Im-Politic: Biden’s Massive China Fakery

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2020 election, Biden, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, China trade deal, coronavirus, COVID 19, currency, currency manipulation, Hunter Biden, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Obama, Trade, travel ban, WHO, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, WTO, Wuhan virus, xenophobia

Imagine the gall that would’ve been required had Republican nominee Mitt Romney campaigned for President in 2012 by blaming incumbent Barack Obama for the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007-09. Not only did these economic disasters erupt well before Obama took office, but the White House at that time had been held for eight years by the GOP. (The Democrats did win control of the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, but still….) 

Multiply that gall many times over and you get this year’s presumptive Democratic candidate for President, Joe Biden, charging that Donald Trump is largely responsible for the devastating hit the nation is taking from the CCP Virus because Mr. Trump has been too soft on China. The Biden claims are much more contemptible because whereas Romney played no role in bringing on the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent near-depression, Biden has long supported many of the China policies that have both greatly enriched and militarily strengthened the People’s Republic, and sent key links in America’s supply chains for producing vital healthcare-related goods offshore – including to a China that has threatened the United States with healthcare supplies blackmail.

The Biden campaign’s most comprehensive indictment of President Trump’s China and CCP Virus policies was made in this release, titled “Trump Rolled Over for China.” Its core claim:

“We’d say Trump is weak on China, but that’s an understatement. Trump rolled over in a way that has been catastrophic for our country. He did nothing for months because he put himself and his political fortunes first. He refused to push China on its coronavirus response and delayed taking action to mitigate the crisis in an effort not to upset Beijing and secure a limited trade deal that has largely gone unfulfilled.”

More specifically, the Biden organization claims that even long before the pandemic broke out, Mr. Trump has “never followed through” on his 2016 campaign’s “big promises about being tough on China” and simply conducted “reckless trade policies that pushed farmers and manufacturers to the brink” before he was “forced to make concessions to China without making any progress toward a level playing field for American industry.”

I’d say “the mind reels” but that phrase doesn’t begin to capture the mendacity at work here. Not to mention the sheer incompetence. After all, the trade deal was signed on January 15. It was only two weeks before that China told the World Health Organization (WHO) that an unknown illness had appeared in Wuhan. On January 3, China officially notified the U.S. government. It was only the day before the trade deal signing that WHO broadcast to the world China’s claim (later exposed as disastrously erroneous – at best) that no evidence of person-to-person transmission had been found. It wasn’t until the very day of the deal signing that the individual who became the first known American virus case left Wuhan and arrived in the United States. It wasn’t until January 21 that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed him as the first American victim.  (See this timeline for specifics.)

So evidently the Biden folks don’t know how to read a calendar.

Meanwhile, in early January, The New York Times has reported, CDC offered to send a team of its specialists to China to observe conditions and offer assistance. China never replied. On January 7, four days after Washington received its first CCP Virus notification, but two weeks before it identified the first U.S. virus case, the CDC began planning for tests. We now know that it bungled this challenge badly.

But did Trump coddle China in order to keep Beijing from terminating the agreement? Surely Biden’s team isn’t calling that failure an effort to appease China. It’s also true that on February 7, the Trump administration announced its readiness to provide Beijing with $100 million worth of anti-virus aid to China (and other countries), and had just sent nearly 18 tons of medical supplies (including protective gear) to help the People’s Republic combat the pandemic. But is the Biden campaign condemning these actions? From its indictment, it’s clear that its focus instead is on the numerous Trump statements praising China’s anti-virus performance and transparency, and reassuring the American public that the situation was under control.

Where, however, is the evidence that these remarks amounted to the President treating China with kid gloves, and stemmed from desperation to save the trade deal? Just as important, here we come to a fundamental incoherence in Biden’s treatment of the agreement – descriptions that are so flatly contradictory that they reek of flailing. After all, on the one hand, the Phase One agreement is dismissed as a fake that fails to safeguard American trade and broader economic interests adequately. On the other, it assumes that China has been eager from the start to call the whole thing off. Yet if Phase One had accomplished so little from the U.S. standpoint, wouldn’t Beijing actually have been focused on sustaining this charade?

But even if the Biden read on trade deal politics is correct, how to explain the January 31 Trump announcement of major restrictions on inbound travel from China that went into effect February 2? Clearly China didn’t like it. Or were these reactions part of a secret plot between the American and Chinese Presidents to snow their respective publics and indeed the entire world?

How, moreover, to explain such Trump administration policies as the continuing crackdown on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, and its effort to kick out of the U.S. market  Chinese services provider China Telecom? Or the ongoing intensification of the Justice Department’s campaign against Chinese espionage efforts centered on U.S. college and university campuses? Or yesterday’s administration announcement that although some payments of U.S. tariffs on imports would be deferred in order to help hard-pressed American retailers survive the CCP Virus-induced national economic shutdown, the steep tariffs on literally hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of prospective imports from China would remain firmly in place?

In addition, all these measures of course put the lie to another central Biden claim – that Mr. Trump is not only soft on China today, but has been soft since his inauguration. A bigger goof – or whopper – can scarcely be imagined.

