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.
Former Kansas Senator Robert J. “Bob” Dole passed away on Sunday at the age of 98, according to a statement by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation.
“Senator Robert J. Dole died early this morning in his sleep,” the statement said. “At his death, at age 98, he had served the United States of America faithfully for 79 years. A statement from the Dole family will be released soon.” Dole was best known as the Republican nominee for president in 1996, running against incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton, who was at the peak of his popularity after moving to the political center. Though Dole lost in a landslide, his warnings that Clinton could not be trusted were later vindicated by the sexual scandal that led to Clinton’s impeachment.
Born in 1923 in the small town of Russell, Kansas, Dole was a student and athlete at the University of Kansas when World War II broke out. He enlisted a year later in the U.S. Army Reserve Corps and was assigned to active duty in June 1943.
As the Topeka Capital-Journalrecalled earlier this year:
Rotating around several U.S. camps and attending the Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning in Georgia, Dole deployed to Italy as a second lieutenant in the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in late 1944.
But just a few months into that deployment, Dole on April 14, 1945, led an assault on Hill 913 north of Castel D’Aiano, with the soldiers taking heavy artillery and aerial fire. When he saw a fellow soldier go down, Dole went to help pull him into a manhole, and as he scrambled out, he felt a sharp sting in his shoulder.
Dole collapsed onto the battlefield, and it was nine hours before medics could evacuate him to a field hospital. He would spend the next two and a half years at the Percy Jones Army Medical Center in Battle Creek, Mich., in a head-to-hip plaster cast, having lost a kidney and full use of his right arm.
He was awarded two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. He would hold a pen in his right hand so that people would not be alarmed by his disability when they met him.
Dole later attended the University of Arizona, and transferred back to Kansas, where he graduated with undergraduate and law degrees from Washburn University in Topeka in 1952. By then, he had already been elected to the Kansas State House of Representatives and launched his political career. He served as county attorney for Russell County, and won election to the U.S. House for four successive terms in the 1960s before running for Senator in 1968. He was reelected four times.
In 1976, Dole entered presidential politics as the running mate of then-incumbent President Gerald Ford, who lost to Jimmy Carter. He would go on to lead Republicans in the Senate, as both majority and minority leader, before resigning in 1996 to focus on his ill-fated presidential campaign. He remained involved in politics, partly through his second wife, Elizabeth Dole, who represented North Carolina in the U.S. Senate from 2003 through 2009, and partly through his own commentary.
Though seen as an establishment figure, Dole supported President Donald Trump — not uncritically, but with admiration for Trump’s policies and his achievements in office. In 2017, Dole openly praised Trump’s first trip to Europe, including his speech in Warsaw on the need to defend western civilization. During the 2020 presidential election, Dole spoke out in Trump’s defense against the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying that it appeared to be biased against the president.
Curiously, and somewhat controversially, following his political retirement, Dole also became an early pitchman for Viagra, the revolutionary medication for erectile dysfunction in men. In doing so, he removed the stigma from both the condition and the drug, opening a new world of sexual freedom for middle-aged and older couples.
Robert Dole will remain widely admired, both for his military heroism and for his public service, one of the greatest Americans never to win the presidency.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Try to imagine a President doing a worse job than Joe Biden. Think about how that would even be possible. Would they have to set the White House on fire while vomiting on Boris Johnson? Maybe a President in a Nyquil-induced stupor trying to start a nuclear war with Canada? Jimmy Carter on his worst day couldn’t hold a candle Joe Biden on his best, provided Biden ends up having a best day.
Remember this one: “I’m gonna ask the public for 100 days to mask, just 100 days to mask. Not forever, 100 days. And I think we’ll see a significant reduction if we occur that, if, if, if, if that occurs with vaccinations and masking to drive down the numbers considerably, considerably”? That was Joe Biden 1 year ago Friday, part of his “plan” he swore he had to “shutdown the virus.” How’d that work out again?
Has there ever been a bigger disconnect between what a candidate for President promised and what they delivered? It’s not even that Biden tried and failed, it’s that the entire premise of his campaign was a lie. He had no plan, he had no clue. All he had was an objective and handlers determined to get him there, for their own reasons.
It’s unclear to me that Joe Biden ever wanted anything more than the trappings that go with being President of the United States – the house, the being waited on hand and foot, and most importantly to a career politician with wild insecurity and unrivaled narcissism like Joe, the guarantee of being remembered. Senators are forgotten, quickly, Presidents are remembered forever. Someone who loves themselves as much as Joe does, who desperately needs others to love him just as much, that matters.
