Joe Doakes, ex of Como Park, emails:

President Trump is threatening to pull US troops out of Italy because they weren’t there when we needed them to help us in Iran. It’s the right act for the wrong reason.”Tribute” is a payment from the conquered countries to the Imperial conqueror, an act of submission. Mongol Horde, Chinese Dynasty, Aztecs, Romans … they all did it.

If the United States was any kind of Imperial power, money would be flowing from the rest of the world to us; but instead money flows from us to them in the form of military aid and welfare.  Instead of them paying tribute to us, we are paying tribute to them.

Either we are the Conqueror or we are the Conquered. I prefer the former and we ought to start acting like it. Pull the US out of our subservient role in UN, WHO, NATO, and NAFTA. End foreign welfare payments. 

Notify England, Spain, Germany and Italy that we are no longer leasing our bases while giving them rights to deny our use, but instead they are gifting that land to us in exchange for our continued troop deployments there. 

Then we can talk about Greenland.

Joe Doakes

 

If we were an empire – like the British, Roman, Napoleonic or Alexandrian ones – the armies of our various cliens (let’s call ’em “vassals”) would be parts of our military. The Romans had a word for it – “auxiliaries”.

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

The American government should put the interest of American citizens first, before all other countries. If not America First, then who?

I agree with Thomas Jefferson’s vision of American foreign policy: 

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

 A century ago, Europe got itself into trouble and America bailed them out.  We went back two decades later and did it again.  We’ve been babysitting them ever since. 

True, the NATO treaty does not require Europe to assist us in our Iranian endeavor. But they should.  The missiles launched by Iran could have reached Paris or Bonn but not New York. The oil bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz was headed for them, not us. 

What brings the issue to a head is not their unwillingness to help, but their inability.  The British navy has a dozen operational vessels.  French, Spanish, and Italian air forces claim 400 combat aircraft each, but how many are operational and how many have the legs to reach the Middle East?  How many German tanks?

NATO was formed with eyes East toward Russia but The Fulda Gap is no longer the threat. President Trump is correct that the United States should reconsider its membership in NATO. And then let’s talk about the United Nations.

Joe Doakes

 

Even as NATO’s civilian populations swelled, their militaries shrank to – I’m not kidding – 1/6 of their 1992 size. They shifted their missions to “peacekeeping”, and treated their militaries accordingly – becoming global mall cops.

Hey, Eurotrash.  Meet Americans.  

We’re pretty famous for not letting each other get captured by barbarians:

Aw, shucks.  But no, our greatest military success of all time was liberating this weasel’s homeland and the rest of Europe, in a war we didn’t start but that the French could have ended in 1939 before it really got going.  

Anyway, yeah – that’s us. Once we lost 18 men trying to get back a single chopper pilot – and he was already dead .

So – we lost two MC130s, each costing $114M, plus three Kiowa “Little Bird” choppers that couldn’t be loaded out in time.   To save one guy.   

To a European Air Force, that’d be a crippling loss to their fleet. 

To the US, it means we’re down to 57 MC130s.  

Now – if you’re a Euro fighter pilot, what does this tell you?

Although I wouldn’t worry too hard. If you’re a European pilot operating outside of Continental Europe, you’re gonna have to have American support to have gotten there in the first place. So you’ll probably get rescued too. By Americans.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Trump is threatening to send 10,000 troops to Iran, boots on the ground,  which moderate Republicans fear would be crossing a “red line” and would cost Republicans the midterm elections.

The fear is that if we lose seats in the midterm elections, then we won’t have power so we won’t be able to get Presidential appointments confirmed or judges confirmed or the Save Act passed or DHS funded.

Which would be different from now, how, exactly?

Maybe the problem is not lack of Congressional power but lack of willingness to use what power we have. That problem won’t get solved by backing down from Iran. 

Joe Doakes

 

Yep. I think we’re past the point where timidity is the prescription for the midterms.

The most reliable weapon in the arsenal of anyone at war with the United States is Americans – specifically Americans of the left and, lately, the “horseshoe right”, who’ve pretty much taken Jane Fonda’s mantel and run with it.  

The Mullahs knows this – it almost worked for them in re Gaza.  

And I’m pretty sure they’re counting on it working again – and that it’s behind the missile “attack” on Diego Garcia over the weekend.  

Launching two missiles at a target like that is like having your six year old nephew throw the first punch in a brawl.  It’d take a pretty serious “saturation” attack and/or a lot of luck to get anything onto that airfield that’d explode.  

