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On May 6, 2023, Queen Consort Camilla will be crowned as Queen.
With that in mind, my weekday posts until then will be a retrospective of Queen Elizabeth II.
Family history
It is useful and interesting to look back on how the British had a succession of German monarchs dating back to George I.
On June 24, 2015, The Telegraph featured an article, ‘How German is the Queen?’
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Many Britons say we have a German monarchy, but our ties with that part of Europe and others date back to the Dark Ages:
It is, in fact, worth remembering that the word “English” is derived from the Angles, of Anglo-Saxon fame. When the Romans cleared out of Britain in AD 410, a range of German, Danish, and Dutch tribes that we sloppily call the Anglo-Saxons moved in from across the Whale Road. That’s not forgetting the Vikings either, who brought Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish blood to swathes of Britain. So, to be honest, if we scrutinise the Royal Family’s connections with the Fatherland, we should take a long look at our own, too, and acknowledge that this country has had the most profound and close genetic and cultural ties with the people of Germany and Scandinavia for over 1,500 years.
In 1701:
The Protestant King William III has no direct heirs, and his crown could soon pass to a Catholic. To prevent this, Parliament passes the Act of Settlement, locking them out of the succession.
In 1714:
William’s sister-in-law Queen Anne dies without children. The crown skips over 56 of her close Catholic relations to rest on George Ludwig, ruler of the German state of Hanover. He speaks very little English and relies on his ministers to run Britain for him.
In 1761:
George III takes the throne. He is still a Hanoverian, but unlike his father and grandfather he was born in London and speaks English as a first language.
In 1819:
A succession crisis prompts George III’s fourth son Edward to marry the princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Their daughter, Victoria, will end up Queen – and marry her German cousin Albert.
In 1917:
Victoria’s line continues as the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But the First World War – and the Russian revolution – call for a royal rebrand. George V renames it the House of Windsor.
Here’s how it happened:
When World War One bred increasing anti-German sentiment in Britain, astute observers noted that Kaiser Bill was Queen Victoria’s grandson and our King George V’s first cousin. In recognition of the delicacy of the position, George V changed the name of his royal house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, after the castle. At the same time, he also took the modern step of adopting Windsor as a surname for his family.
Thirty years later, in 1947, the future Queen married Prince Philip:
Philip is a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. But, with the Second World War fresh in Britain’s memory, he abandons these titles before his marriage.
When she acceded the throne in 1952:
Queen Elizabeth II chose to keep the name Windsor, and in 1960 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh announced that they wanted their descendants who do not have an HRH title to be Mountbatten-Windsor. (Mountbatten is the Duke of Edinburgh’s adopted name. His German-Danish-Greek royal lines are Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glūcksburg on his father’s side, and Battenberg on his mother’s.)
The Royal Family still follow German customs at Christmas:
The Royal Family still opens its presents on Christmas Eve, following the German tradition, which Prince Albert was particularly keen on following.
However, it is also important to point out that the Queen was also a direct descendant of Britain’s royal houses:
… there’s no point overstating it. The Queen is also directly descended from over a thousand years worth of Britain’s royal houses, including the Stuarts, Tudors, Plantagenets, Angevins, Normans, and Wessex.
That means King Charles is, too.
Politics
The Queen was acquainted with 15 Prime Ministers during her reign. Liz Truss was the last.
A 2019 Tatler retrospective shows her pictured with several of them, beginning with Sir Winston Churchill. You won’t want to miss the photographs, which end with Boris Johnson. How time changed through the decades.
Here is a video of the Queen and other members of the Royal Family at a G7 drinks reception in 1991. At that time, John Major was Prime Minister and George H W Bush was president. However, other former Prime Ministers also attended:
The video is known for a quip that the Queen made to Sir Edward ‘Ted’ Heath (1970-1974), who is not held in the highest esteem among Britons who were around in the 1970s:
Guido Fawkes gives us the quote (emphasis his):
One of the highlights of the clip is the Queen saying what we all knew directly to Ted Heath’s face; when the former PM mentioned he’d been to Baghdad the Queen jokingly responds, “I know you did, you’re expendable”. The Queen of diplomacy…
The Queen was also astute in other political matters, such as economic crises. The monarch goes through a red box every day with updates on national and world affairs.
On April 13, 2020, The Express told us about her consternation at the 2008 banking crisis:
… unearthed reports shed light on how Queen Elizabeth II reacted to the turmoil on the international markets twelve years ago.
According to a 2008 report by the Telegraph, during a briefing by academics at the London School of Economics (LSE), Her Majesty asked: “Why did nobody notice it?”
Professor Luis Garicano, director of research at the LSE’s management department, had explained the origins and effects of the credit crisis when she opened the £71 million New Academic Building.
The Queen then described the turbulence on the markets as “awful”.
Prof Garicano said: “She was asking me if these things were so large how come everyone missed it.”
He told the Queen: “At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing” …
The Queen’s investments, largely in British blue chip companies, broadly tracked the market, resulting in a 25 percent fall in her portfolio’s value.
Philip Beresford, compiler of The Rich List, told the publication: “I would think she will have taken an enormous hit.
“Though maybe not as much as people who did racy investments in shares.”
On April 21, 2019, the Queen celebrated her 93rd birthday and became the longest reigning British monarch and longest-serving current head of state in the world at the time:
At the beginning of the month, the Conservative government was having an exceedingly difficult time getting Brexit legislation through Parliament.
Lord James of Blackheath CBE wanted the Queen to step in and resolve the issue (emphases in the original):
The way forward from this is to:-
1. Make an immediate appeal to the United Nations making reference to a potential breach of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaty Making 1969 under Article 46.1, with a view to seeking an adjudication that the EU is attempting to force us to agree a treaty based upon fundamentally unconstitutional arrangements unacceptable to the British Crown …
2. If the application could be supported by Her Majesty, it would add significant force. This application to the UN could surely be assembled by a Government legal team within a single working day and be ready to be presented by the UK’s Ambassador to the UN on behalf of Her Majesty within 48 hours …
4 The dire constitutional consequences of remaining will very likely force an abdication by the Monarch. She would either have to accept a state of perjury or maintain the Crown’s honour by abdication. Her oaths of office will have become entirely corrupted such that no successor could undertake them, thus the total demise of the Crown is a very real and inherent risk in remaining.
Failure to terminate the membership of the European Union will continue to lead us all deeper into a treasonous liability arising from placing our governance subject to a foreign Potentate. That Potentate is unelected by the UK’s electorate, is unaccountable to them and irremovable by them.
This is an absolute affront to the Dignity and Majesty of the Crown. It could foreshadow the total demise of the Monarchy.
When Brexit is finally done, Parliament must be shown to have discharged its absolute responsibility not to have reduced its own omnipotence.
However, a spokesman for Her Majesty said that she would not become involved in the Brexit rows:
One year later, on the evening of Sunday, April 5, 2020, the Queen made the rare move of addressing the nation outside of her Christmas speech. She spoke to us about the pandemic:
The nation was in its first-ever lockdown and Her Majesty gave us a short televised message about keeping our chins up, telling us that we would meet again, echoing Dame Vera’s Second World War hit song:
The ratings were massive:
Her address even made the main French news channel BFMTV:
That evening, just after the Queen’s broadcast ended, Boris Johnson entered St Thomas’ Hospital with coronavirus:
Admiration for the Queen went up by 30%. The Government’s ratings went up by 29%:
The Queen also entertained American presidents.
She welcomed the Obamas twice, once in 2011 and again in 2016.
On April 22, 2016, The Mail reported:
Barack Obama paid a heartfelt tribute to the Queen today, calling her ‘a real jewel to the world’ and ‘one of my favourite people’ after he and his wife Michelle had an intimate lunch with Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Speaking alongside David Cameron at a Press conference in London, the US President took the opportunity to praise the Queen on the occasion of her 90th birthday – and also joked about the ‘smooth ride’ he and Mrs Obama had when Prince Philip drove them in his Range Rover.
Mr Obama, who is making his last trip to Britain as President, shared a meal with the Queen at Windsor Castle before his summit with the Prime Minister.
He came equipped with a gift – an album of photos showing the Queen meeting various Presidents – which he handed over shortly after the Duke took the role of his chauffeur, driving both couples 400 yards from their helicopter landing site to the door of the castle.
Three years later, it was Donald Trump’s turn for a State Visit:
The Express reported:
The Buckingham Palace event will be held as Britain and the US mark 75 years since D-Day.
US President Trump and his wife Melania will be guests of the Queen during a three-day visit, beginning on June 3.
Here is a photo of President Trump inspecting the troops at Windsor Castle with the Queen following behind:
Protocol
Although the Queen was a stickler for protocol, there were times when she relented.
Once was when Prince Charles insisted that Princess Diana’s body be flown home on the Royal jet.