There’s also the added bonus that former Democratic Party Presidents are showered with money after their term, often times by the industries they pretended to “fight” when they were running. And Joe Biden loves money. He made a bunch after his stint as Vice President on the prospect that he would run in 2020 (leftists hedge their bets and spread their money around). That’s, of course, in addition to the millions his family raked in through Hunter’s string of jobs and contracts for which he was wildly unqualified. Joe pretends he isn’t, but he’s all about the money.
But to get to the rewards of being a former Democrat President, those Presidents tend to want to accomplish some things; they usually believe in things. Joe Biden believes in nothing. His biggest, and really only accomplishment in the Senate was the 1994 crime bill and he had to denounce it because Democrats had gone from being against crime and supporting police to supporting criminals and wanting to defund police.
On abortion, Biden changed his tune completely as well. There isn’t a person serving his administration, either in the White House or the media, who won’t insist Joe labored between running for President or becoming Pope, such a devout Catholic is he. And in his time in the Senate he used to pretend to be personally against abortion, but refused to allow his religious beliefs to dictate his policy positions. It was and is BS, but many politicians play this game (looking at you, Nancy Pelosi).
Now, he’s no longer pretending. The party of “safe, legal, and rare” abortions is now the party of abortions for everyone, on demand, with no restrictions on when. It won’t be long, maybe 5 years, before they start advocating post-birth abortions, taxpayer funded, of course. That’s where Democrats are now, so that’s where Joe Biden is now. Biden is such a weathervane on everything, and always has been, that he’d perform abortions in the White House if that’s what the fringe of his party demanded.
With no moral code, no center, nothing matters. You just read what’s in the teleprompter and hit the sack by 7:00 while your degenerate son collects piles of cash for the family until you’re free to do it on your own. All you have to do is what you’re told, your handlers and the media will take care of the rest.
That Joe Biden hasn’t come close to fulfilling any campaign promises, or even that those promises were made, is a testament to what he was willing to do to get the job. Just imagine what he’s willing to do to keep it. Even scarier, just imagine how much worse things have the potential of getting as he works to do just that.
The problem with socialism? It’s based on self-sacrifice. When self-sacrifice becomes the law of the land, people stop producing. Why? Because there’s no incentive. You can’t keep your profits. What’s the point of doing something great, innovative or productive if there’s nothing in it for you? Also, without profits, you cannot build capital and expand your production. So productivity stops. Suddenly, there’s nothing to buy, sell or trade. If there are no profits, there’s no wealth. There are no jobs. There’s nothing to spend money on. The government freaks out and starts generating more currency — which devalues the money. Jobs start to disappear because again, there’s nothing to produce. The surplus of material goods we take for granted in capitalist societies dwindles and eventually disappears.
America has been inching this way for decades. But now ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING we’re doing is socialist, Marxist, fascist. And you see what’s happening: inflation, supply chain breakdowns. America has a much longer way to fall than poor countries that become socialist. But the same thing will happen to us, on our present course. Our lives are going to change and difficult, personal dilemmas are going to confront us. I don’t know if it’s too late to reverse course or not. But I don’t trust Republicans to reverse course for us, and I don’t trust elections to deliver us authentic results. If you do, then I hope you’re right. But almost all of the evidence points in the other direction. We are being destroyed like an occupied country is being destroyed. Socialism is the wrecking ball. Freedom — the economic freedom of unfettered capitalism, and the inalienable individual rights of our Constitution — is the only thing that can save us. Will anyone who really means it come to our defense? Are we willing to do what’s required to save ourselves?
For nearly a year the Biden “presidency” — whoever they are — has subjected the United States to a destructive revolutionary agenda of unprecedented scope and virulence, all of it arising out of an irrational civilizational death wish for which there is no historical parallel.
No more than a small minority of Americans knowingly voted for this.
Given safety from reprisal, large majorities of the electorate would reject both the underlying unhinged beliefs and the ruinous policies and goals that have been promoted since Biden and his opaque gang took office.