Unless it’s the companion Biden insistence that the Trump trade wars have devastated American agriculture and manufacturing? When, as documented painstakingly here, U.S. farm prices began diving into the dumps well before the Trump 2016 victory (when Biden himself was second-in-command in America)? When manufacturing, as documented equally painstakingly, went through the mildest recession conceivable, when its output was clearly hobbled by Boeing’s completely un-tradewar-related safety woes), and when every indication during the pre-virus weeks pointed to rebound? When the raging inflation widely predicted to stem from the tariffs has been absolutely nowhere in sight?

Which leaves the biggest lies of all: The claim that Biden is being tough on China now – the promise that he’ll “hold China accountable,” and the implication that he’s always been far-sighted and hard-headed in dealing with Beijing

According to the campaign’s Trump indictment, the former Vice President “publicly warned Trump in February not to take China’s word” on its anti-virus efforts. But this Biden warning didn’t come until February 26. As to making China pay, the campaign offers zero specifics – and given Biden’s staunch opposition to Mr. Trump’s tariffs (and silence on the other, major elements of the Trump approach to China) it’s legitimate to ask what on earth he’s talking about. In addition, Biden insinuated that the Trump curbs on travel from China were “xenophobia” the very day they were announced – before pushback prompted him to endorse them.

Finally, the Biden China record has been dreadful by any real-world standards. In the words of this analysis from the Cato Institute, “he voted consistently to maintain normal trade relations with China, including permanent NTR in 2000” – meaning that he favored the disastrous decision to admit China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which gave Beijing invaluable protection against unilateral U.S. efforts to combat its pervasive trade predation. He did apparently vote once for sanctions to punish China for its currency manipulation (which has artificially under-priced goods made in China and thereby given them government-created advantages against any competition), but many such Senate trade votes were purely for show. (I apologize for not being able to find the specific reference, and will nail down the matter in an addendum and post as soon as possible.)  

Revealingly, once he was in the Obama administration, he failed to lift a finger to continue the battle against this Chinese exchange-rate protectionism, and served as the President’s “leading pitchman” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose provisions would have handed China many of the benefits of membership without imposing any of the obligations. More generally, there’s no evidence of any Biden words or actions opposing an Obama strategy that greatly enriched the People’s Republic, and therefore supercharged its military potential and actual power. 

For good measure, despite constant bragging that his personal contact with numerous foreign leaders during his Senate and Vice Presidential years, he completely misjudged Xi Jinping, writing in a 2011 article that the Chinese dictator (then heir apparent to the top job in Beijing) “agrees” that “we have a stake in each other’s success” and that “On issues from global security to global economic growth, we share common challenges and responsibilities — and we have incentives to work together.”

There clearly are many valid reasons to support Biden’s Presidential bid.  But if China’s rise and its implications worry you (as they should), then the former Vice President’s record of dealing with Beijing just as clearly shouldn’t be one of them. 

Im-Politic: No U.S. Politicians Own China Virus Bragging Rights (& That’s Not a Scandal)

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Biden, budgets, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, China virus, coronavirus, Democrats, election 2020, health security, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, public health, Trump

Since the coronavirus’ serious threat to Americans’ health and their economy became clear, a blizzard of charges has accused President Trump of being caught flat-footed by the pandemic. I agree that the President didn’t expect a dangerous plague to break out overseas and swiftly cross America’s borders. I’ve also written that Mr. Trump made a big mistake in cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – but mainly for political reasons. For the amounts of money involved are so small that they couldn’t possibly even move the needle in terms of reining in federal spending and cutting deficits.

In fact, given the tiny sums, the picture looks pretty good when it comes to the latest Trump budget request for the CDC programs that actually deal with coronavirus-type threats. Check out the line items for “Emerging Infectious Diseases” and “Global Disease Detection and Other Programs.” The former is down only marginally from actual spending levels previously agreed to by Congress (including of course its Democrats) and the latter is up significantly.

But more important, the allegations seem to assume that the American political system has been chock full of leaders who can boast the foresight the President lacked, and that the nation’s response would have been much more effective had one of them occupied the Oval Office. Is there any actual evidence for this proposition?

One crucial test is whether well before the virus became front-page news any of the leading recent and current Democratic candidates for President rolled out plans for beefing up American capabilities to respond to pandemics before the virus’ breakout in China. And do you know how many did? None – with the possible exception of former New York City Mayor and media magnate Michael Bloomberg.

That’s based on checking the polcy sections of the websites of former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and drop-out Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Drop-outs Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg have taken all the content down from their sites.  But a wide-ranging media survey of their positions reveals no attention paid to pandemics, either.

I describe drop-out Bloomberg as a possible exception because his site did Mr. Trump’s “erratic leadership, go-it-alone approach, and distrust of science” for putting the country “in a vulnerable position should a major public health emergency, such as the novel coronavirus…materialize.” And he outlined what can fairly be called a plan.

Yet it’s not clear when these Bloomberg proposals were unveiled, and there’s no evidence that he was thinking about such matters before COVID 19’s appearance.