In 2021, the story emerged of the Queen’s reason for denying it — they were divorced — then giving in to her son on August 31, 1997. The Express reported:
After Diana’s death in Paris, the Prince of Wales reportedly had an argument with the Queen about how his ex-wife’s body should be brought back to the UK. It has been reported that Prince Charles wanted to travel to Paris on the royal plane to bring Diana’s body home but the Queen initially disagreed. Richard Kay, a friend of Princess Diana, told the Channel 5 documentary, Diana: 7 Days That Shook the Windsors: “This was a surprising and brave move.
“He had no right to be there other than as the father of her sons.
“Charles wanted to take the royal flight to Paris but the Queen wouldn’t allow it.
“Charles fought harder for Diana than he had ever fought for her in her lifetime.”
His request to travel to Paris was initially refused.
However, Prince Charles did not want to back down and eventually, the Queen gave him permission to use the royal plane to bring back Diana.
When Prince Charles arrived in Paris Princess Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, was in the hospital.
Speaking on the Channel 5 documentary he said: “He was devastated.
“This was a woman he had loved in his own way.”
Princess Diana’s coffin was taken to the royal plane, which was waiting at an airport in Paris.
This was just 16 hours after she had died.
The royal plane then landed at RAF Northolt just outside of London.
In 2011, the Queen came up with a plan to entertain the Obamas, who were not invited to Prince William’s wedding. This was another story that did not see the light of day until several years later.
On April 14, 2020, The Express reported:
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge walked down the aisle more than eight years ago. It was April 29, 2011, and Kate Middleton made history when she said “I do” to Prince William at Westminster Abbey. The day was declared a public holiday in the UK, but because the Duke of Cambridge is not the first-in-line to the throne, the wedding was not a full state occasion, which meant many details of the big day were left down to the couple …
The guest list included more than 1,900 people and had its fair share of celebrities – including the Beckhams, Sir Elton John, the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and David Cameron.
However, there were two people missing from the guest list, who had been widely expected to attend.
The Queen personally invited 40 heads of state, who received gold-embossed invitations.
Former US President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, however, were not among them.
According to a 2011 report by the Daily Mail, the Government organised a state visit the following month – the first for a US President since 2002 – in return for Mr Obama not coming to the wedding.
The couple did not receive the invitation, the report claims, because of the added security costs involved with protecting the former President.
French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni also missed out and Prince Andrew’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson – the Duchess of York – was also snubbed.
The Queen had a wonderful way of working quietly with the utmost discretion. In her reign, no one dared leak anything from her office.
One hopes that will continue to be true with King Charles.
No Briton in any position of influence likes President Donald Trump.
That outlook extends to 99% of the British middle classes.
Throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I couldn’t help but think that, were President Trump still in the White House, Putin never would have dared to try it.
Finally, a British journalist has spoken up, saying the same thing.
Enter The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley, a never-Trumper, who wrote ‘Trump was right on Russia. He could have been its deterrent’, published on Monday, March 7.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
Donald Trump is like one of those Roman emperors who everyone hated at the time but historians later admit was prophetic …
… Putin took Crimea in 2014, under Obama, and invaded Ukraine in 2022, under Biden, so it’s reasonable to guess that this invasion wouldn’t have happened under Trump because it didn’t.
Trump says this is because he told Putin he was ready to drop a bomb on Moscow (“he sort of believed me like 5 per cent or 10 per cent – that’s all you need”), which is embarrassing if a lie and terrifying if true, but it does fit with the substantive record of his administration.
This is a good contrast between the Obama and Trump administrations:
Obama resisted sending lethal aid to Ukraine; Trump did so. From 2017-19, the Trump administration carried out 52 policy actions against Russia, ranging from sanctions to military action against Putin’s client Bashar al-Assad. When Assad used chemical weapons under Obama, America did not reply with force. When he tried the same trick under Trump, Trump hit a Syrian airbase with 59 tomahawk missiles. Separately, US commandos engaged directly with Syrian soldiers and Russian mercenaries. The details were classified but the President bragged about it at a fundraiser.
Trump was also right about NATO:
Trump called out the bad; he mocked the pretensions of the good. At the 2018 Nato summit, he demanded that his allies spend more on the military and pointed out that they were buying energy from the very country, Russia, that they expected America to protect them from. The West wasn’t just sanctimonious, it was cheap and greedy, and its decadence was sapping its deterrence.
Contrary to what Trump haters say, he wanted NATO members to stump up their fair share of cash to keep it going. The US was — and still is — overwhelmingly funding NATO, although Germany has been doing better. Britain is in second place, after the US.
Although labelled as an isolationist, Trump went to the troubled areas and leaders of the world no other US president wanted to get involved with. He attempted to broker a deal with North Korea. He succeeded in the Middle East, with influential Arab countries and Israel. For all of his bellicosity, which these leaders respected, he was a man of peace, not war.
Stanley says:
Trump, despite being labelled an isolationist, stood in a long line of Republicans who asserted the best way to avoid a fight is to signal to your opponent that if they lay one finger on you, you’ll break their nose.
Stanley mentions the parlous state of affairs with Biden and other Western leaders:
… does anyone doubt that Biden’s incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan encouraged Russia to try its luck? Weakness escalates tensions; politicians typically try to extricate themselves from the resulting crises through over-reaction – to bomb North Vietnam or surge troops in Iraq – and now there is talk of imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. If we don’t do it, says Zelensky, we are complicit in the murder of citizens. His anger is righteous. But the same Westerners who tell us Putin is insane and desperate can’t then advise us to risk nuclear war with him. When a house is on fire, we try to put it out: we don’t show our solidarity by burning down the whole street.
Stanley points out that Trump did not have time for idealism:
Another common notion is that the Ukrainians are defending the universal principle of “democracy”, when what they’re really fighting for is their homes. That’s a noble cause and we’re right to back them, but Trump regarded such ideological abstractions as artificial, expensive and best avoided. All nations are in competition, he would argue, regardless of political system, and their goals are shaped by history and geography. Russia wants, and will always want, a buffer zone to the West. Trump had no problem with that, in theory, and it was a mistake to needle Moscow with the threat of Nato extension.
On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Stanley rightly concludes:
Given the obvious blow to Pax Americana that the invasion has inflicted, it’s hard to imagine that a second-term Trump would have tolerated it.
Too right!
Personally, I doubt that Trump will run again in 2024, although he might.
If he doesn’t, I hope that the Republican candidate adopts a similar position of toughness.
It’s the only language some world leaders understand.
How could Joe Biden end US involvement in Afghanistan so disastrously?
He made the decision unilaterally, leaving the nation in peril over the weekend, with horrific images unfolding across world media.
That said, by the time the US and UK entered Afghanistan in 2001 to rid the world of Osama bin Laden and terror, everyone knew that any operation there would be futile. The Soviets even pulled out in 1989.
In fact, Afghanistan was always an intractable place, a law unto itself throughout history.
Alexander the Great’s tenuous hold
Military historian Jamie Hayes wrote a gripping history of an ancient and weak conquest of Afghanistan, ‘Unwilling To Stop And Unwilling To Go On: Alexander the Great’s Afghan Campaign’.
Until his invasion of Afghanistan, Alexander the Great believed himself invincible (emphases mine):
Alexander the Great was undeniably the greatest military commander in history. He took over his father’s throne at just 20 years old and immediately began a campaign the likes of which the world has never seen. He fought battle after battle, forging the largest empire on earth—all without losing even once. As he rampaged across Western and Central Asia, he founded countless cities that stand to this day. Millennia after his death, military geniuses like Napoleon painstakingly studied his battles to learn from his success. He unquestionably earned his moniker—Alexander was Great.
With such a spotless military record, Alexander’s conquests seem almost like they were…easy. With his elite troops and unmatched tactical genius, he started from the unassuming Macedon in Northern Greece and wrought the largest empire the world had ever seen, spanning from Greece in the West all the way to India in the East. But while his remarkable conquests in Persia and his far-reaching campaign to India take center stage in the history books, there’s an often-forgotten chapter of Alexander’s legacy that was anything but easy.
Alexander’s campaign in Afghanistan has become a mere footnote in his legacy—perhaps because it was the region where the great warlord saw the least success. Like many other military superpowers would after him, from the British Empire to Russia to NATO, Alexander waltzed into Afghanistan with all the confidence in the world, but he left battered and bruised, with very little to show for it. The region chewed him up and spat him out, and while he never explicitly “lost” any battles in his time there, it’s hard to so he won much of anything either. In fact, historians have claimed that the brutal Afghan campaign marked a shift in Alexander—from infallible Golden Boy to a cruel, paranoid shell of what he once was.
Alexander the Great wanted to topple a man named Bessus, the only obstacle preventing the military commander from becoming king of the Persian Empire. Bessus had toppled Darius III (Darius the Great), the self-styled King of Kings of the Persian Empire. Bessus gave himself a new name, Artaxerxes V.
Incensed, Alexander believed that Artaxarxes V was a usurper and set about to right that perceived wrong. For that, he had to follow the new king into Bactria, which is part of modern-day Afghanistan.