And whoever fired the missiles had to know that.   The target wasn’t the B2s or B52s.  It was X, MSNow and Tucker Carlson.  

Oh yeah – and nations, especially nations that Mossad penetrated decades ago, don’t likely just arf up a missile that doubles the known range overnight, do they?

Not really, no.  

The target wasn’t bombers. It was an influence bomb.

War is hell. 

I’m not going to be out there chanting “USA! USA!”. War generally means a lot of suffering and misery for the people who *didn’t* start it. It’s nothing to celebrate. 

Put a pin in that thought. We’ll come back to it. 

So, about some of the stuff I’m seeing on social media about this weekend’s happenings:

1. “Congress needs to approve this kind of thing”

Forget for a moment that no President, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, including Obama, has gone to Congress *before* going medieval since Harry S. Truman. 

Let’s go back to December 11, 1941. Remember when Congress declared war on Germany and Italy? 

Yeah? You do? Liar. They didn’t. 

They didn’t have to. Germany declared war on us. When someone goes to war *against us*, we don’t have to declare anything. 

Now – did Iran *declare* war against us? I mean, they stormed our embassy, kidnapped its staff and held them hostage for a year and a half (an act of war all by itself – even Jimmy Carter figured that out eventually), funded and equipped proxies that blew up our Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982, funded other proxies and murdered many Americans all over the world between then and 2003, and covertly but directly supported attacks on US troops in Iraq; they perfected the modern “IED”, and Iranian money (and sometimes troops) were directly responsible for the deaths of 600 US servicepeople and indirectly for many more. And that’s just their attacks on America; their proxies conquered Lebanon (once a moderate, pluralistic nation), Yemen (which was not, but which they drove even further back into barbarism), and were the prime funders of Hamas through years of rocket attacks on Israel, 2-4 Intifadas, and October 7. 

So – do we need a notarized form to tell us that Iran considered *itself* at war with the US? 

Don’t get me wrong – I would very much like Congress to vote on this. I want to get votes on record. But I don’t care how “libertarian” you are – responding to acts of war against the US is a legitimate executive branch role. 

2. “Heyyyyy! Trump ran on being the ‘peace’ President!”

Yep. And the Middle East is the least peaceful place on earth, and with Al Quaeda pretty much vanquished most of that war (see above) has come to us courtesy of Iran; the *many* attacks on Israel by Hamas, Hezb’allah, the Houthis, the Iran/Iraq war that may have killed a million, the civil war in Lebanon that saw a modern, moderate, prosperous multireligious society destroyed with tens of thousands of dead, and replaced by a mini-Iran, the Yemeni, Libyan and Syrian civil wars that’ve claimed perhaps a million lives between them. 

And let’s not forget internal peace. Iran’s government had murdered it’s own people well into the six digit range over the past five decades. The Shah’s secret police were really nasty – but the “Revolutionary Guards” were much, much worse in terms of numbers and, yes, cruelty over time. 

Will removing the Mullahs make the middle east more peaceful or less? 

Oh, yeah – Russia is about to lose its main supplier of drones to shoot at Ukraine, and China just got a big warning sign about invading Taiwan (not to mention the very real chance that the US could cut off China’s supply of oil, especially given the removal of Venezuela). So it’s not just the Middle East. 

3. “It’s *reckless!*”

You know what’s reckless AND pointless? Responding to a terror attack that kills dozens of Americans and hundreds of other people by shooting a cruise missile at some empty tents and calling it square. That’s what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did – “sent messages” that, if you got us made enough, we might get angry. At best, it killed some terrorist foot soldiers; at worst, it convinced them that we were impotent – that they could, I dunno, crash planes into our skyscrapers and Pentagon without worrying too much. That all they had to do was hang on; they had plenty of red shirts for us to kill off. They didn’t care. 

But now, with Sulemani, Maduro, El Mecia and the Mullahs, we’re doing it different; we’re taking out the head of the snake. War is hell, indeed – but if you’re going to do it, taking out the leadership makes a whole lot more sense than killing bag men, camels or empty tents. We’re not trying to “Send messages” to people who answer their voice mail less often that Gen-Zs. We’re sending it to the foot soldiers: “See what happened to your leaders? You’ve got a chance. Take it”. 

Think of it this way: if the US and UK could have killed Hitler, Göring, Himmer, Göbbels, Seyss-Inquart and the rest of the leadership, and skipped Warsaw, Rotterdam, the Blitz, Barbarossa, Stalingrad, Hamburg and Dresden and the extermination camps and millions of lives – is that not a better plan *humanity as a whole*?