The same goes for Warren and Klobuchar, whose plans only dated from late January. Biden published an op-ed detailing his own ideas at about the same time. (See this post for links.)

I don’t believe that any of these politicians (including those with long years of public service) deserve any blame for failing to anticipate the virus threat on a timely basis – and for the same fundamental reason I don’t believe Mr. Trump should be pilloried. Because this kind of pandemic (coming from a country with extensive ties with the U.S. and global economies, like China, as opposed to regions like Central and West Africa, with almost no such ties) really couldn’t be anticipated adequately.

And incidentally, this point is also relevant to the charge made by Biden and others that the President not only cut the budget for the CDC, but for the country’s foreign aid agency, and also dismantled the White House global health security team created during the Obama years.

But anyone honestly believing that a little office somewhere in the Executive Office of the President would have made a meaningful difference in preventing or fighting the virus is guilty of drinking the policy wonk kool-aid claiming that augmenting bureaucratic flow-charts in any way amounts to solving problems – even those that emerge suddenly. As for the foreign aid cuts, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been working on helping prevent the spread of infectious diseases like the coronavirus, but Beijing made clear early on that American government help wasn’t wanted. (Nor was World Health Organization help.)

In other words, life is full of unpleasant surprises and shocks, and from time to time they’re big. Human beings don’t come with perfectly functioning crystal balls in their heads, and learning curves are rarely as steep as we’d like because lessons from experience and history tend to be excruciatingly difficult to draw. Hindsight can be superb, but says nothing about clairvoyance. Governments, moreover, although indispensable in such situations, are often not the most efficient actors, and in crises, they’re often forced to scramble.

That’s not to say that the President may not pay a political price for his coronavirus record, or that Americans don’t have a right to be frustrated with his actions to date, much less that he deserves reelection on any grounds. Indeed,  here’s a great suggestion for the kind of speech Mr. Trump should have made by now, and still should make – which urges him to use the virus crisis as an opportunity both to stimulate the economy and prepare better for future pandemics with major spending and other measures to bolster national health security.

But it is is to warn that none of President Trump’s critics or challengers can legitimately claim to have done better, let alone that they’ll act more effectively when the next black swan – biological or not -flies into our lives.

Im-Politic: I Stutter and I Know That’s Not Biden’s Only Gaffe Problem

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Biden, campaigns, cognitive decline, election 2020, Hollins Communications Research Institute, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Ronald A. Webster, stuttering

Here at RealityChek I’ve avoided writing about myself for three main reasons. First, I can’t imagine that my life and experiences are remotely as interesting to others as they are to me. Second, they’re almost never relevant to the public policy issues on which I’d rather focus. And third, when they are, viewing them through a personal lens unavoidably entails using firsthand anecdotes to make a case – which holds no analytical water whatever.

Yet over the last few months, and especially over the last few days, it seems, the personal and political have intersected in a way that I believe does enable me to make a valid point about a headline issue. That’s the matter of whether Joe Biden’s verbal gaffes indicate “cognitive decline,” or whether they simply show that he’s dealing with a lifelong stutter.

The difference of course matters greatly. After all, if the former is the case, then it’s legitimate to wonder whether the 77-year old former Vice President and frontrunner for this year’s Democratic presidential nomination can hold up under the rigors of a general election campaign and, more important, the pressures of the world’s most important job. If the latter, then there’s no reason to suppose that Biden isn’t up to the task mentally. For there’s absolutely no intrinsic relationship between stuttering and intelligence or mental health.

To the former Vice President and long-time Senator’s credit, he’s never tried to excuse these episodes – or any from years past – as a speech impediment. But some of his supporters (or at least opponents of President Trump) have.

My take? Biden’s control over his stutter has faltered from time to time, and explains some of his stumbles and other unusual speech patterns. But many of the instances that have generated concern have nothing to do with a pure speech disorder. Indeed, they at least appear to represent moments of genuine confusion and/or memory lapses often characteristic of advanced age.

And here’s where the personal comes in: My confidence in the above conclusions reflects my own experience as a lifelong stutterer. Not that I’m an accredited expert in speech pathology or gerontology or any aspect of brain science. But I am (way too) intimately familiar with an inability to voice the words I want to say, and with the various tactics stutterers use to try to make their thoughts heard.

Moreover, because I’ve been lucky enough to have received treatment from an outstanding stuttering therapy program developed and run for decades by Ph.D. speech pathologist Ronald A. Webster, I’ve made long-time friendships with literally dozens of fellow stutterers and become acquainted to varying degrees with literally hundreds more. By sharing experiences with them and observing them deal with their own stutters first-hand, like many other stutterers, I’ve learned to identify whether someone is simply encountering the kind of speech disfluency that everyone faces every now and then, and whether they’re dealing with a genuine stuttering problem.

In addition, thanks to listening to many hours of Webster classroom talks and more hours of personal discussions, I’ve learned that the best research in the field (essentially Webster’s own) makes clear that stuttering ultimately represents malfunctions in an individual’s anatomical speech mechanism (consisting mainly of the lips, tongue, vocal folds, and abdomen) that reveal nothing about mental faculties.