Bactria proved to be highly difficult with regard to the terrain and the men who lived there:
… the conflict here was slow and brutal—guerrilla warfare and sieges that left Alexander and his men exhausted and disillusioned. The frozen mountains and blazing deserts of the region were a far cry from the battlefields they were used to, and “glorious battle” seemed to be a thing of the past.
Alexander spent two agonizing years in Afghanistan, a major chunk of his historic campaign across western and central Asia. Granted, he didn’t leave the brutal landscape empty-handed: His primary goal in Bactria was to capture the traitorous Bessus, and he accomplished that. The rival claimant to the throne of the Persian Empire was dealt with, and Alexander could rightfully call himself the King of Kings. But the price he paid for that luxury was extreme.
Alexander’s most successful enemy in Afghanistan was the land itself. He lost far more men to the frigid peaks of the Hindu Kush or the scorching Northern Afghan desert than to any military resistance he faced. And when he did try to engage enemy forces, he found himself playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.
Once he left, his victory was short-lived:
Fighting in Afghanistan was a Sisyphean task, and Alexander’s grip on the region started slipping the moment that he left. While it was considered a part of the enormous Empire that he left after his death, control of the territory was tenuous at best. Revolts began almost the moment that Alexander dropped dead, and they seemingly never truly stopped. Rebellion was simply a reality for any foreign state that attempted to claim sovereignty over the unforgiving landscape.
Nonetheless, he left a legacy with the foundation of several cities, including Kandahar. He also found a wife there:
He founded many cities as he chased Bessus across the region, some of which still exist today. The most notable is the city of Kandahar, which he named Alexandria Arachosia (in fact, it’s believed that the name Kandahar itself is derived from the Persian name for Alexander, Iskandar). He also found his famous bride, the beautiful Roxana, whom he loved above all others, in the region. But while Alexander left his mark on Afghanistan, Afghanistan also left its mark on him.
Centuries later, the British tried to control the country as did the Soviets. Both failed.
That would not stop another British foray nor did it stop the Americans.
The Americans tried their best
I have only a few bookmarks on the Americans’ long-term mission in Afghanistan.
In October 2009, Michelle Malkin found two reports about a deadly attack on US troops. She wrote (emphasis in the original):
An incredible account from ABC News reporter Karen Russo, who notes that wounded troops refused to leave the battlefield this weekend during the deadly siege at Kamdeysh:
Flying into the besieged Afghan base during a nighttime firefight this weekend is a harrowing mix of overwhelming noise, stomach dropping maneuvers and shadows hurrying through the gloom.
When the chopper lifted off moments later with three wounded soldiers, it left behind others who were wounded but refused to be MEDEVACED out of the combat zone so they could return to fight with their buddies.
As fighting at two U.S. outposts raged on the ground this weekend, the MEDEVAC team at a nearby base waited – with both patience and frustration.
Eight soldiers, all from Fort Carson, were killed that night. Malkin cited another report (emphases mine):
In the deadliest day for Fort Carson since Vietnam, eight soldiers from the post’s 4th Brigade Combat Team died in Afghanistan on Saturday when insurgents attacked a pair of remote outposts in Nuristan province …
“My heart goes out to the families of those we have lost and to their fellow Soldiers who remained to finish this fight,” Col. Randy George, the brigade’s commander, said in a statement late Saturday. “This was a complex attack in a difficult area. Both the U.S. and Afghan Soldiers fought bravely together; I am extremely proud of their professionalism and bravery.”
Later that month, when Obama had been in the White House for less than a year, Global Research published ‘America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan’, which posited that the real reasons for being in Afghanistan were far removed from terror. Controlling the opium supply there was one real objective. The second was to maintain a bulwark against Russia and China.
Excerpts follow:
The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.
According even to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.
It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation, Karzai’s days could be ending as President.
The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they did in the 1980’s against the Russians.
The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it …
Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential contributions. China has the world’s most robust economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not recovered from the destructive end of the Soviet era and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era, still holds essential assets for the combination. Russia’s nuclear strike force and its military pose the only threat in the world today to US military dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold War. The Russian military elites never gave up that potential.
As well Russia holds the world’s largest treasure of natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed by China. The two powers are increasingly converging via a new organization they created in 2001 known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That includes as well as China and Russia, the largest Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of the geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is Russia and China.
Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.
In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.
The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.
Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.
Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.
Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.
By the time the article was posted, there was allegedly little terrorism threat left:
… the National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”
That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…
If we follow the statement to its logical consequence we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains of Afghanistan has nothing to do with “winning a war against terrorism.” Conveniently most media chooses to forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever existed, was a creation in the 1980’s of the CIA, who recruited and trained radical muslims from across the Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by Reagan’s CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a “new Vietnam” for the Soviet Union which would lead to a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time for a more honest debate from our political leaders about the true purpose of sending more young to die protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, terror remained a by-product of the American presence in Afghanistan. One Afghan-American visitor was so affected by his time there that he returned to launch terror attacks of his own in the Chelsea district of Manhattan as well as in a shore town in New Jersey. He was from Elizabeth, New Jersey.
On September 19, 2016, the Boston Herald reported that a friend of the suspect said that the visit to Afghanistan was ‘life-changing’:
A man who described himself as a childhood friend of the 28-year-old busted today in connection with this weekend’s New York-area bombings told the Herald the suspect made a life-changing trip to Afghanistan two years ago.
“At one point he left to go to Afghanistan, and two years ago he came back, popped up out of nowhere and he was real religious,” friend Flee Jones, 27, said of suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami. “And it was shocking. I’m trying to understand what’s going on. I’ve never seen him like this.”
Police this morning released a photo of Rahami, an Afghan immigrant and U.S. citizen, wanted for questioning in the bombings that rocked a Manhattan neighborhood and a New Jersey shore town. Rahami was taken into custody after a gunfight in nearby Linden today at 11:20 a.m. (See that story here…)
The terror suspect’s arrest came after investigators this morning swarmed a chicken restaurant and apartment here in connection with the hunt for Rahami, Elizabeth Mayor Christian Bollwage told the Herald …
Bollwage told the Herald the search began after five people were pulled over on the Belt Parkway last night in connection with the bombing in Chelsea. That led to the search of First American Fried Chicken and the apartment above it in Elizabeth, Bollwage said, but it was unclear how the people detained were connected to the restaurant.
In addition to the blast in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood on Saturday that injured dozens, a pipe bomb exploded in a New Jersey shore town before a charity 5K race and an unexploded pressure cooker device was found blocks away from the explosion site in Chelsea. Yesterday, five explosive devices were discovered at an Elizabeth train station.
FBI agents as well as state and local police were in the eatery and the apartment upstairs, which are cordoned off by yellow crime tape. Investigators towed a black Toyota sedan away from the street in front of the restaurant this morning …
According to an Elizabeth resident, Rahami worked the register at the restaurant and was in charge when his father was gone.
A few months earlier, in June, the father of mass shooter Omar Raheem allegedly supported the Taliban and wanted to become president of Afghanistan. The Daily Mail reported:
Mass shooter Omar Mateen’s father Seddique Mateen recently visited Congress, the State Department and met political leaders during a trip to Washington, DC.
Mateen, who made the trip in April, is seen in social media posts posing in front of the State Department and Democratic Foreign Services Committee offices.
The Afghanistan native, who also regularly writes open letters to President Barack Obama, has expressed gratitude [to the] Afghan Taliban who hosts the Durand Jirga Show on a channel called Payam-e-Afghan, which broadcasts from California …
Dozens of videos are posted under Mateen’s name on YouTube, where he speaks on a range of political subjects in the Dari language.
One video shows him declaring his candidacy for the Afghan presidency.
Posts include topics such as ‘Rise Afghan people against Pakistan’ and ‘Intelligent service and Military of Pakistan real Enemy of the USA (sic)’.
In one video the elder Mateen holds up a sign that reads: ‘ISI Pakistan and Military is Destroying 14 years of US work in Afghanistan to cut AID to killers’.
Meanwhile, the Taliban were still terrorising children, revealing the fact that local government was superior to that from the nation’s capital, Kabul. On June 12, 2010, the Taliban hanged a seven-year-old boy in order to punish his family. The Telegraph reported:
Del Awar, aged seven, was taken at sunset and found hanging in an orchard at sunrise the following day.
Bruises and scratches around the young boy’s neck suggested his murder had been neither quick, nor easy, according to those who saw his slight body after it was cut down.
His death is widely believed to have been punishment for the stand taken by his family against the Taliban in their remote Helmand village.
Reports from the village of Heratiyan in Sangin district said Del Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, and grandfather, Abdel Satar, had grown tired of Taliban intimidation and the violence the militants attracted.
The family had either demanded rebel fighters stop using village compounds to stage ambushes or had refused a demand of £400 for machine guns, villagers reported.