Here’s an incomplete list of the reality-averse ideas and suicidal policies that America’s ruling revolutionaries have promulgated and pursued since January 20, 2021:
Western civilization in general and America in particular are and always have been evil, and accordingly must be “fundamentally transformed,” i.e., abolished by revolution, whether or not majorities have ever expressed a desire for revolution
Whites, by their nature, are congenitally, innately, permanently racist, and every child and student in the nation must be taught that as fact;
“Systemic racism,” whatever that is, is ubiquitous in America, and is the principal, indeed only, barrier to black success; that too must be universally taught and acknowledged as fact;
A multiplicity of “genders” exists — rather than two biologically determined sexes – a subjective identity smorgasbord from which every person, including every child, may choose; all individuals and institutions must go along with that subjective choice, or endure social and career ostracism or — soon — worse;
It is highly desirable, indeed essential, to forcibly, explicitly, and in detail, expose young children to radical gender ideology and to the most bizarre and statistically rare expressions of human sexuality;
It is racism, genderism, or some other criminal “ism” to base college admissions or employment decisions on demonstrated ability, behavior, and character — “excellence” is a white male plot; human sorting must be predicated on group membership (race, sex or sexual orientation), and any underrepresentation of “oppressed” groups in desirable schools, careers or positions is irrefutable proof of invidious discrimination;
Permanently abolished borders and unlimited, unexamined immigration to America are unchallengeable goods; those who oppose either are racists, xenophobes, Islamophobes, or generalized haters, and all of them deserve the same ostracism and career penalties as those who doubt the reality of subjective multi-genderism;
As a desirable consequence of open borders and unlimited immigration the nation-state will be abolished (that is, only those nation-states of the West), to be replaced by international boarding houses occupied by peoples with conflicting values and behavior patterns, and differing abilities, interests, and languages; this will be a great good and will usher in a period of historically unprecedented peace and prosperity; opposition in any form to unlimited immigration is “white nationalism”;
Many if not most crimes of theft are not crimes at all and should not be prosecuted; where mass looting and destruction of property occur, whether or not incident to political protest, the police, and armed private guards should always stand down, and nothing ever should be done that might cause harm to the looters; even violent felonies should be treated leniently, especially where the perpetrator is a member of an “oppressed” group and the ostensible victim a member of the “oppressor” group (i.e., a heterosexual white male);
To save Mother Earth from “climate change,” there must be a radical downward adjustment of America’s standard of living; this ultimately will include dramatically reduced single-family homeownership while most of the population lives in cramped urban glass and steel boxes; sharply reduced access to personal vehicles and commercial air travel; and radically altered diets; in sum, a civilization that affords the vast majority of its citizens far fewer enjoyments and material goods than now … while its elites continue to live large, as before; and
Finally, the foregoing beliefs are so indisputably true, and the resultant agenda so urgently necessary, that it’s fully appropriate to abolish free expression, if that’s what it takes, to compel universal acceptance of both the beliefs and agenda. The necessary abolition of free expression is already well underway through branding opposing opinions or inconvenient facts as “hate speech” or “disinformation;” this ongoing campaign of first amendment suppression will continue and be intensified. Appropriate internet banning, coupled with employment, career, and other penalties will be imposed on those so branded.
These lunatic beliefs and goals — only a partial list – amount to the most astonishing embrace of guaranteed civilizational extinction in the history of government. And their promulgation by the highest powers in the United States has been in high gear for almost a year.
resultant agenda so urgently necessary, that it’s fully appropriate to abolish free expression, if that’s what it takes, to compel universal acceptance of both the beliefs and agenda. The necessary abolition of free expression is already well underway through branding opposing opinions or inconvenient facts as “hate speech” or “disinformation;” this ongoing campaign of first amendment suppression will continue and be intensified. Appropriate internet banning, coupled with employment, career, and other penalties will be imposed on those so branded.
These lunatic beliefs and goals — only a partial list – amount to the most astonishing embrace of guaranteed civilizational extinction in the history of government. And their promulgation by the highest powers in the United States has been in high gear for almost a year.Top Articles By American ThinkerRead More
Beto O’Rourke’s Mysterious Womannull
It can’t be said strongly or often enough, that the destructive madness now passing as federal ideology and policy amounts to an unprecedented revolution more profoundly radical than any other in human history. It includes a redefinition of human nature and the human family; mandatory confession of evil and racism by a nation’s founding and still majority people; rejection of that country’s founding values of individual liberty and the rule of law; and replacement of merit and character with group identity as the primary basis of social reward.
Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao — all would have shrunk from this prescription for assured social destruction.
How did we get here?
How did one of the two major political parties come to embrace an ideology whose fact-free, reality-averse explicit goal is the dismantling of its own highly successful, free, and prosperous country?
The causes are several and beyond the scope of a brief column — they include normal Americans’ negligent forfeiture to the Left of their public schools and universities, leading to the transformation of both major media and popular culture into instruments of leftist propaganda, the left’s near-complete control of the internet (also directly caused by forfeiture of the educational institutions) and growing electoral corruption by the left.