(Some more truth in advertising: I have never found any aspect of Biden’s record in public life the slightest big impressive, and cannot imagine voting for him this fall.)

There’s little doubt that chronic stuttering can affect one’s frame of mind, and that it’s worsened by factors like stress and fatigue. But the roots are physical – and as Webster and his program have demonstrated, fluency can be dramatically improved through the kind of muscle-memory-strengthening practice that’s a proven way to enhance all manner of physical skills.

The stress and fatigue points are especially important because they surely explain some kinds of Biden difficulties that seem to be getting more common – specifically, repetitions of certain words or initial sounds of words, and unusual word choices. Here’s why:

Both behaviors amount to ways in which stutterers try to deal with whatever difficulties they’re facing at the moment. The repetitions generally represent efforts to generate enough momentum to power or zoom through the sound in question, or through the next word (which is anticipated to cause a problem). The unusual word choices are examples of “word substitution” – finding a word that’s expected to be easier to pronounce than the one the speaker was originally planning to use, either because he or she is worried about the repetition thing, or because they fear they won’t be able to voice even the initial sound of that word. (Even stranger – stutterers can also worry about words coming further down the verbal road.)

Because I’ve got a decent vocabulary, I’ve gotten pretty skilled at the kind of word substitution that’s difficult even for many other stutterers to detect (though fortunately, because I have learned to produce more fluent speech, I don’t have to use this ploy often any more). But even for someone with such advantages, word substitution can be challenging especially because in order to maintain a reasonably normal speech flow, very rapid decisions are needed. And feelings of slight panic, or memories of past panic and failed word substitution efforts, are never far out of mind.

Moreover – and finally, we get to the fatigue and stress angles – all of these responses are much more difficult to execute for stutterers who are tired and.or stressed, for reasons that should be obvious. What should also be obvious – 77-year olds tend to tire more often than younger folks, and the problem almost never gets better. (I’m 66 and certainly don’t have the energy I had at 56 or even 60. And sometimes it affect my speech.)

Political campaigns, moreover, can get pretty stressful, especially for office-seekers who aren’t killing it. And elderly political candidates can therefore face special problems. So although these Biden difficulties don’t necessarily demonstrate cognitive decline, they do point to emerging age-related issues that are matters of genuine concern.

One prime example of a Biden stumble that I believe has been described mistakenly as a moment of debility: his troubles speaking about healthcare issues during the Democratic debate in Detroit last July. Then, when it was imperative that he rebound from faring poorly in a previous event, and live up to his then-frontrunner status, his speech deteriorated significantly after a strong start.

The story is very different, however, when it comes to Biden episodes like declaring that mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio took place in Houston and Michigan; or claiming that he visited survivors of the Parkland, Florida shootings before the tragedy took place, along with assuming he was still Vice President in 2018. (Keep in mind that gun violence has been a special Biden interest.) Nor does stuttering explain confusing the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher both with a much more recent successor (Theresa May) – not to mention German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Ditto for babbling about the authorization of U.S. military force in the Middle East. (Keep in mind: He’s supposed to be a foreign policy expert.) 

It’s similarly tough to square stuttering claims with mistaking New Hampshire for Vermont and Nevada with New Hampshire and Iowa for Ohio, or calling Fox News anchor Chris Wallace “Chuck,” or calling “Super Tuesday” “Super Thursday,” or telling voters this year that he’s running for the Senate, or claiming that the Democrats can win back the House of Representative this year (they already hold it), or boasting that his campaign “chooses truth over facts.”  (For the cites, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)  

A few of these can be written off to the kind of mixups heard from time to time from people of every age. But not all of them. Moreover, these supposed gaffes are qualitatively different from the type for which Biden has long been known – which have almost always involved indiscretions. 

And a particularly revealing sign that age is producing both more of these misstatements and even more stuttering (due to the fatigue and/or stress factors): In a long Atlantic piece on Biden’s speech (cited above and written, interestingly, by a reporter who stutters himself), the former Vice President said,

“he hasn’t felt himself caught in a traditional stutter in several decades. ‘I mean, I can’t remember a time where I’ve ever worried before a crowd of 80,000 people or 800 people or 80 people—I haven’t had that feeling of dread since, I guess, speech class in college.’”

These Biden problems by no means disqualify him for the Presidency. Even if I’m right about growing signs of cognitive decline, they may stabilize, or worsen very slowly. But they also may accelerate. And however difficult this year’s Democratic primaries have been for Biden, the general election will surely be far worse. (See this article on the physical and emotional strains suffered by recent White House hopefuls.)

So obviously, these issues need to be discussed openly and frankly – and of course for all the candidates. For now that above all mean that not all of Biden’s lapses should be written off as “simple” stutter.