The two men had been angrily denounced as Nato or US spies and unknown to them, Del Awar’s cruel fate was sealed.
The Taliban have denied the killing, but in Heratiyan where villagers must live under the reality of complete militant control, many privately doubt their protestations.
Awar’s father, Abdul Qudoos, was a poor man who could not send his children to school and did not have a feud with anyone, explained Maulawi Shamsullah Sahrai, a 50-year-old elder from the village …
For those accused of collaboration with the Nato-led forces or with Mr Karzai’s weak government, Taliban control often means rapid summary execution.
Afghanistan brought other peculiarities involving alliances through sexual relations. In 2014, an American couple sued the United States Marines for allegedly covering up the circumstances of their son’s death in 2012. The New York Post reported:
The shattered family of a Long Island Marine murdered by an Afghan rebel on an American military base in 2012 is suing the corps and top brass for allegedly covering up details of the incident, The Post has learned.
Relatives of Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr., 21, of Oceanside, say his killer served as a “tea boy” for an infamous Afghan police chief who was allowed to operate out of the Helmand province compound despite his perverse reputation, according to the Brooklyn federal suit filed Wednesday.
Ainuddin Khudairaham walked into a gym on the base and shot dead Buckley, Cpl. Richard Rivera and Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson. He proclaimed himself a jihadist before being arrested.
Khudairaham was employed on the base by Sarwar Jan, a notorious Afghan police chief with a taste for young boys, drug dealing, and trading arms with the Taliban, the suit states.
He had already been ejected from another village for his unsavory activities and the US military compiled a dossier of his ugly exploits long before he arrived at Buckley’s base, court papers state.
Afghan women continued to be terrorised, as the Daily Mail reported on December 28, 2016, after Donald Trump had been elected president:
A woman has reportedly been beheaded by a group of armed men in Afghanistan after she entered a city without her husband.
The horrific act took place in the remote village of Latti in Sar-e-Pul province, which is under Taliban control.
Provincial Governor spokesman Zabiullah Amani told the Nation that the 30-year-old woman was targeted because she went out alone without her husband, who is in Iran.
The Middle East Press reported the woman had gone to the market to shop.
Under Taliban rule women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative.
They are also banned from working or education and are forced to wear the burqa.
The Taliban have rejected any involvement in this latest incident …
Gateway Pundit carried the story and said that Trump would bring better days:
There is hope, however because Donald Trump has publicly stated that ‘things will be different after January 20th’.
Terrorism persisted in Afghanistan. On April 13, 2017, Trump retaliated with a MOAB, Mother of All Bombs:
Here is a video of the MOAB:
A Fox News article from that time stated that the MOAB had been tested for deployment as early as 2003:
It was first tested in 2003, but hadn’t been used in combat before Thursday.
Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the bomb had been brought to Afghanistan “some time ago” for potential use. The bomb explodes in the air, creating air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.
“As [ISIS’] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS].”
President Trump told media Thursday afternoon that “this was another successful mission” and he gave the military total authorization.
Trump was also asked whether dropping the bomb sends a warning to North Korea.
“North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of,” said Trump.
It was thought that the MOAB was launched in retaliation for the death of a Green Beret soldier. The Daily Mail reported that the Pentagon denied any revenge:
The blast killed 36 militants as it destroyed three underground tunnels as well as weapons and ammunition, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense said.
No civilians were hurt, he added.
U.S. forces used a 30-foot long, GPS-guided GBU-43 bomb, at around 7.30pm local time in the Nangarhar Province …
A crater left by the blast is believed to be more than 300 meters (1,000 feet) wide after it exploded six feet above the ground. Anyone at the blast site was vaporized …
The Pentagon is denying that the attack was a revenge strike despite the fact that it came in the same area of Afghanistan where a Green Beret soldier was killed on Saturday.
Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar of the 7th Special Forces Group was cut down by enemy small arms fire while his unit was conducting counter-ISIS operations.
A WikiLeaks document, quoting a New York Times article, says that the CIA had built those tunnels with the help of their then-ally, Osama bin Laden, who had a degree in civil engineering. He tapped into his family’s construction equipment. They owned the Saudi Binladin Group:
From the White House, Sean Spicer confirmed the MOAB hit. Nearly two-thirds of registered American voters approved.
Weeks later, on May 7, the US confirmed they had taken out Afghanistan’s head of ISIS at the end of April. Reuters reported:
The head of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Abdul Hasib, was killed in an operation on April 27 conducted jointly by Afghan and U.S. Special Forces in the eastern province of Nangarhar, U.S. and Afghan officials said on Sunday.
Hasib, appointed last year after his predecessor Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a U.S. drone strike, is believed to have ordered a series of high profile attacks including one in March 8 on the main military hospital in Kabul, a statement said.
Last month, a Pentagon spokesman said Hasib had probably been killed during the raid by U.S. and Afghan special forces in Nangarhar during which two U.S. army Rangers were killed, but prior to Sunday’s announcement there had been no confirmation.
“This successful joint operation is another important step in our relentless campaign to defeat ISIS-K in 2017,” the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson said in a statement from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul.
Late that summer, on August 21, Trump gave a speech on the future of Afghanistan, stating that he was weary of the American presence. He said that the country would need to sort its own governance out. He told the terrorists that America was keeping a close eye on them. He threatened to withdraw funding for Pakistan if they continued to support terrorists. He requested help and support from India. The short version is here, but beware of the language from the person summarising it.
The full transcript of Trump’s speech is here. It is too long to excerpt. He delivered it before the first lady, Mike Pence and a group of American troops.
By October 13, Pakistan was helping the United States. That day, Trump tweeted:
Starting to develop a much better relationship with Pakistan and its leaders. I want to thank them for their cooperation on many fronts.
Nearly one year later, on September 3, 2018 — Labor Day — an American soldier serving in Operation Resolute Support was killed in an attack on NATO forces. He was the sixth American to fall in Afghanistan that year.
Two days earlier, news emerged that China was encroaching on Afghanistan, specifically into the Wakhan Corridor, which connects China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang to Afghanistan. This is a thin tongue-shaped area of land, which you can see in a map here.
On September 1, Lawrence Sellin, a retired colonel in the US Army Reserve, wrote an article for the Indian Center for Diplomatic Studies, ‘China Moves into Afghanistan As Part of Its Global Expansion Mission’.
He wrote that China was seeking to end the Afghan conflict and enhance their own strategic standing:
For many, it was a stunning development. China will build a brigade-size military training facility in the strategic Wakhan Corridor, the land bridge between Tajikistan and Pakistan, which is located in Afghanistan’s northeast Badakhshan province and borders China.
Although Beijing denied the claim that hundreds of Chinese soldiers will be deployed to Afghanistan, a source close to the Chinese military stated, “Construction of the base has started, and China will send at least one battalion of troops, along with weapons and equipment, to be stationed there and provide training to their Afghan counterparts.”
For those who have been closely following growing Chinese influence in Afghanistan, the above report comes as no surprise.
A year earlier on August 14, 2017, Spogmai radio quoted the spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense (translation): “A brigade base will be built to maintain the security of Badakhshan, which will be funded by China.”
The spokesman stated that China has steadily increased its military cooperation with Afghanistan and had, at that point, already provided $73 million in military aid.
Beyond the enormous geopolitical implications of a Chinese military base inside Afghanistan, the Badakhshan installation is the final security link between Tajikistan, vital to China’s commercial interests in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, China’s “all-weather” ally in South Asia.
It was largely unreported that China financed border outposts and deployed troops to Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, which borders Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province and is part of the Wakhan Corridor.
Consolidating a Chinese presence in Badakhshan province, the Afghan Ministry of Information and Technology has discussed signing a contract with China Telecom for a fiber optic network connecting China to the Wakhan Corridor. No doubt, the intention is to couple that system to the larger network linking China with Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa.
China is already Afghanistan’s biggest investor. In 2007 it took a $3 billion, 30-year lease for the Aynak copper mine. China and Pakistan have offered to extend the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan. Some have concluded that the CPEC invitation is a prelude to positioning China as a mediator to end the Afghan conflict.
I will stop there and continue tomorrow.
Involvement in Afghanistan is an unholy mess, aided and abetted by China and its allies.
There’s time only for a short post today.
Here is a powerful, must-see video that is only just over a minute long:
Who said, ‘Ordinary people are too small minded to govern their own affairs’?
It was not George Soros, from whom we get a short soundbite at the beginning of the video. He cannily said that global governance might or could happen, acting as if he did not know one way or the other.
The next person to appear is Obama. It was he who said:
Ordinary people are too small minded to govern their own affairs.
In fact, he says it not once, but twice.
He says that ‘order and progress’ (his words) will come only when:
individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign.
But the real kicker comes in starting at the 45-second point with a man reading from a Communist book outlining how to discredit opposition: build up verbal attacks, then label person(s) ‘fascist’ or ‘anti-Semitic’, followed by open discreditation by leftist organisations. That part of the video was filmed in the 1950s or 1960s. The book from which he read was published in the United States.
