The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Memorial Day matters, but not in the usual way. These brave warriors fought and even died for freedom. We are now, as an occupied country, losing that freedom. Nearly half of our fellow Americans, including a majority of ignorant young people, seem even to support it. So while we honor these brave soldiers of the past and recent wars, we must also learn and be inspired by their example: Because we are the generation that either loses America’s freedom, or fights to get it back.
Last week, President Biden signed a massive $40 billion military aid bill for Ukraine. Who cares that inflation is killing the American economy and mothers can’t even get baby formula. For Washington, spending on war and empire always seems to trump America’s interests.
To put this giveaway to Ukraine in perspective: just since late February, the US has provided nearly $60 billion in “assistance” to Ukraine. That is almost half that country’s entire 2020 GDP! Washington has literally adopted Ukraine in our name and on our dime.
The Biden Administration claims that Ukraine is winning the war with Russia and that such an expenditure to protect Ukraine’s borders is critical to our national interests and worth risking a nuclear war over.
But protecting Ukraine’s democracy is no longer the stated goal of the Administration. Defense Secretary Austin outlined the Administration’s new intention not long ago when he said that the real goal is to weaken Russia.
Biden’s neocons are fighting a war with Russia, but once again Congress has no interest in voting on a war declaration or even in debating whether war with Russia 30 years after the end of the Cold War is a good idea.
There is a reason our Constitution grants war powers to the legislative branch. Forcing Members of the House and Senate to declare the US to be in a state of war also enables them – through the powers of the purse-string – to define the goals of the war and particularly what a victory looks like. That prevents the kind of mission-creep ahd shifting objectives that have characterized our endless wars in the 21st century – including this current proxy war with Russia.
Even the US mainstream media is beginning to notice. Last week the New York Times’ Editorial Board published an editorial originally titled, “What is America’s Strategy in Ukraine?” complaining that the Biden Administration has yet to answer any questions to the American people regarding its involvement in Ukraine.
While, as could be expected, the paper attacked the “isolationists” in the US Congress who opposed the $40 billion giveaway, the NY Times editorial board nevertheless registered what can only be seen as the first major sign of dissent among the usual media war cheerleaders.
They wrote:
…it is still not in America’s best interest to plunge into an all-out war with Russia, even if a negotiated peace may require Ukraine to make some hard decisions. And the US aims and strategy in this war have become harder to discern, as the parameters of the mission appear to have changed.
While warning that Americans’ interest in Ukraine will begin to wane without more clarity from Washington as to its goals, the paper went on to directly contradict the Biden Administration’s predictions of a Ukraine victory:
A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal.
Congress – with very few exceptions – has opened a financial spigot to the government in Kiev without asking a single question about how and why the money is to be spent. When Senator Paul simply asked for someone to keep track of the $60 billion we shipped over there he was met with near-unanimous opposition.
An endless supply of US taxpayer money to Ukraine with zero stated goals and zero oversight. Isn’t it time to stand up and demand that both parties in Congress start asking some hard questions?
The media wants us to pay attention to the bloodbath in Texas right now — to that, and absolutely to nothing else.
They want us to pay attention to it with a certain slant. The slant is, “Guns are bad. If we just outlawed guns, this wouldn’t happen.”
They don’t want us to ask any other questions, other than, “How soon can we outlaw all guns, and repeal the Second Amendment?”
These sycophants and ideologues in the media DO NOT CARE about the pain or plight of grieving parents. They care about being SEEN as if they do. They are every bit as much the actors as the people you see performing on your favorite Netflix series. Acting is an honorable profession. Media and “journalists”, as we know them, are prepetrating the greatest, most sickening fraud in all of human history.
Nobody asks the question: What’s wrong with government-run schools? Why can’t they — or won’t they — keep children safe? Private schools keep children safe. Why can’t public schools? Because government schools are going to remain dangerous, even after you demand that all peaceful, law-abiding, nonpsychotic people turn over their weapons of self-protection.
Our government takes toys off the market if half of one percent of children die while playing with them. But government-run schools are proving far, far more dangerous to children than any toy ever could. How many brutal shootings resulting in dead children have occurred in Catholic schools? Or Jewish schools? Or Montessori schools? I can’t think of even ONE single case. ALL of these shootings are happening in “gun-free zone” government-run schools.
It seems obvious: Public schools are toxic. The risk is far, far too great of sending your children to one of these monstrosities. To say nothing of the intellectual brutality committed against children every day, by saturating them with fascist, Communist, Marxist, brazenly racist, government-sanctioned propaganda.
I fail to understand why ANY parents still send their children to government-run schools. Homeschooling seems like a better option, educationally as well as eliminating the risk that your children will be mauled or murdered on a typical school day.
Public schools are the problem. They should be defunded. Parents should get tax credits for education, as a transition to a totally free market for education. We have (more or less) a free market for shoes, clothes, airlines, automobiles and groceries. Why no freedom in education?
I will be on vacation (deep woods camping) from tomorrow through Sunday. There is no WiFi at this location. Hey, even the Artful Dilettante needs a vacation from time to time. Happy Memorial Day to all my loyal followers.
Biden’s approval rating is down 24 points from his 63 percent rating one year ago in May 2021.