Im-Politic: The Washington Post Goes All Fake News on Trump, Biden, and the UN

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Anne Gearan, Ashley Parker, Biden, election 2020, General Assembly, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Mainstream Media, Philip Rucker, Trump, Ukraine, UN, United Nations, Washington Post

On Sunday, I wrote about an Associated Press article dealing extensively with manufacturing that I said might not have been Fake News, but sure came close. Today, the Washington Post published an article about President Trump’s activities at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City that unquestionably deserves that label.

The theme of the article was made clear by the headline: “Trump uses U.N. meeting to wage domestic political attack on Biden.” Sounds pretty disgraceful, right? I mean, after all, every September the world’s leaders gather for this event, and address weighty issues ranging from threats to peace to climate change (a big focus this year). And here comes this notoriously egomaniacal and selfish boor of an Oval Office occupant determined to ignore his responsibilities as steward of the national interest and global leader – and the tradition of domestic politics stopping at the water’s edge. Instead, all he cared about was using this solemn conclave to slime former Vice President Joe Biden, a likely opponent during the next presidential election campaign.

As often not the case these days, moreover, the article itself faithfully reflected the header. According to authors Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker, and Ashley Parker, the President “turned” the General Assembly, “where foreign leaders converged to confront climate change and other global pandemics, into the backdrop for an assault on a domestic political opponent.”

They continued: “Trump used his meetings with heads of state to flay Biden, celebrate his personal attorney’s altercations and tend to his media feuds.”

For good measure, they wrote that Mr. Trump “seemed to revel in the opportunity to kick up dust around Biden, who has led Trump in virtually every public poll for several months.”

In other words, could the President be more of a reckless lout?

Readers were also told that participants in the global gathering were “baffled by the sudden interjection of a complex Trump scandal that they found mystifying.” And the authors dutifully quoted (globalist) “experts” to validate their emphasis on the President’s allegedly alarming weirdness:

“‘It puts foreign leaders in a difficult if not impossible position,’ said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. ‘How do you manage this complicated person who doesn’t play the game by the rules, and how do you somehow protect this important relationship? Everybody’s a bit wary.’

“Victoria Holt, managing director at the Henry L. Stimson Center, said the arcane details of the Ukraine story and its overlap with U.S. politics are largely beside the point for other leaders here. ‘I’m sure they are scratching their heads,” she said. “The United States is supposed to be leading on major issues” such as climate change.’”

Except a glancing reference in its paragraph completely destroyed the alarming premise of the article. As the authors briefly noted, the controversy over Mr. Trump’s own and the Biden family’s dealings with political leaders and oligarchs from Ukraine “hung over Trump’s first day at the annual U.N. meeting, beginning with a volley of shouted questions from journalists….”

Another unintentionally revealing observation: “Trump stayed away from the Ukraine topic in his only major prepared remarks of the day….”

That is, it wasn’t Mr. Trump who injected domestic politics into this year’s General Assembly and its work. It was journalists like the Post reporters. (Unless you attach lots of importance to the fact that the President tweeted about the subject beforehand – which the Post reporters clearly didn’t, since they devoted no other passages to it.) Talk about blaming the victim.

The Washington Post, of course, is the newspaper that throughout the Trump administration has been sanctimoniously warning that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” As so often the case, though, it’s ignored how shamefully biased reporting by democracy’s supposedly impartial watchdogs represent an equally dangerous threat.

Im-Politic: Biden’s Fake History on Fighting Russia’s Political Interference in Europe

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Alliance for Securing Democracy, Biden, Bill Kristol, Eastern Europe, election 2016, election interference, Europe, German Marshall Fund, Im-Politic, John Podesta, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, Obama, Putin, Russia, Trump, vital interests, Western Europe

Maybe Joe Biden’s main problem isn’t simply that he’s “gaffe-prone” – at least not nowadays, as he again seeks the Democratic nomination for President. Maybe the former Vice President’s main problem is that he’s suffering major memory loss – and I mean major memory loss. Either that, or his recollection of how the Obama administration in which he served responded to Russian political subversion in Europe reveals a truth-telling problem comparable to the one widely believed displayed by President Trump.

How else can the following recent Biden statement be explained, in a CNN interview in which he charged that Mr. Trump’s reelection would wind up destroying the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – America’s most important post-World War II security alliance:

“Why did we set up NATO…? So no one nation could abuse the power in the region in Europe, would suck us in the way they did in World War I and World War II. It’s being crushed.

“Look at what’s happened with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. While he — while Putin is trying to undo our elections, he is undoing elections in — in Europe. Look what’s happened in Hungary. Look what’s happened in Poland. Look what’s happened in — look what’s happening. You think that would have happened on my watch or Barack [Obama]’s watch? You can’t answer that, but I promise you it wouldn’t have, and it didn’t.”

Leave aside for now the massively inconvenient truth that the Obama-Biden watch was exactly when Putin most recently tried to “undo” (bizarro phrasing, I know) a U.S. election. Leave aside also the incoherence of the claim that “You can’t answer that, but I promise you it wouldn’t have, and it didn’t.”