4. “He’s acting like a dictator”

He’s doing what Obama did. I was about to say “exactly what Obama did”, but that’d be false: Obama did a lot more of it, but it was a lot less effective. It – his policies and those of Big Guy after him – set the permission structure that led *directly* to Yemen, the Russo-Ukraine war, October 7, and were (and may still) lead to China invading Taiwan. 

5. “Regime change is bad, and we suck at it”

We certainly had a 20 year losing streak. 

But, er, remember Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Georgia, the eastern third of Germany and, eventually, Ukraine ? The people there will tell you we’re pretty GOOD at regime change when we do it right. 

6. “I mean, overthrowing governments to change the regime”

Like, Poland? It was, to borrow a phrase, “mostly peaceful” – but the US, UK, Germany, the Vatican and the *AFL-CIO* joined forces to undermine the Polish government. It was unironically mostly peaceful – ZOMO did all the killing – but it most definitely overthrew the government and changed the regime. 

So let’s give ourselves a couple of retrospective “W”s. The people of Poland, Estonia and Czechia sure do. 

7. “What about the schoolgirls we bombed!”

Nobody outside the Iran State News Service is reporting that yet. As loathsome as America’s mainstream media is, the ISNS is an *official* propaganda ministry. This time yesterday they were also saying Ayatollah Khamenei was alive and well and leading the troops at the front (?). To the extent there HAS been any independent investigation, there are reports that the school was next to an IRGC base. So did it happen? We don’t know – and when I say “we”, that means “neither of us”. Like I said – war is hell; it is inherently arbitrary, capricious and cruel. Like the mullahs – who, given the context, we’d *really* best make sure are gone for good. 

And if you’ve skipped past the murders of 32,000 Iranians in the streets, and likely hundreds or thousands more in prison, not to mention the many tens of thousands murdered over the past 47 years, let’s just say my respect for your point is, er, “nuanced”. 

Let’s get this over with, and help Iranians build themselves a free country.

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Recently watched the Amazon Prime movie “Heads of State” starring Idris Elba as Prime Minister of the UK and John Cena as President of the United States.  They join forces to defeat the bad guys who want the US out of the NATO alliance.  

One of the bad guys gives a moving speech explaining the plan and the most amusing thing happened:  I found myself cheering for the bad guys. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Pretty good movie but a massive propaganda failure. 

Joe Doakes

Every time I’m tempted to re-up Prime, I hear something like this.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails

The polar map of the world shows why Greenland is of strategic importance to defend the United States from Russia, about on a par with Alaska.

Pull the military out of Europe and put them in Greenland.  Not tanks amd troops but bombers and missiles. Radar. Submarines. Long range drones controlled from AWACs airplanes. Snowmobile mounted lasers. Whatever.

Germany can have the tanks, the tanks weren’t defending us anyway.  Europe is on its own. America First. 

This is genius. I wonder who thought of it.  No better still,  I wonder who sold the idea to Trump? 

 

Makes sense. 

Might also be cool – as it were – if we can sell Hollywood on Greenland being the latest “in” thing, like the Pacific Diet.  

Not out of any strategic imperative. Just because I want to see most of Hollywood stuck out on a glacier, like those “influencers” from the “Fyre Festival”.  

Joe Doakes, once of Como Park, emails:

Media reports Trump told Zelinsky, “Accept Putins terms or be destroyed.” 

Trump denies he said it.  That’s too bad.  It’s the correct answer and should have been given nine months ago.  End the killing.  Surrender.  Live to fight another day. 

 

Gonna disagree with Joe there.  

It won’t end the killing.  It’ll just defer it ’til Putin, encouraged rather than sated by the western cave-in, decides to go after Estonia, counting on a NATO that’s too weak to do anything about it and too cowed to risk getting nuked.   NATO doesn’t have the conventional force to resist, and the US doesn’t have the ability to move enough troops to Europe in a hurry to be any kind of deterrent in the near term.  

And when, not if, NATO caves on Estonia, then come Latvia, Lithuania, and the other nearly-disarmed NATO countries.   Finland and Poland would be tougher nuts to crack, but neither can really do much to the Russians either.  

Now you might say “not our circus, not our monkeys”.   Maybe you’re right (although I disagree).  But I think it’s wishful thinking that giving up in Ukraine will do more than validate Putin to do more.  

I caught part of Secretary Hegseth’s speech yesterday.   

I can see where the whole “Make the military a military again” think might get liberals exercised – they tend to see the military as a social program with some regrettable weapons involved.  