Whatever the long, medium, and short term causes, the coup has happened and the revolution is in progress. We are now in the midst of it, and the only question worth asking is how, if at all, a counterrevolution of sanity can be mounted and succeed.
Surprisingly, there is real hope. That hope lies in two stubborn centers of resistance that remain: nearly 50% of the American electorate, judging by the 2016 and 2020 elections; and the Republican Party.
Mention of the Republican Party may have caused a few groans from the readership, and I sympathize. The Republican Party may not be much, but, institutionally, it’s all we’ve got. Every other major American institution has either signed on for the revolution or completely acquiesced to it.
First, the more encouraging of the two holdouts: The stubborn 50%.
The last two presidential elections have established that despite all the institutional losses and capitulations, despite the massive information suppression and nonstop stream of unanswered leftist propaganda, nearly 50% of the American electorate remains actively opposed to the Left’s agenda and imbued with the same basic good sense and patriotism that prevailed in both major political parties 50 years ago. These two elections have revealed a huge and obstinate reservoir of national immunity to the Left’s informational monopoly and propaganda. European patriots can only look on with envy.
If the second remnant of the opposition, the Republican Party, can be made to grasp the significance of this tenacious and enormous reserve of patriotism and good sense, the route would still be open to the recovery of the presidency and the congress and, with that, to a gradual, albeit lengthy and tortured, reassertion of national sanity.
There’s the rub. The Republican Party, the only electoral vehicle that can deliver America from this mess, is the same Party that got us into it. Its decades-long failure to defend America from the Left’s malicious falsehoods and delusional notions goes back at least to 1992.
But politically attentive conservatives and patriots must be charitable and realistic about the Republican Party:
In all Western democracies, it’s the left who are the political pros, the fanatics armed with utopian truth who live politics 24/7, most of them all their lives. Republicans and their center-right cousins elsewhere, as defenders of tradition and gradual change against revolution, are always and everywhere the amateurs. This will never change. They are the part-timers, who before politics actually accomplished something: they are the mothers of elementary school children who were never interested in politics until they took a close look at what’s being taught to their children in the public schools; the successful heartland small businessman, respected and liked by everyone, who winds up in Congress; the entrepreneurial founder of a new company who’s made a fortune and now believes (mistakenly) that his proven business acumen will facilitate a seamless transition to political sophistication and success.
The Republican Party has other types too (including a few grifters and those who’ve been bought by the Chamber of Commerce, but far fewer of these than the left); but most, like the school-politicized mother, the small businessman, the successful entrepreneur, are orders of magnitude less politically sophisticated and less certain their agenda than the Left.
Many of them compromise when they shouldn’t; are unsure of their agenda; actually believe the advice of the Washington Post and New York Times who “helpfully” counsel Republicans to “moderation” on the issues where clarity and toughness will resonate.
Conservatives’ job between now and the congressional elections of 2022 is to convey to the Republican Party, everywhere and at all levels, the historically unique destructiveness of what’s now coming out of Washington and, hence, the enormity of the stakes; and the need for absolutely resolute clarity and toughness in rejecting the entirety of the Democrats’ insane ideology and agenda. If that message gets through to the Party — and is coupled this time with an actual battle plan that includes troops on the ground to defeat electoral corruption — the once-free American republic might be able to gain a significant political foothold to resist those trying to replace it with an interlocking globalist tyranny
Two weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an heir of the most famous family in America, released his blockbuster new book The Real Anthony Fauci. Despite the lack of any advertising campaign and virtually any media coverage, it soon spent ten days as Amazon’s #1 bestseller, and has now attracted over 1,100 reviews, 96% of them five-star.
“Dr. Joseph Goebbels wrote that ‘A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.’ Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr exposes the decades of lies.”
—Luc Montagnier, Nobel laureate
“Bobby Kennedy is one of the bravest and most uncompromisingly honest people I’ve ever met. Someday he’ll get credit for it. In the meantime, read this book.”