Because even if Biden is only referring to Russian interference with politics in Europe, his statement ignores literally dozens of such instances and campaigns during his White House years. Abundant evidence comes from the Alliance for Securing Democracy – a research organization housed in the German Marshall Fund – a quintessentially globalist, Washington, D.C.-based think tank. For good measure, the Alliance’s “Advisory Council” contains not only the usual crew of bipartisan Washington foreign policy Blob hangers-on from previous globalist administrations, but virulent Trump-haters like long-time neoconservative stalwart Bill Kristol, as well as John Podesta, who chaired Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential run in 2016. So clearly, this source has no interest in putting out anything that will make Mr. Trump look good relative to political rivals.

The Alliance maintains a handy-dandy interactive search engine called the “Authoritarian Interference Tracker,” which makes it easy to identify political subversion efforts by a wide range of countries in a wide range of countries. And here’s just a small sample of what comes up when the controls are set for the Obama years:

>2008 – present: “In 2008, the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, a pro-Russia think tank headed by former Duma deputy Natlaya Norchnitskaya, opened in Paris. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, ‘the organization toes a blatantly pro-Kremlin line.’ The Institute’s Director of Studies…told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that its financing comes from ‘the Foundation for Historical Outlook in Moscow, which in turn is financed by unspecified private Russian companies.’”

>2008-2017: “According to the [British newspaper] The Guardian, between 2008 and 2017, Rossotrudnichnestvo, a Russian government-organized non-governmental organization (GONGO) worked with state-sponsored media outlet TASS and Russian intelligence agencies as part of a nearly decade-long influence effort that sought to distance Macedonia from the EU [European Union] and N NATO and to prevent the success of the Macedonian name change referendum.”

>2009-2011: “According to the Czech Security Information Service’s (BIS) annual reports for 2009 and 2010, Russian intelligence services were actively involved in programs to build closer relations with the Russian expatriate community in the Czech Republic as a way to expand influence in the country. These programs specifically targeted academic and intellectual elites as well as students, according to BIS.”

>2010-2014: “According to Reuters, between 2010 and 2014, the Russian government offered Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash lucrative business deals in exchange for Firtash’s political support in Ukraine. Firtash and his companies received large loans and lucrative gas contracts from Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom at significantly discounted prices. Firtash’s companies would then sell gas to the Ukrainian government at a high price and pocket the difference. Firtash used his domestic political influence in Ukraine to support Russian government-backed presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych’s successful 2010 campaign for the presidency. According to Reuters, the Russian government instructed Firtash to ensure Ukraine’s position in Russia’s sphere of influence.”

Here are some abbreviated descriptions of other such incidents:

>2010-2011: “Funds from Russian money-laundering scheme funneled to Latvian political party.”

>2010: “Russian government-connected oligarch Vladimir Yakunin finances pro-Russian Estonian political party.”

>2010-2014: “Emails expose Greek political party Syriza’s ties to Russian-connected actors.”

>2013: “Russian money-laundering ring cycles money through Polish, pro-Russia think tank.”

>2013: Bulgaria’s “Pro-Russian Ataka party reportedly receives funding from the Russian embassy.”

>2013: “Russian government-connected oligarch Vladimir Yakunin launches foundation in Geneva [Switzerland]. The foundation allegedly “is part of a network of organizations promoting an authoritarian and Eurasianist model of thought to counter the current liberal-democratic world order.”

>2014: A “new Russian Orthodox Church in Skopje [Macedonia] raised concerns among Macedonian officials that ‘Russia may be trying to use the Orthodox Church to its Russian interests in Macedonia,’ according to” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

>2014-present: “Emails reveal Russian government-connected oligarch funded network of pro-Russia fringe political groups in Eastern Europe.”

>2014: “French far-right party National Rally, formerly Front National…receives loan from bank ‘with links to the Kremlin.’”

>2015: “Russian government activist founds pro-Russia political party” in Poland.

>2016-17: “Czech intelligence service reports on Russian covert political influence campaign in annual report.”

My point here certainly isn’t to sound the alarm about all this Russian political activity, especially in Eastern Europe – which, as I’ve written repeatedly (see, e.g., here), has long been part of Russia’s sphere of influence, has never been defined as a vital U.S. interest, and where America’s options for responding effectively are limited at best. Nor is my point to vouch for the accuracy of every single one of the above claims, or others like it in the database. And I certainly don’t believe that the above information represents any evidence that Russian interference put Mr. Trump over the top in 2016.

Instead, the point is to show that, despite Biden’s boasts, the kind of Russian activities about which he’s alarmed plainly took place during the Obama years in spades (and have been reported by many Mainstream Media sources, as the database makes clear), they occurred in both Eastern and in (more important to the United States) Western Europe, and that Washington’s responses evidently did little to stop or even curb them.