Please circulate the tweet.
It was with sadness that I read of Jackie Mason’s death at the weekend.
Still, he had a good innings. He was 93 years old.
The Daily Mail had an excellent obituary of one of the world’s most consistently funny comics. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Life before comedy
I did not know that he was born in Wisconsin:
Mason was born in 1928 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as Yacov Moshe Maza to immigrant parents from Belarus.
In the early 1930s, the family moved to New York’s Lower East Side. All the male relatives were rabbis and young Yacov was expected to follow in their footsteps:
‘It was unheard-of to think of anything else,’ Mason said. ‘But I knew, from the time I’m 12, I had to plot to get out of this, because this is not my calling.’
However, there was no way out for many years. Mason earned a degree in English and Sociology at City College of New York then completed rabbinical studies at Yeshiva University, after which he became a practising rabbi.
He served several congregations, including those in Weldon, North Carolina, and Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
Sometime in the 1950s, he began working summers in the Catskills, a mountain range in New York State, known for its resorts which attracted Jewish clientele. It is known as the Borscht Belt.
He wrote his own material, put comedy sets together and accustomed himself to being on stage.
Comedy career
It was only in 1959, after his father died, that the rabbi pursued a stand-up career full time and changed his name to Jackie Mason.
However, he did not leave his theological training behind. In 1988, he described his style of comedy to the New York Times:
‘My humor — it’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you,’
‘He’s not better than you, he’s just another guy,’ he added. ‘I see life with love — I’m your brother up there — but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you.’
From the Catskills, he branched out into the big time, playing clubs in Miami and New York in 1960 after two television appearances on the iconic Steve Allen Show.
I am old enough to remember that Jackie Mason was on television a lot in the early 1960s.
In 1964, he appeared on another iconic programme, The Ed Sullivan Show, which aired on Sunday nights. I remember my mother got very worked up about what happened in one of his appearances, as she was a huge Ed Sullivan fan. We never missed a show. After this appearance she turned against Jackie Mason:
… after a terrible misunderstanding in 1964 between Sullivan and Mason involving a perceived obscene middle finger gesture, Jackie’s career hit a major slump.
Sullivan canceled Mason’s six-show contract, refusing to pay him for the performance.
Mason eventually filed a lawsuit, and won.
Mason’s career did not recover until the late 1970s:
… it would take him many years to find his momentum once again, with his comeback punctuated by well-received performances in 1979’s Steve Martin film The Jerk, and Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I two years later.
‘People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,’ Mr. Mason told Look. ‘It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.’
My mother would definitely have agreed with the ‘sick maniac’ description, unfounded though it was.
He hired a new manager Jyll Rosenfeld, whom he later married. She convinced him that there was an appetite for Borscht Belt humour beyond the Catskills. He launched a long-running show on Broadway in 1986:
Mason decided to bring his one-man comic shows The World According to Me!, to the Broadway stage in 1986.
The hit show ran for two years, and earned him a special Tony Award in 1987, followed by an Emmy for writing when HBO aired a version of the show.
From there, the legendary comedian put close to a dozen other one-man shows on Broadway, with the last being The Ultimate Jew in 2008.
Here is one of his performances from 1986:
Mason also enjoyed an on-screen appearance in Caddyshack II in 1988 and a voice-over as Rabbi Krustofsky in an early episode of The Simpsons in 1992, for which he won a second Primetime Emmy Award, for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.
In the aforementioned New York Times interview from 1988, he was philosophical in the way only a rabbi can be:
‘I’ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years, but it’s like I was born last Thursday,’ Mr. Mason told The New York Times in 1988.
‘They see me as today’s comedian. Thank God I stunk for such a long time and was invisible, so I could be discovered.’
London appearances
For several years, Jackie Mason used to come to London once a year for a stand-up show that was often televised.
I was in stitches.
Guido Fawkes tweeted Mason’s 2002 appearance, which was or was close to being his last over here:
Here’s the video, which is just over 90 minutes long:
The next video is his 1999 performance at the London Palladium. It is just under 40 minutes long:
However, in 1992, Mason did a half-hour set at Oxford University, where he ribbed the students for their total lack of sartorial elegance and fondness of political correctness. He also made fun of the Jewish lifestyle which encompasses self-denial of Jewishness as well as certain material aspirations. The University asked him to do the set for free, something at which he also cavilled, in a humorous way:
This is his description of the video:
This is a clip from a lecture I gave at Oxford University back in 1992. They gave me an award and a fellowship in the Oxford Union Society. The first American comedian to receive such an honor. That’s how they got me to work for nothing. Enjoy!
Here’s the second part, which was a Q&A session:
He talked about his years as a rabbi where people didn’t want the sermon and hoped for a few jokes. He said that Oxford students were very polite and he hadn’t heard one four-letter word yet: ‘I’m waiting, I’m waiting’.
Near the end, he said that England is the most polite society in the Western world with all the ubiquitous apologies one hears. The only exception, he noted, is in Parliament, where the raucous tone reminded him of a ‘sanitarium’.
Politics and talk radio
In 1998, Mason’s biography was published and he began a career in talk radio:
he published an autobiography, ‘Jackie, Oy!’ (written with Ken Gross), and discovered a new venture as an opinionated political commentator on talk radio.
Twenty years later, he issued a series of vlogs against then-candidate Barack Obama. I watched most of them. This one discusses the first presidential debate in September 2008:
His description of the Obama v McCain debate reads as follows:
Here are my thoughts on the first presidential debate. Although neither candidate had a clear victory Friday night, the media is saying Obama won because he didn’t lose. He looked poised and presidential. Well he did look poised as he made no sense! And if looking Presidential is telling bold lies, the Hail to the Chief!
In 2016, Mason was an unabashed Trump supporter:
He was among the few well-known entertainers to support former President Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.
In October 2016, he appeared on Aaron Klein Investigative Radio, which airs in New York City and Philadelphia. Mason contrasted Trump’s words about women to Bill Clinton’s actual violence against his victims.
Breitbart had the story, reporting that Mason said:
What Trump ever did to women is that he called them a name because she gained too much weight so he said she got too fat and he called her a pig. Imagine if the worst thing Bill Clinton ever did was call a girl a name. He called them names after he raped them.
When he got through with them, Juanita Broaddrick wound up with a cut lip. And he had advised her to please go see a doctor. He was very compassionate about sending them to doctors. But he wasn’t too concerned about beating them up in the first place. He was so busy punching them around that nobody knows if he made love to them or he just wanted to beat them up a little bit.
As for Hillary, he said:
He was really a violent, insane character. Now his wife, she had a job. Her job was to make sure that these women were never heard about it. Every time somebody threatened to talk about it she immediately went to work on destroying them. First he punched them around. Then it was her job to wipe them out altogether.
… And she’s calling Trump a person who can’t be trusted because of the way he treats women? This is like somebody who crossed a red light being compared to a murderer.
After Trump’s election, Mason turned his attention towards the RINOs, especially the then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan:
In March 2017, Breitbart reported:
In this week’s exclusive clip for Breitbart News, Jackie weighs in on the GOP’s failed healthcare bill, explaining that Republicans in Washington were focused on “repealing and replacing” the wrong thing.
“When they were talking about ‘repeal and replace,’ they were stupid,” Jackie says. “They were talking about healthcare, they should have been talking about [House Speaker Paul] Ryan. If Ryan was repealed and replaced we would have had no problem today.”
Jackie — who was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in Ryan’s home state — says he finds it odd that a Speaker of the House who is supposed to be some kind of “genius” can’t count correctly.
“You know what Ryan should do if he wanted to save this whole country? Get another job,” he says. “Find out something that you actually know. If there’s nothing like that, sit in the House and don’t bother anybody. Mind your own business, you’ll save the country.”
My deepest sympathies go to his widow and former manager Jyll Rosenfeld and his daughter Sheba Mason, from a former union with Ginger Reiter in the 1970s and 1980s.
For more Jackie Mason shows and interviews, visit TheUltimateJew channel on YouTube.
On October 24, 2020, Joe Biden said two interesting things about the most recent US presidential elections:
Please play the video, which is only 24 seconds long.
First, he thanked everyone for putting together:
the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.
Secondly, he began by referring to his and Obama’s two elections:
and you guys did it for our — President Obama’s — administration before this …
Biden’s whole statement is as follows (emphases mine):
Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together, and you guys did it for our — President Obama’s — administration before this, we have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.
I thought back to the 2008 election. John McCain was in a good position to stave off the Democrats, then, a week before the election he told a lady at one of his rallies:
Don’t worry, Senator Obama will make a very good president.
I saw that on ITV’s morning news between 5:30 and 6:00 and about spat out my coffee.
So, when he lost, I thought that he threw the election.
In 2012, things were much different. A lot of Americans were leaning towards Mitt Romney. The queues on Election Day that year began early. I watched coverage live on an American network and everything looked brilliant for Romney until around 6 a.m. GMT. Suddenly, the votes flipped in seconds. Obama had clearly won.
