year: “the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity” and what she says was a coverup by White House staff. The Wall Street Journal columnist claims President Biden “has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn’t fully up to the job.” She suggests the right move would’ve been to inform the public. Instead, the Biden White House “felt justified in misleading the public about the president’s true state,” protecting him from scrutiny—until it couldn’t. With the June presidential debate, “the country finally saw what those in the White House saw every day,” Noonan writes, adding the alleged coverup will forever color the Biden administration’s reputation.

She contrasts the White House’s alleged actions with those of the wife and aides of Woodrow Wilson who “misled the public as to his condition” after the president was left incapacitated in 1919. In her 1939 memoir, Edith Bolling Wilson wrote that she suggested her husband should resign before a doctor told her that would be bad for the country and that she should essentially serve in his place until he recovered. She claimed to have acted as an intermediary and “I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs.” However, in his 2013 biography of her husband, historian A. Scott Berg wrote that Bolling Wilson had “executed the physical and most of the mental duties of the office” and “enshrouded the Presidency in as much secrecy as possible.”

“The Wilsons’ historical reputation was never the same. Nor will the Bidens’ be,” writes Noonan, who suggests that to mislead the public about the president’s true state is “Democratic Party gospel.” Apart from the alleged coverups related to Democrats Biden and Wilson, Noonan refers to speculation that Ronald Reagan was experiencing cognitive decline shortly before he left office. “Political parties, like people, must beware the stories they tell themselves, the stories they weave and come to believe that just are not true,” Noonan concludes. “The not-true ones can get you in terrible trouble, especially the ones you use to justify your actions and that make poor personal motives seem noble.”

Read the full piece here.

Like I said this ‘scandal’ I agree with….I was never a big Biden supporter so this should come as no surprise to anyone.

If you think there is something else that is the ‘big’ scandal of 2024….please elaborate.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

 

Is This Trump Foreign Policy?

I know that Trump has mouthed a lot of crap since being elected but so far he has bee mostly silent on foreign policy….that is until now.

Is this the type of silliness we can expect from the Trump administration in the coming years with our foreign policy?

The nonsensical foreign policy begins.

Turning over the Panama Canal, a process started in 1977 by President Carter, was foolish, President-elect Trump says. And unless there are changes, Trump posted, “we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question.” At issue are the fees Panama charges US ships to pass through the canal, which he called exorbitant, Politico reports. Trump teed the issue up with two long posts Saturday night on Truth Social, then returned to it Sunday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix.

“It was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions, you gotta treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly,” Trump said in his speech, per the Hill. To keep the canal, he said, Panama must follow “the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving.” When a member of the audience member hollered “take it back,” Trump answered, “That’s a good idea.” Panama is a strong ally of the US.

A few hours after making that idiotic statement he made yet another foreign policy proclamation…..

President-elect Trump is expressing some interesting territorial wishes ahead of his return to the White House, hinting in recent days that Canada should become the United States’ 51st state and floating the idea that the US should retake control of the Panama Canal. Over the weekend, the Trump reupped an older item on his wish list: the US gaining ownership of the Danish territory of Greenland. Trump’s desire for the island state came via a Sunday post on Truth Social, as he announced PayPal co-founder Ken Howery as his nominee for the ambassadorship to Denmark.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote. “Ken will do a wonderful job in representing the interests of the United States.” Axios notes that Greenland is a desirable plot of land, with access to the Arctic and natural resources such as gold, silver, copper, and uranium, as well as the possibility of offshore oil. The US has indicated multiple times since the late 19th century that it would love to have the world’s largest island in its fold, but nothing ever panned out. Trump’s overtures, meanwhile, have been roundly dismissed by Denmark and Greenland’s leadership.

In 2019, when as president Trump first expressed interest in Greenland, Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, called the idea “absurd,” per the Guardian. Trump ended up calling her “nasty” and nixing a trip to her country. It’s not clear what Denmark thinks of Trump’s latest remarks, but Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede has weighed in. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale,” Egede said in a statement. “We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”

I hope this is not the total extent of foreign policy by Trump and Rubio….and this theme of ‘imperialism’ is a scary situation….

As he prepares to return to the White House, President-elect Trump has floated the idea of the US taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal, not to mention needling Canada about becoming the 51st US state. A look at related coverage:

  • No joke: OK, disregard the Canada comments, which were made with a “trolling jocularity,” write David E. Sanger and Lisa Friedman in a New York Times analysis. But Trump is serious about Greenland (an ever-more strategic locale as Arctic ice melts) and Panama (because of worries that China is gaining too much sway over the canal).
  • No joke, II: Trump may use an “America First” motto, but that doesn’t translate to an “isolationist creed,” they write in the Times. It’s more an expansionist one, and “it reflects the instincts of a real estate developer who suddenly has the power of the world’s largest military to back up his negotiating strategy.”
  • Historic reach: If Trump is indeed serious, it would translate to “an American territorial expansion” that “would rival the Louisiana Purchase or the deal that netted Alaska from Russia,” writes Steve Contorno at CNN. His analysis also draws a comparison to “the 19th century doctrine of Manifest Destiny—a belief in the United States’ divine right to expand across the continent.” Contorno finds it a striking view from a president-elect who has advocated a pullback from American intervention in foreign wars.
  • Mexico, too: Rolling Stone reports that the incoming Trump administration is planning what one source close to the president-elect describes as a “soft invasion” of Mexico. That could mean, for example, sending in special-ops military personnel to take out cartel leaders—fulfillment of a Trump campaign pledge to wage “war” against cartels flooding the US with drugs. “How much should we invade Mexico?” says a senior member of the transition team. “That is the question.”
  • The i-word: Assessing all of the above, Dave Lawler at Axios writes that “America First is colliding with American imperialism,” adding that “no one, including Trump, really knows how it will all play out.” For context, he notes that Trump often says “wild stuff” without acting on it, but as president-elect, his proposals cannot be ignored.

But not to worry his idiocy is not only in the international scene he has inject his stupidity into domestic affairs….

Opposition to President-elect Trump’s renewed suggestion to change the name of Alaska’s 20,310-foot mountain back to McKinley includes many Alaskans, including Indigenous people, and the state’s two Republican senators. Sen. Lisa Murkowski advocated for years to remove the name of the nation’s 25th president, who never visited the mountain or had any connection to it, the Anchorage Daily News reports. “There is only one name worthy of North America’s tallest mountain: Denali—the Great One,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote on X.

Trump brought up the idea in a speech Sunday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, where he praised William McKinley as a fellow supporter of protective tariffs. “We’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley because I think he deserves it,” Trump said. In 2016, Trump had said he might change the name back, a notion he dropped when Alaska’s senators objected, per the AP. Denali is the Koyukon Athabascan name that was used by Indigenous people for centuries. It translates to “the high one” or “the great one.”

The federal government named it Mount McKinley in 1896, which stood until Barack Obama’s administration in 2015. That switch came after years of effort by state officials and Native groups. Sen. Dan Sullivan once told an Alaska Federation of Natives conference that Trump made the same suggestion when he and Murkowski met with him at the White House in 2017. The senators objected vehemently, he said. An aide texted the Daily News that “Sen. Sullivan like many Alaskans prefers the name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskan people gave the mountain thousands of years ago—Denali.”

Not even in the seat of power and he is already making stupid statements.

How much sillier can this get?  (I know silly question)

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”