Indeed, the record shows that, at least when it comes to Biden’s record of fighting the Russian subversion in Europe that he considers a mortal threat to America, by his own standards, he deserves the Trump-ian label of “Sleepy Joe.” As in asleep at the switch.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why the Iran Deal (So Far) Worries Me

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allies, Biden, European Union, Iran, Iran deal, Iran talks, Kerry, Middle East, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, sanctions, Saudi Arabia, Shiites, State Department, Sunnis, Susan Rice

I still haven’t yet examined all the statements made by participants about the nuclear weapons deal announced yesterday by the United States, five other major world powers, the European Union, and Iran. So I can’t comment on all of the possible loopholes created by the agreement, which include differing interpretations of its provisions by the signatories (not to mention the inevitable discrepancies among wording in different languages, plus any that might be deliberately created by the various governments involved). In fact, as far as I can tell, no actual agreement text has been made public by the Obama administration. The only official U.S. document I’ve seen is this description posted on the White House website.

So like most of us, I’m somewhat hamstrung in evaluating the accord – which, to complicate matters further, is a work in progress, that everyone acknowledges leaves many critical details up in the air. Further, I’m no expert in the technology involved in producing nuclear weapons and peaceful nuclear energy.

All the same, what I know of the deal worries me as much today as it did the day before its unveiling. My main – non-technical – concerns:

>Iran is an awfully big country – the world’s 18^th largest. At more than 636,000 square miles, it’s just under 18 percent the size of the United States, and slightly less than 2.5 times bigger than Texas. A country that big will contain a great many hiding places, and will be challenging for the international community to monitor.

>All of the strategic conditions that, at least in principle, have been driving the Iranians to develop so many of the capabilities for building nuclear weapons remain firmly in place. Their theocracy represents a hated minority sect located in a region demographically dominated by its main theological rivals – which include not only large countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but unspeakably violent terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and its various offshoots.

At least as important, Iran has used force to challenge the United States, which has in recent years toppled adversary regimes in Iraq and Libya, and has worked hard to oust the Assad dictatorship in Syria. Even a small nuclear arsenal would practically ensure the Iranian regime’s indefinite survival against its most powerful foreign threat by far.

And don’t forget – Iran’s neighborhood is overwhelmingly likely to remain hostile and dangerous long after the end of the various fixed-term provisions envisioned by the framework.  Therefore, going nuclear could still just as strongly appeal even to a future Iranian regime much more moderate than today’s.

>America’s foreign policy team doesn’t even deserve to be called the JV. Secretary of State Kerry was known during his Senate career as a “showhorse,” not a “workhorse.” And even with a strong legislative record on Capitol Hill, there is no reason to consider him anywhere near a match for Iranian negotiators. Like Vice President Biden, he’s traveled extensively, and accumulated much face time with foreign leaders. Whether either of them has learned anything useful from these experiences is not entirely clear. As for national security advisor Susan Rice, she’s simply a climber devoid of any substantive accomplishment.  Her career has been nothing more than a monument to over-promotion and possibly racial tokenism. And then there’s the president himself, who of course, had amassed only a half a Senate term’s worth of national policy-making experience before winning the White House in 2008.

Has foreign policy experience been any guarantee of good results for the United States? Hardly. It was the “best and the brightest,” after all, who led the nation into Vietnam and other debacles. What’s worrisome about the current administration is that it’s a combination of down-the-line (liberal) establishment thinkers completely lacking in any meaningful private sector or other real-world experience, and the wisdom and judgment they usually nurture.

>As has widely been noted, the Obama administration is heavily invested in Iran deal’s success for many reasons. Both the president and Kerry clearly have the legacy thing on their minds – both in the positive sense of achieving an historic and enduring breakthrough, and in the negative sense of burnishing records that look decidedly bleak so far. How enthusiastic will the president and his aides be to conclude that Iran is cheating? In fact, between now and the next (June 30) deadline, how plausible is it that they’ll hold fast on the framework’s decisive conditions when firmness could blow up an enterprise on which they’ve worked so hard for so long?  

Add to these influences – to which all politicians, and other human beings, are subject – the strong tendency of the State Department, the diplomatic establishment, and their Mainstream Media enablers to value perpetuating diplomatic “processes” at least as much as achieving results. Just think of how the endless, on-and-off Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are continually described. Not that it’s out of bounds to believe that “talking is better than fighting.” But time is not necessarily America’s friend here – both because of Israeli threats to solve the problem militarily, and because of the related likelihood of continuing Iranian progress toward weapon-ization.

>America’s allies in keeping Iran nuclear weapons-free are hardly known for steadfastness. The European Union and most of its individual members have been ambivalent enough about responding to Russia’s expansionism over the last year – and that’s a threat in their own neighborhood. Economics looks like the most powerful explanation. The continent is stagnating economically, and even though Russia is no giant on the global economic stage, it’s been a major market, and fuel supplier, for many European countries – notably Germany. Growth-starved European economies are bound to be just as tempted by potential customers in Iran. As a result, it’s not just President Obama who could be reluctant to accuse Tehran of cheating. Many allies could be equally unwilling. Which means that, barring the most frightening and flagrant examples of Iranian cheating on a final nuclear agreement, the threat of promptly and completely reimposing sanctions to punish agreement violations looks ominously empty. 