I wrote about it at the time, including a number of links to related commentary and news stories:
Final words on the US election — vote flipping and debunking the media
Two short excerpts from that long post follow:
I have read in several places that Obama had no acceptance speech planned. Romney had no concession speech. This opens up the possibility that people behind the scenes had a vote flipping operation put into place. Of course, one name always pops up in the picture, although there are no doubt more who would like to see the United States reduced to serfdom by a bunch of feral neo-Bolsheviks …
To clarify my hypothesis of vote flipping, only a few people in the background could know about it. Otherwise, the secret risked exposure. I do not believe that Obama knew, because he appeared as surprised as Mitt Romney did. This action was done independently of Obama and most of his water carriers, even though they had hoped for this result. I believe that what people saw on the ground with voter irregularity and intimidation was but a small part of the hypothetical vote flipping …
Here we are today, eight years later.
Suddenly, Joe Biden, a man who stayed home most of the time during the campaign, is on track to win the presidency. Most of his rallies attracted a handful of people. The most I ever saw were fewer than a hundred attendees. By contrast, President Trump’s rallies attracted tens of thousands most of the time, depending on local regulations.
By law, poll watchers from both parties — Republican and Democrat — must be present when votes are being counted. Unfortunately, in some cases, Republican watchers have been told to watch from a long distance away or have been denied entry to places where votes are being tabulated. Senator Josh Hawley explains:
President Trump has filed lawsuits in the states where votes are still being counted or the results are in dispute:
Trump is right. Look at the list of states below. So far, all except Georgia have more votes than registered voters:
Trump’s campaign needs additional funds to help fight this apparent fraud:
I am glad to see Senator Lindsey Graham is helping:
Below are snapshots of what has been happening on the ground.
Arizona
Arizona’s results show Biden has won. Hmm.
Arizona voting instructions specify that Sharpie pens should not be used because they can bleed through the ballot paper, thereby rendering that vote invalid. The instructions can be seen in the Gateway Pundit article below.
Gateway Pundit reported on a Steven Crowder discussion whereby some Arizona voters were given Sharpie pens by voting officials, who insisted they use them to mark their ballots (emphasis in the original). The video is ready to play at the designated point:
As the corrupt county officials across Arizona scramble to downplay Sharpiegate, with the help of a complicit media running cover, it appears as though they are being outsmarted by their own ballot instructions. Their own voters’ guides specify “Do NOT use a sharpie type pen as it will bleed through.”
Steven Crowder brought this to light on his live stream yesterday, around the 3 hour, 20 minute, 7 second mark:
Election observers are not being allowed in to do their job:
Trump supporters are not meekly retreating to the background. Arizona is one of the states holding peaceful protests about the vote results:
Here’s the full video:
Michigan
Michigan raised the dead so that they could vote:
Last night, Trump supporters held a peaceful protest in Detroit near the convention centre where the votes were being counted:
Nevada
This is why Trump was suspicious of the US Postal Service. If true, this is really something:
Nevada’s Republican Party chapter noticed an irregularity involving votes by people who had earlier moved out of the state. They have notified US Attorney General Bill Barr:
Pennsylvania
On November 5, Tucker Carlson interviewed a poll worker who was not allowed back in a polling centre to oversee the count on the second day of vote counting. The video begins with Corey Lewandowski (Trump’s first campaign manager from 2016) in Philadelphia. Brian McCafferty is the poll watcher who has video evidence he has submitted to Fox News of what was going on inside the convention centre. He says, ‘You know something’s wrong’:
That day, two days after the election, Philadelphia was allegedly still collecting ballots.
Gateway Pundit picked up on a Trump campaign official’s tweet (emphases in the original):
President Donald Trump’s director of election day operations has posted a video of a suburban Philadelphia post office continuing to collect ballots long after election day.
Trump’s 2020 EDO Director Mike Roman posted the shocking video on Thursday evening, tweeting “a post office in suburban Philly is STILL COLLECTING BALLOTS!”
The same thing is allegedly happening across the state in the city of Erie. James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas, posted the story yesterday:
This is interesting:
Hmm:
Trump’s press conference
On Thursday, November 5, major television networks cut Trump’s press conference short — and I am sorry to see Michael DeLauzon’s Twitter account suspended once again:
Here is the president’s press conference in full:
In closing, Twitter has been quick off the mark to announce that, as of January 20, 2021, it will not hesitate to censor Trump’s tweets. They figure he will be out of office.
Gateway Pundit reports:
Twitter has confirmed that President Donald Trump will no longer receive “special protections” beginning on January 20th at 12:01 p.m. if he does not win the election.
The platform has already been censoring the president and his supporters for years, but is now promising even more censorship if he does not fall in line …
Since the polls closed on election night, Twitter has censored eight tweets from the president for “violating the company’s rules.”
I’m shaking my head in frustration. However, I pray that this fraud will finally be brought to light and that someone or something will put an end to it.
Before I get to Joe Biden’s behaviour around the opposite sex, I have an update on Tony Bobulinski’s interview with Tucker Carlson.
I featured half of it in yesterday’s post, but here is the full interview:
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway tweeted a summary of it. I’ll begin with her commentary where I left off:
On last night’s show, Tucker said that he asked one of his staff members to send some Hunter Biden-related documents to him in Los Angeles, where he has been filming. The staff member, based in New York, sent them through a well-known, reputable courier service. Unfortunately, an empty package reached Carlson. (I hope they have a copy in New York.)
En route, the package was opened and contents removed. The company interviewed every possible person who could have handled it. They also searched a van and plane, but nothing showed up. The company is not only deeply apologetic, but also deeply disturbed that this could have happened:
I agree. Someone is watching.
Here’s Tucker’s full show from Wednesday, October 28. I’m not sure how long it will be up, so watch it while you can. The last five minutes are about how to pronounce Kamala, as in Harris. Some say KAM-a-la, others say KAHM-a-la. The vice presidential candidate herself pronounces it halfway between the two.
Now on to the main topic.
Gropin’ Joe
During his vice presidency, Joe Biden swore in US Senators. Watch Biden caress Senator Christopher Coons’s daughter Maggie:
That video went viral:
Maybe he’s just a tactile person? It looks as if Hillary wants him to get off. Outside of Maggie Coons, the rest are likely to be married women. Even if they weren’t, it looks highly inappropriate — and weird:
The woman on the left in the photo collage above is a reporter, Amie Parnes:
Four years ago, the lefty media buzzed with anti-Trump groping stories, but the real groper was Biden. A Daily Mail article from October 18, 2016, has more on Biden, including photos.
The article features a photo of Stephanie Carter, the wife of the then-defense secretary Ash Carter. She and Biden were standing behind the podium as Ash Carter was speaking! Biden had his hands firmly on her shoulders and looked as if he were kissing her hair. (Also see The Daily Caller‘s take.)
Carter was not bothered:
‘Oh, I laughed. I laughed. I laughed,’ Carter said after the fact. He told the ‘Today’ show, ‘They know each other extremely well, and we’re great friends with the Bidens.’
Returning to Maggie Coons above, the article says:
Biden placed his hands on the shoulder of Coons’ daughter and whispered in Maggie Coons’ ear during the ceremony, attracting enough chatter in DC that Senator Coons got asked about it during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.
‘I have to ask, ’cause a lot of people have been speculating about it, does she think the vice president is creepy?’ host Chris Wallace asked point-blank.
‘No, Chris,’ Coons responded. ‘She doesn’t think the vice president is creepy.’
Senator Coons also vouched for what Biden said at the time. ”I could hear him. He was leaning forward and whispering some encouragement to her about how when he was sworn in his own daughter Ashley was 13 and she felt awkward and uncomfortable.’
Biden feels at liberty to touch women, regardless of age. There is another photo of him caressing an older lady’s chin with this accompanying caption:
Biden has also been known to flash his charm on mature women during swearing in ceremonies, including chatting up Sen. John Barrasso’s mom.
The article carried this short video compilation of Biden’s ‘greatest hits’, as it were. Hillary features in this too, in another scene at an airport. She’s patting his arm rather insistently — as in ‘get off’ — while smiling:
Here’s the Hillary sequence all on its own:
Here is the full swearing in of Sen. Kelly Ayotte. This one has audio. He asks Kelly Ayotte’s daughter how old she is. After the swearing in, he can’t keep his hands off her. I don’t particularly agree with the title of this video — others do — but Biden shouldn’t be touching children like that:
In 2018, Biden campaigned for Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and the gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers. He said Tony had met his future wife when both of them were in kindergarten:
The Daily Caller has the story (emphases mine):
“By the way, running for governor is a team sport! No way out,” Biden said. “He met Kathy in kindergarten. In kindergarten. She was too young to resist. She should’ve known better but she did it anyway.”