Only 33 percent of Democrats believe the country is headed in the right direction, down 16 points from his rating in April.
When will people realize that DemComs WANT the things that are happening to the country? We see rising, unsustainable gas prices. They see the end of fossil fuels. It’s what they want. In their fantasy-land, the end of fossil fuels will automatically mean that everyone uses solar and drives electric. That, of course, won’t happen. If those things were economically and technologically feasible, people would already be doing them.
None of that is the point. The point is that the worse things get, the more people become afraid. The more people become afraid, the more they let the government do whatever they want to do to them. Look at what happened with COVID. People behaved precisely as tyrants wanted them to behave, when afraid. Imagine when the fear isn’t only over a virus with a 99.99 percent survival rate, but instead the fear is over hyperinflation, shortages, mass impoverishment and the end of life as we have known it.
You’ve heard the phrase, “divide and conquer.” DemComs are doing that, too. Another phrase is “weaken, destroy and conquer.” People do not act like “Democrats” do unless it’s deliberate. They are destroying our currency, our liberty, our economic prosperity, our morale and our Constitution with wreckless yet surgical precision — and speed. It’s like a 9/11 coming from our own government — not just to a couple of buildings, but to the entire material and spiritual foundations of our society.
That’s why I keep saying we are an occupied country. The people occupying our country are not going to let us vote them away. They are here to stay, and once their destruction reaches a certain point, it will be too late to go back.
It’s too late for a “red wave”, and most Republicans are rotten and corrupt, anyway. We need a revolution. You don’t vote away tyrants. You eradicate them.
For half a decade now, America’s media elite have been obsessed with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s conversion to Trumpism.
Press and TV are daily consumed with his actions and prospects and the future of the party he captured in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider the prospects of President Joe Biden and the political future of his embattled presidency.
What are the odds that Biden, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him, will run again in 2024, win reelection, serve out a second term and transfer his office to the 47th president on Jan. 20, 2029?
My guess: The odds of that happening are roughly the same as the odds that last-minute entry Rich Strike would win the Kentucky Derby, as he left the starting gate at Churchill Downs at 80-1.
Consider the first hurdle Biden faces on the way to renomination in 2024 — the midterm elections five months off.
Since the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 reached record highs in January, both have seen eight weeks of wipeouts of trillions of dollars in value as we approached bear-market territory by the end of last week.
Stock portfolios, pensions and retirement benefit plans have been gutted. These massive market losses are also a lead indicator pointing to a recession right ahead, just as voters pass judgment on a Democratic Party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress.
But even before we reach recession, Americans have already been living with a Biden inflation of 8% that has lasted for months and affected all the necessities of normal life, such as groceries and gasoline.
And the worst seems yet to come.
The Federal Reserve has reversed course from its easy money days and begun to raise interest rates to squeeze the Biden inflation out of the economy. What lies ahead may remind people who were around then of Jimmy Carter’s “stagflation,” where interest rates hit 21% to kill an inflation that reached 13%.
As for the crisis on the southern border, it is deeper than ever. Some 234,000 migrants were caught illegally entering the U.S. in April alone, with thousands of others evading any contact with U.S. authorities.
This is an invasion rate of some 3 million illegal migrants a year.
Shootings, killings, carjackings, criminal assaults, and smash-and-grab robberies in record numbers are the subject of our nightly news.
And the latest national polls suggest the country is holding Biden responsible. The president’s approval rating is down to 39%, and only 1 in 3 Americans think he is doing a good job handling the economy and that the nation is headed in the right direction.
Now the omicron variant of COVID-19 is making a comeback; infections are again over 100,000 a day.
Biden might find consolation from how his predecessors overcame midterm defeats. Clinton in 1994 lost 54 House seats and won reelection easily in 1996. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010 to come back and win handily over Mitt Romney in 2012.
Why cannot Biden ride out the anticipated storm in this year’s midterms and come back to win election in 2024, as did Clinton and Obama?
Age has something to do with it. Clinton was 50 in his reelection year 1996. Obama was 51 in his reelection year 2012. And both were at the peak of their political powers.
Biden, on election day 2024, will be two weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. Should he serve out a second term, he would not leave the White House until he had turned 86. Biden has been America’s oldest president since the day he took office.
Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers wrote of “energy in the executive” as being an indispensable attribute of good government.
Does Biden, with his shuffling gait, regular gaffes, and physical and cognitive decline manifest that attribute of which Hamilton wrote?
The likely scenario for Biden?
His party sustains a crushing defeat in November comparable to what Clinton and Obama suffered. But the party does not immediately rally around Biden as present and future leader, as it did with Clinton and Obama. Critics inside the Democratic coalition begin to blame Biden for the loss.
Ambitious Democrats, sensing disaster if Biden tops the ticket in 2024, begin to call for him to stand down and give way to a younger candidate, a new face, in 2024.
One or two progressives declare for president, and the pressure builds on Biden to avoid a personal and political humiliation in the 2024 primaries by standing down, as Harry Truman did in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.
By early 2023, Biden will have adopted the line that dealing with the challenge of China and Russia and, at the same time, coping with recession and inflation require his full attention. And these preclude a national political campaign for reelection.
And then President Joe Biden announces he will not run again.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 