The part I heard sounded like it could have been an answer to Edwin Luttwak’s “Pentagon and the Art of War”, in which the historian noted that the Pentagon was overgeneraled, and heavily focused on maintaining a bureaucracy capable of re-fighting World War 2.   

Over generaled?  At the height of the Cold War, the US millitary had roughly one flag rank officer (general or admiral) per 2,500 or so troops.  

Today it’s close to one per 1,000.   

The parts I heard – re-instating male-centered standards for combat arms troops (infantry/armor/cavalry/artillery/combat engineering and the like) in particular – landed with this non-veteran.

Although I suspect the real audience was in Moscow and Beijing (Teheran caught the early show).  

Now, Trump’s bit about sending the military to fight “in the city?”  

Shiny new quarter says he knows it’s preposterous – but he’s trying to get Democrats to support criminals against, ahem, the US military as well as the citizens of those cities.  Hard to see where that’s a bad ideal politically, even if it’s balderdash legally (outside the POTUS’s Article 1 Section 8 power to protect federal facilities and operations – which will no doubt get defined to a fine sheen in court). 

You can, of course, count on Big Left to get the wrong point…:

…although to be fair it’s only Rupar, and he’s too stupid to understand that here, Hegseth was right. The only military that deters aggression is the one people are afraid to test.

Russia didn’t give to farts in the breeze about the German, French or Italian militaries – full of overweight NCOs and planes that don’t fly and units without armored vehicles because NATO turned into a “peacekeeping” force from 1993 to 2020 – when he attacked Ukraine.  Poland, maybe, but Poland can’t wage an independent war against Russia by itself, much to Poland’s chagrin, I suspect.  

December 6, 1941: “A modern war would inevitably turn into a trench quagmire like the First World War”

June 24, 1950: “The next war will be, at best, a mobile industrial clash of titans, and likeliy end with mutual nuclear annihilation”

March 7, 1965: “This war is going to be a conventional war to contain Communist aggression”

August 1, 1990: “This war is going to devolve into a quagmire that will destroy a generation and enervate a nation”

October 3, 1993: “American technological power and training will enable us to walk all over these primitive tribesmen, and restore order just the way we did in Kuwait”

October 18, 2001: “As we discovered in Mogadishu, the Islamist terrorist’s willingness to die will make any war between us an endless quagmore

March 19, 2003: “American technological prowess and our experience liberating Afghanistan in record time will enable us to prevail against the Iraqi Army, Republican Guard and Fedayeen in short order.

June 22, 2025: “Iran will inevitably be another Iraq”.

Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,  I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”.

Not much I can say or do about the former. 

But as to the latter?

Just War Doctrine outlines reasons that war might be morally justified. It requires a legitimate cause (like self-defense), proportionality in response (there’s your bugaboo right there), and due discretion to minimize harm to non-combatants. It also says you need a legitimate authority to declare war, a reasonable chance of success, and war as a last resort after running out of peaceful alternatives. The doctrine is an academic attempt to balance the moral complexities of armed conflict with the pursuit of peace.

I’ve seen a few of my liberal Christian friends dunk on the Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuke program and military, even though by any *rational* measure, the Israeli strikes satisfy all of these criteria.

Self defense? Iran has been bankrolling terror against the US (not to mention Israel)  for over forty years. The Marine Embassy bombing? Funding and arming Hamas, Hizb’allah, the Palestinian Authority, the Houthis and other terror movements throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia? Funding all the Intifadas, paying big money to the families of suicide bombers, funding decades of rockets attacks on Israel (and others), having their fingers directly on the October 7 pogrom, and having “eradicating Israel” as a foundational goal (inclding for their nuke program)?

Too many of my liberal Christian friends seem to have gone past “Just War” doctrine and straight on to “Groundhog Day Doctrine” – forgetting all of history when they wake up every morning and starting the entire Middle East conflict over from a clean slate every morning. Israel “attacked Iran” – 40-odd years of terrorism, direct attacks, and apocalyptic ,eliminationist rhetoric be darned.

Proportionality? Forget for a moment that it’s not only an academic concept when actual self-defense is involved – “proportionality” taking to the ridiculous extreme too many history-challenged liberal Christians do, it actually makes wars worse and less “just”. Think about it: a “proportional” response to Pearl Harbor would have involved sinking Japanese ships and calling it even; in 1939, the Allies should have retaken Poland and left everything else in place; Israel should presumably send goons into rural Iran on an anti-Farsi pogrom, taking hostages and killing 1200-ish people – in all cases, leaving the *root cause* of the wars (Japanese and German expansionism, elimination antisemitism) in place.