—Tucker Carlson
Although the mainstream media has almost totally ignored this blockbuster, we ourselves have just published two lengthy reviews by Pepe Escobar of Asian Times and Laurent Guyénot, a longtime French contributor to our website:
Fauci and the Great AIDS Swindle A Partial Review of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci Laurent Guyénot • November 27, 2021 • 5,900 Words
I’d also strongly recommend this hour-long interview of the author by Tucker Carlson:
I’m now extremely pleased to announce that the author and his publisher have now authorized us to republish the lengthy Introduction to his book, where he sets summarizes his important project and sets forth the reasons he undertook it:
Introduction to The Real Anthony Fauci Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. • November 30, 2021 • 6,900 Words
On an unrelated matter, I’m pleased to mention that we have recently added the following three downloadable eBooks to our available collection:
“We never demanded the one payment that the world owed us—and we let our best reward go to the worst of men. The error was made centuries ago, it was made by Sebastian d’Anconia, by Nat Taggart, by every man who fed the world and received no thanks in return. You don’t know what is right any longer? This is not a battle over material goods. It’s a moral crisis, the greatest the world has ever faced and the last. Our age is the climax of centuries of evil. We must put an end to it, once and for all, or perish—we, the men of the mind. It was our own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world—but we let our enemies write its moral code.”
The emperor has no brain. Or mind. Or soul. Or charisma, gravitas. Or skill. Or grasp of human nature. Or talent. Or military ability. Or diplomatic, or economic, ability. Or past achievements, in business or even politics. He is (they say) the President of the United States — the greatest republic and civilization in all of human history. Yet he has NO redeeming qualities, no virtues, no assets, no talents OF ANY KIND. Nothing.
The Kremlin demonstrated indecision and weakness, and left a festering wound that Washington is exploiting. As I have long warned, the Kremlin’s passivity will result in war.
The situation has developed precisely as I forecast. The Kremlin’s failure in 2014 to reincorporate the Donbass Russians back into Russia has played into Washington’s hands. The Kremlin gave Washington years to arm and train the Ukrainians, to continue the hostilities toward the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, and to conduct a propaganda campaign that paints Russia as the aggressor. Mistakes of this magnitude usually result in war.
If Russia had accepted the vote of the breakaway republics to be reincorporated into Russia, the hostilities would have ended as not even the Ukrainians are stupid enough to attack Russia herself. If the hostilities had been ended, Washington would have had no opening, and the current dangerous situation would not have been able to emerge.
Kremlin Says Half Of Entire Ukrainian Army Is In Donbass As Blinken Warns Putin: US “Prepared To Act”
WEDNESDAY, DEC 01, 2021 – 05:30 PM A Wednesday statement out of the Russian Foreign Ministry has charged Kiev with stoking tensions along the Ukrainian border. The statement alleged that over 100,000 Ukrainian troops and military hardware have been moved into the restive Donbass region, where the national forces have been in a stalemate with pro-Russian separatists for half a decade going back to 2014.
While rejecting prior accusations out of Kiev and Washington – and especially Western media – that it’s Russia that’s stoking tensions by sending 90,000 regular forces near the border, Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova had this to say: “According to some reports, the number of troops… in the conflict zone already reaches 125,000 people, and this, if anyone does not know, is half of the entire composition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
Further she accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of breaking the peace, particularly the Donbass ceasefire terms of the Minsk agreement, after he submitted a bill to Ukrainian parliament which would allow foreign troops into the country to participate in joint military drills next year.
The rival sides are now in a full-blown media and information war, trading tit-for-tat accusations of military build-up, in a dangerous situation that could be barreling toward renewal of actual armed conflict:
“In recent weeks, we have seen a stream of consciousness from the Ukrainian leadership – especially when it comes to the military – that is excessively inflamed and dangerous,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in follow-up to Zakharova’s words.
Just last week the foreign ministry used similar language which denounced the “hot heads” in Kiev which have a “feeling of complete impunity” and “are in favor of a military solution to this internal Ukrainian crisis.”
But Secretary of State Antony Blinken also weighed in on Wednesday, escalating the rhetoric further. He charged Putin with “laying the groundwork for an invasion” of neighboring Ukraine. He demanded the Kremlin pull back it’s forces from near the border (an implicit admission that we are still merely talking about the “movements” of Russian troops within Russia’s own territory). This despite the Pentagon this week appearing to downplay the ‘invasion threat’.
Meanwhile The Washington Post is reporting that top Biden admin officials are wildly speculating over ‘false flag’ scenarios… and they are already blaming Russia.
“We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade. We do know that he is putting in place the capacity to do so in short order should he so decide,” Blinken told reporters in Latvia after meeting with NATO foreign ministers, where the crisis was discussed.
“Should Russia follow the path of confrontation, when it comes to Ukraine, we’ve made clear that we will respond resolutely, including with a range of high-impact economic measures that we have refrained from pursuing in the past,” Blinken added. While stopping short of any direct threat of American military intervention, he said that Western allies have expressed “tremendous solidarity” to take action in the event of a Russian offensive in Ukraine.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 