Biden did not explain what he meant by the joke, instead planting a kiss on Kathy’s forehead. The audience laughed and smiled along with Biden’s joke.
Here is a strange photo, dating from Joe’s earlier days as US Senator for Delaware:
Obama
He and Obama had a somewhat unusual friendship.
On June 28, 2016, People reported that Obama made a friendship bracelet for his vice president:
“That stuff’s hard,” Obama concluded in the video for BuzzFeed, which has partnered with a nonprofit, nonpartisan app called TurboVote to help make the voter registration process smooth sailing. “But you know what isn’t? Registering to vote. I hope you all understand that you have the power to shape our country’s course. Don’t take that for granted.”
“Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a meeting with my vice president,” Obama added, proudly holding up a friendship bracelet with the name “Joe” on it.
Biden returned the favour on Obama’s birthday that year:
This next tweet is just a bit of fun:
Republicans react differently
Not everyone has been as understanding of Joe Biden’s behaviour as establishment Democrats are.
In the next video, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions bats Biden’s hand away from his granddaughter. Before that, however, Biden rests his hand on a teen’s waist and is tempted to reach further:
Secret Service agents’ stories
In 2014, veteran journalist Ronald Kessler wrote a book about Secret Service agents’ experiences, The First Family Detail.
On August 1 that year, a few days before its release, US News & World Report received an advance copy. Regarding Joe Biden, their article says:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
In addition to the alleged skinny-dipping, agents are reportedly irritated by frequent last-minute trips to Delaware.
A Biden spokeswoman would not address the claims on the record. A spokesperson for the Secret Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf thought that criticising skinny dipping was out of date:
… let me tell you that virtually no one in the Washington, D.C., political press is scandalized by skinny dipping. But every time it emerges that someone in public life has swam naked, there is widespread, disingenuous playacting on the question. You’d suddenly think that Maude Flanders was managing the newsroom. While I have no idea if the reporting in the new book on the Secret Service is credible, outlets treating it as credible enough to report have been distracted by skinny-dipping from what is indisputably more important news.
He forgets that the press corps weren’t there; female Secret Service agents were the ones guarding him. They had every right to be offended.
In 2017, Gateway Pundit reported that Secret Service agents were relieved that Biden was no longer vice president because his behaviour towards women was so raunchy.
A former Secret Service agent described it as ‘Weinstein-level stuff’, it was so bad (emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the agent asserted that, “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.” The annual party was for agents and Navy personnel who were tasked with protecting the Biden family.
“He would mess with every single woman or teen. It was horrible,” the agent said.
According to the source, a Secret Service agent once got suspended for a week in 2009 for shoving Biden after he cupped his girlfriend’s breast while the couple was taking a photo with him. The situation got so heated, the source told Cassandra Fairbanks, that others had to step in to prevent the agent from hitting the then-Vice President.
Additionally, the agent claims that Biden would walk around the VP residence naked at night. “I mean, stark naked… Weinstein level stuff,” he added.
He said that the men on duty would frequently stand in front of female agents and Navy women that were present “like a damn guardian.” On some occasions, they would make up reasons to get the women away from where he was.
The agent said he was specifically concerned about women in the Navy.
“They weren’t allowed to disobey him at all, but we’d take them away under pretend auspices,” the agent stated.
The official Vice Presidential residence is the Queen Anne style house at One Observatory Circle in Washington, DC, which is located on the northeast grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory. The property is maintained and cared for by the service branch.
As for skinny dipping at his home in Delaware:
Our source confirmed this sentiment, adding that “it was especially an issue at his Delaware house that he would go to every weekend.”
“He would only get naked when Jill was absent,” he added.
Biden has also long been criticized for his contact with women and girls in photos and videos, and was even referred to as “Creepy Uncle Joe Biden” by the Washington Post.
The agent said that this type of thing did not go on when Republicans were in charge:
The agent also worked under the Bush administration, and added that Vice President Dick Cheney “never grabbed any butts or breasts.”
Lucy Flores, 2014 Democrat candidate
In 2019, Lucy Flores, recounted her encounter with Biden while she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada in 2014. She wrote a first-person article for The Cut: ‘An Awkward Kiss Changed How I Saw Joe Biden’. (Breitbart‘s John Nolte wrote about this story shortly after her article appeared.)
Excerpts follow (emphases mine):
… when my campaign heard from Vice-President Joe Biden’s office that he was looking to help me and other Democrats in the state, I was grateful and flattered. His team offered to bring him to a campaign rally in an effort to help boost voter turnout. We set the date for November 1, just three days before election day …
I found my way to the holding room for the speakers, where everyone was chatting, taking photos, and getting ready to speak to the hundreds of voters in the audience. Just before the speeches, we were ushered to the side of the stage where we were lined up by order of introduction. As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience …
Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.
She then wrote about some of the material I have posted above, which has been making the rounds for the past four years, and more:
Time passed and pictures started to surface of Vice-President Biden getting uncomfortably close with women and young girls. Biden nuzzling the neck of the Defense secretary’s wife; Biden kissing a senator’s wife on the lips; Biden whispering in women’s ears; Biden snuggling female constituents. I saw obvious discomfort in the women’s faces, and Biden, I’m sure, never thought twice about how it made them feel. I knew I couldn’t say anything publicly about what those pictures surfaced for me; my anger and my resentment grew.
Had I never seen those pictures, I may have been able to give Biden the benefit of the doubt. Had there not been multiple articles written over the years about the exact same thing — calling his creepy behavior an “open secret” — perhaps it would feel less offensive. And yet despite the steady stream of pictures and the occasional article, Biden retained his title of America’s Favorite Uncle. On occasion that title was downgraded to America’s Creepy Uncle but that in and of itself implied a certain level of acceptance. After all, how many families just tolerate or keep their young children away from the creepy uncle without ever acknowledging that there should be zero tolerance for a man who persistently invades others’ personal space and makes people feel uneasy and gross? In this case, it shows a lack of empathy for the women and young girls whose space he is invading, and ignores the power imbalance that exists between Biden and the women he chooses to get cozy with.
A male friend told Flores not to say anything about her encounter:
When I spoke to a male friend who is also a political operative in Biden’s orbit — the first man who had heard the story outside of my staff and close friends years ago — he did what no one else had and made me question myself and wonder if I was doing the right thing. He reminded me that Biden has significant resources and argued points that made me question my memory, even though I’ve replayed that scene in my mind a thousand times. He reminded me that my credibility would be attacked and that I should be prepared for the type of “back and forth” that could occur. (When reached by New York Magazine, a representative for Vice-President Joe Biden declined to comment.)
I’m not suggesting that Biden broke any laws, but the transgressions that society deems minor (or doesn’t even see as transgressions) often feel considerable to the person on the receiving end. That imbalance of power and attention is the whole point — and the whole problem.
In the end, Lucy Flores did speak up and out:
Trump’s winning campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted:
No one can dispute this:
Nancy Pelosi doesn’t take Joe’s groping seriously.
You can find more photos and GIFs of Joe Biden in action here.
Democratic primary campaign videos
He was still at it on the campaign trail before winning the nomination this year.
These are incidents from 2019:
Gateway Pundit wrote about another:
Their article says, in part:
No video has been posted yet, but it fits a pattern seen on numerous videos of Biden making sexual comments to pre-teen and adolescent girls about staying away from boys, or keeping boys away or not dating until they are thirty. That is in addition to the numerous videotaped incidents of Biden groping young girls.
Here’s one where he held onto a woman’s hands:
Poor woman:
This is the last set of videos from 2019. The one with the kids is from Wilmington, Delaware:
He told them the story of Cornpop:
This video from Texas is where he can’t remember ‘God’:
Hillary Clinton told People magazine that year that we have to ‘get over it’. Joe’s gropes are no biggie.
Lucy Flores nailed it: Joe Biden he thinks he’s so powerful that he can get away with anything. And does.
Recently, I ran two posts on the Biden family: Hunter’s laptop and alleged corruption.
Let’s look at their past and present dealings.
The present
By way of update on the laptop story, whistleblower Tony Bobulinski, President Trump’s special guest at last Thursday’s debate, appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Tuesday, October 27.
The Daily Mail has an article about the interview, referenced below.
Below are two clips from Carlson’s interview.
In the first, Bobulinski, a US Navy veteran, explains how he met Joe and Jim Biden. The clip also includes a shot of an email which details what percentage of financial cut individual Biden’s hoped to receive from their venture with China:
Background and excerpts of the video transcript from the Daily Mail follow, emphases mine:
Bobulinski has since early October been pushing the story of his time in business with Hunter, 50, and his claims that Joe was involved in the attempts to make deals with their Chinese partners.
Bobulinski and Hunter formed a company in 2017, specializing in infrastructure investment. No deals appear to have been completed, and the firm folded in 2018.
Joe had left the White House and was a private citizen at the time …
Bobulinski is listed as one of the recipients of a May 13, 2017, email detailing their business deal, and he claims that ‘the big guy’ mentioned is a reference to Joe, whom he claims Hunter regularly asked for business advice.