>Finally, the administration’s explanation of why Iran has come this far literally sounds too good to be true, especially given the existential advantages Tehran would create for itself by going nuclear. As Mr. Obama has made clear, he doesn’t believe that sanctions possible in current circumstances by themselves can change Iran’s nuclear plans. He has repeatedly stated that using force in the Middle East has usually been a disastrous mistake for the United States in recent years. Yet he credits current sanctions with, first, seriously committing Iran into a diplomatic exercise aimed expressly at eliminating any nuclear option and, second, with producing Iran’s signature onto a framework fully capable (as the president sees it) of achieving this epochal objective.

I readily concede that the sanctions have hurt Iran economically. Yet as a friend reminded me a few weeks ago, it’s a country for which levels of economic privation unknown to Americans are still a warm memory. The population’s ability to endure further hardships shouldn’t be underestimated – especially considering the national power it could bring and the pride it could foster. Indeed, Russia may be teaching Washington a lesson in economic resilience right now.

But let’s close on an encouraging note. The Wall Street Journal today reported that, as the Iran talks have proceeded, the Obama Pentagon has been upgrading its biggest bunker buster bombs – weapons that can be used in principle to destroy even heavily protected Iran nuclear facilities. Perhaps despite much evidence to the contrary, when administration officials keep saying that they’re not operating in a perfect world, they really do know it.

Im-Politic: Budget Strengthens Case that Obama’s Border Security Strategy isn’t Serious

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Biden, border security, budget, CAFTA, Central America, Colombia, foreign aid, George W. Bush, Im-Politic, Immigration, Obama, Plan Colombia, Ronald Reagan

With immigration and Department of Homeland Security funding at the center of a looming budget showdown between President Obama and Congress’ Republican leaders, it’s surely useful to look over the new Obama budget and see what it actually proposes on this front. And it’s hard to avoid concluding that the president’s claimed determination to bolster border security shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Let’s leave aside Mr. Obama’s “executive amnesty” move last fall, which can only strengthen the already powerful policy magnet that’s been luring illegal immigrants to the United States for so long. Yes, the president did propose to increase border security funding by nearly 25 percent over current funding levels – to just under $374 million. But the week before the official budget request was unveiled, the administration dropped a powerful hint that it doesn’t expect any of these new resources to do much good. Why else would the White House have touted so prominently – in a New York Times op-ed by the Vice President – its decision to attack the proverbial root causes of last year’s Central American immigration surge by spending $1 billion to promote reform in the region?

The administration’s ostensible belief that the best way to deal with the international problems facing the United States is to manipulate hard-to-contol revents abroad is, as I’ve written, a time-honored tenet of American foreign policy. With the huge but long-ago exceptions of post-World War II aid to Western Europe and Japan, this strategy has also failed so completely in the closely related foreign aid and trade spheres that it deserves the label delusional. Moreover, as I’ve also written, this approach becomes absolutely unforgivable upon realizing the unique geopolitical advantages enjoyed by the United States that make much easier-to-control and more promising domestic solutions – like serious border security efforts, in this case – vastly superior.

After all, it’s not as if the United States hasn’t tried promoting reform in Central America before. During the Cold War, President Reagan launched a “Caribbean Basin Initiative” aimed at preventing the rise of “new Cubas” and a repeat of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. In 2005, Congress passed President George W. Bush’s Central America Free Trade Agreement, which was hyped in part as an immigration control measure. Vice President Biden’s own new article makes clear that substantial American aid to the region has been continuing. Yet he admits that the region’s countries are still held back by “inadequate education, institutional corruption, rampant crime and a lack of investment….”

Nor does Mr. Biden stop there in knee-capping his apparent belief that yet more money is the cure for most of what ails Central America. He adds that Central American countries and their economies still lack “clear rules and regulations; protections for investors; courts that can be trusted to adjudicate disputes fairly; serious efforts to root out corruption; protections for intellectual property; and transparency to ensure that international assistance is spent accountably and effectively.” Who can reasonably doubt, therefore, that what’s fundamentally crippling the region after all this time is not a lack of resources (especially considering how tiny these nations are) but a dysfunctional political culture. And why on earth does the Vice President suggest that this disease can be cured with more “training”?

Mr. Biden at least does provide some concrete answers – mainly, the U.S.-assisted transformation of the much larger nation of Colombia. There’s no doubt that progress has been made in that strife-torn country on many fronts. According to World Bank data, economic growth has been trending up and the poverty rate is declining. At the same time, though down from its peak at the turn of the century, illicit drug production in the country has now stabilized, and a final peace agreement to end Colombia’s 30-year insurgency remains elusive. (Indeed, casualties continue.) Moreover, although this progress has been made at the cost of $9 billion from American taxpayers, the Obama administration is still asking Congress for nearly $300 million more in annual aid in its new budget. More ominously, the end of a long global boom in raw materials is already imposing major economic pain throughout Latin America, which has relied on strong commodity exports for much of its recent growth. So expect those root socio-economic roots of mass emigration to start growing again all over the region.

A president serious about sensible immigration reform would recognize what a losing battle the nation has been fighting in order to curb illegal migrant inflows at their sources. Mr. Obama’s continued hype of these utopian proposals greatly strengthens the case that he’s anything but that president.