Joe has always insisted he was not involved in Hunter’s numerous business ventures.
His team and Hunter’s lawyers have not responded to DailyMail.com’s request for comment …
Bobulinski, in Tuesday night’s interview, told in additional detail how he had allegedly met Joe in Los Angeles.
‘I first met with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, and just had a light discussion where they briefed me that my dad’s on the way, and we won’t go into too much detail on the business front, but we will spend time talking at a high level about you, your background, the Biden family and then he’s got to get some rest because he is speaking at the conference in the morning,’ Bobulinski said.
Joe was coming to Los Angeles to speak at the Milken Conference and discuss his ‘moonshot’ efforts to find a cure for cancer.
Asked by Carlson why Joe would meet him, Bobulinski emphasized that Hunter and Jim wanted him to meet Joe – it was not Bobulinski wanting to meet the former vice president.
‘They were sort of wining and dining me and presenting the strength of the Biden family to get me more engaged and taking on the CEO role and develop it both in the United States and around the world in partnership,’ he told Carlson.
‘And as you can imagine, I’ve been asked by a hundred people over the past month why would you be meeting with Joe Biden, and sort of turn the question around to people that ask me, why that 10:38 on the night of May 2nd would Joe Biden take time out of his schedule to sit down with me in a dark bar at the Beverly Hilton‘s position – behind a column so people couldn’t see us – to have a discussion about his family and my family?‘
In Bobulinski’s telling, when Joe arrived with his security detail, Bobulinski ‘stood up out of respect to shake his hand.’
He continued: ‘And Hunter introduced me as: “this is Tony, the individual I told you about that’s helping us with the business we are working on in the Chinese.”‘
The group sat down …
The conversation focussed on family and personal interests, e.g. family deaths because of cancer. Business was not on the agenda.
Bobulinski met again with Joe Biden the following day, albeit briefly, after his conference speech.
The second clip is about his meeting with Joe’s brother Jim. The quote refers to a business associate who asked Bobulinski not to make the Chinese deal and the Bidens’ involvement public:
Here’s what happened when Bobulinski met Jim Biden after seeing Joe at the conference:
After Bobiulinski said goodbye to Joe on May 3, he went to meet Jim at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles, he said.
Jim Biden, seven years younger than Joe, spent two hours discussing the family’s story, and their careers.
Bobulinski told Carlson: ‘I know Joe decided not to run in 2016, but what if he ran in the future – aren’t they taking political risk or headline risk?
‘And I remember looking at Jim Biden and saying: “how are you guys getting away with this? Aren’t you concerned?”
‘And he looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said: “plausible deniability”.
‘He said it directly to me at the cabana at the Peninsula Hotel, after an hour and a half or two-hour meeting, with me asking out of concern how are you guys doing this, aren’t you concerned you will put your future presidential campaign at risk, the Chinese, the stuff you guys have been doing already in 2015 and 2016 around the world.
‘And I can almost picture his face where he sort of chuckles and says plausible deniability.’
Jim has not responded to DailyMail.com’s request for comment.
The past
Back in 1988, Biden was one of the Democrat candidates running for the presidential nomination. His bid was unsuccessful — former Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis got the nomination that year — however, Biden’s Midwest field director was a Chicago political operative, Joseph Cari.
Twenty years later, Cari was tipped to have a major role to play in Biden’s presidential run that year, but trouble befell him. On August 25, 2008, American Thinker reported:
He got indicted for participating in the kickback scheme involving contributions to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. This is the same scheme that involved Obama friend Tony Rezko. In fact, Cari was a key witness at Rezko’s trial.
Tony Rezko and Obama did a little property deal on the land where his Chicago home is. The CBS Chicago affiliate’s link is now gone, but America’s Watchtower (nothing to do with Jehovah’s Witnesses) has a few paragraphs from it:
Obama bought a house and lot. Rezko’s wife bought an undeveloped property next door. The two parcels had once been a single tract of land.
Obama paid $1.65 million for the house and lot while Rezko paid $625,000 for the undeveloped lot. Six months later, Rezko sold a strip of his property to Obama, who wanted to increase the size of his side yard. Obama paid Rezko $104,500, which he says was the market rate.
While Obama has said that the transaction was handled ethically, he has conceded the perception of favor-trading it created was a “boneheaded” mistake.
America’s Watchtower article is dated June 4, 2008, and leads with this:
Rezko was later convicted on 16 money laundering charges.
But I digress.
Back to Biden.
Somehow, Joe Biden was able to amass enough money to open an eponymous institute at the University of Delaware in 2017. Amazing. Those do not come cheaply. My post yesterday cited Town & Country‘s breakdown of Biden’s income around that time, so that explains it.
He also opened an institute in his name at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018: the Penn Biden Center. Wow.
On March 15, 2018, Breitbart gave a sneak-peek into Peter Schweizer’s book Secret Empires, which also featured in my post yesterday.
Breitbart reported:
The private equity firm of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden inked a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China just 10 days after the father and son flew to China in 2013.
The Biden bombshell is one of many revealed in a new investigative book Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends by Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer. Schweizer’s last book, Clinton Cash, sparked an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation …
In December of 2013, Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew aboard Air Force Two to China. Ten days after the trip, a subsidiary of the Bank of China named Bohai Capital signed an exclusive deal with Hunter Biden’s firm to form a $1 billion joint-investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST. The deal was later increased to $1.5 billion.
Joe Biden has yet to comment on how the firm of a sitting vice president’s son was permitted to bag a billion-dollar deal with the Communist Chinese government—nor whether they had any knowledge or involvement in the deal.
Hmm.
Steve Hilton has more on the China deal in the next video, thought to have involved John Kerry’s son-in-law and heir to the foods fortune, Chris Heinz. Most of this, however, involves Joe and Hunter Biden. It appears that some of the content comes from Peter Schweizer’s Secret Empires:
Another thread follows from elsewhere, alleging that Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz’s business partner Aviation Industry Of China (AVIC), a Chinese state-owned aerospace & defense conglomerate, hacked US military intelligence. (Start five tweets in and keep reading.)
There was more:
In May 2018, Biden, then a private citizen, went to visit the late US Senator John McCain, who was in his final months of life:
The Daily Caller recapped an article about the visit that originally appeared in the New York Times:
According to the Times: “The Republican senator encouraged the former Democratic vice president to ‘not walk away’ from politics, as Mr. Biden put it before refusing to discuss a possible 2020 presidential run.”
Biden was one of those giving a eulogy at McCain’s funeral in August that year. He was also one of the pallbearers — along with Warren Beatty. This is quite the list:
(During the Democrat presidential primaries in 2019, McCain’s widow Cindy and daughter Meghan, it was rumoured that they would lend their support to Biden rather than to Trump, who had said that McCain was ‘not a war hero’.)
Around that time, President Trump revoked former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance. Biden was not happy. Brennan had had two positions in the Obama administration — Homeland Security Advisor then CIA director — spanning Obama’s eight years in the White House:
It is believed that many knew about the — pardon the pun — trumped up charges against the American president who took office in 2017, including Biden and Brennan:
In September 2018, it was revealed that Trump’s former 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort had done some lobbying for Ukraine in 2013. A member of his team had met with Obama and Biden. Politico reported:
Paul Manafort’s pro-Ukraine campaign reached the top of the White House, with one of the members of his lobbying effort meeting President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in 2013, according to new court documents released Friday.
A member of the so-called Hapsburg Group, which comprised former European politicians Manafort convened as part of his lobbying effort in support of Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych, came with a foreign prime minister on May 16, 2013, to meet with Obama and Biden, “as well as senior United States officials in the executive and legislative branches,” according to the court documents …
Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chief, pleaded guilty Friday to two criminal charges from special counsel Robert Mueller to head off a potentially dramatic trial over allegations he violated laws on foreign lobbying. The court documents released Friday say Manafort failed to register as a foreign lobbyist, as required under U.S. law, or disclose a host of meetings, including the one involving Obama and Biden.
After that, in 2014, Joe and Hunter Biden’s involvement in Ukraine began. I won’t be posting all of the following tweets in the thread below, so be sure to read all of them:
Peter Schweizer researched Burisma and the Bidens for his book, Secret Empires:
Peter Schweizer could not uncover how much money Biden made for his work with Burisma. Ukrainian disclosure laws do not require that Biden’s reveal his compensation. (Schweizer’s book is worth the money just for his section on the Bidens alone.)
The thread continues.
Two months later, in April 2019, the Epoch Times (paywall) reported that Ukraine’s chief prosecutor was reopening a corruption probe into Burisma, which could adversely affect Joe Biden’s run for president. It is unclear what the current status is.
However, in September that year, President Trump, who faced impeachment charges at that time, tweeted:
And:
Well, this is enough for one day.
All being well, more to come tomorrow.
Churchmouse Campanologist 