But you’d have a hard time showing a more “proportional” response in all of military history than Israel’s attack on Iran – thus far, at least. No carpet-bombing, no “Search and Destroy” missions through villages – no conventional ground troops at all. And hardly any contact with civilians outside the nuke program at all (it’s likely 90% of the Iranian population has had no contact with the war outside whatever media reports they’re getting.

They’re not a lot different than Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, in their own way.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

 

Joe Doakes

As I noted the other day, I support an independent Ukraine.

But there’s an elephant in the proverbial room that is the European continent – and it makes sense, historically, that it falls to a Pole to point it out:

Not only does Western Europe outnumber Russia by almost the same margin by which Russia outnumbers Ukraine – but the combined NATO/EU economies are roughly eight times the size of Russia’s.   

That is literally every single factor that they need in place to deter Russia back behind its borders and learning some manners…

…if they decide to muster any of that economic power and, more importantly, social will do do it. 

Which, outside of Poland, the Baltics, Czechia and (socially) Hungary, I just don’t see, barring some AfD/UKIP revolution in coming years.

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

I’ve been saying the American government should put Americans first and only after all of our problems are solved, consider taking care of people in other nations.  After watching the Zelensky blow-up in the Oval Office, I’ve concluded I was wrong.  The American government should take care of Americans. Period.

The American government should never give war guarantees to other nations.  That promotes “moral hazard” by making Europeans think they can act irresponsibly because America will step in to defend them.  It’s the classic little brother picking a fight knowing big brother is right around the corner. Zelensky demanded war guarantees in the form of American troops to fight Russian troops on Ukrainian soil.  Trump – to his credit – was smart enough not to give in.  Hell, the only reason there was a White House ceremony at all, was so Trump could claim he wasn’t “giving” Ukraine aid for free, he was getting mineral rights in return, similar to our deals in the Middle East (we have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend the royal family from enemies in Iran and uprising by their own people; in exchange, we get access to their oil, literally a blood-for-oil deal-with-the-devil made 100 years ago).

Now that the minerals deal has blown up, Trump has the perfect opportunity to walk away from defending Ukraine in specific and Europe in general.  Withdraw from NATO, let Europe sort out its own problems, we have enough of our own.   And not just Europe.  About that Saudi deal – do we still need it?  Are the terms still fair to us?  I’d like DOGE to take a look at all similar arrangements, worldwide.

More than military aid, the American government should never give financial aid to other nations.  Money is “fungible,” meaning the funds the foreign government would have spent taking care of its own people can now be shifted to buying a new Rolls Royce for the dictator.   That’s not fair to Americans. Other nations’ own governments should take care of them.   If their governments are unable to take care of their people, that’s what charity is for.  Americans are the most generous, most giving people in the world, but we want to know that our charity is doing good, not simply lining pockets.

Getting government out of the war guarantee and charity businesses would not only save a ton of money, it is the first step in restoring constitutional government.  Zelensky handed Trump the perfect opportunity and Elon Musk’s team is the perfect tool.  Now is our chance.

Joe Doakes

 

I see value to alliances…

…that act with integrity, themselves, and are first and foremost in America’s best interests.

I think a NATO that acts with integrity – like, maintaining its capability to defend itself – is in America’s interest. 

The NATO we have today?  Not so much.

An alliance with Poland, Finland and the Baltic states?  Places that care about upholding Western civilization against enemies military and social, and back it up not only with spending and hardware but national attitude?  Logistics notwithstanding, that would, or could,  work.

On the one hand, I supported a free and independent Ukraine back when the same people sporting Ukrainian flags on their social media profiles were confidently declaiming that the USSR was here to stay and that Walter Duranty deserved his Pulitzer. 

On the other hand, the war in Ukraine has devolved into a World War 1 style trench-war stalemate, with advances in artillery and other technology (drones instead of machine guns, in this case) making the slashing mobile warfare of the recent past (horses then, tanks now) difficult to suicidal.  Ukraine isn’t going to reconquer Crimea or Donbas, anymore than Mexico is going to re-take Arizona.   While I support Ukraine, I’m not sure how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die, or how much western material has to get poured into the meat grinder, to continually reinforce that fact. 

On the other other hand, in the wake of last week’s “fiasco” – which part of me still thinks was 50-100% staged – it’s good that Europe is talking about picking up more slack.  Hopefullly they’ll re-shore some of the defense manufacturing capacity they’ve outsourced. 

On the other, other other hand?   Ukraine is going to depend on the UK and France for its long-term safety? 

Poland would like a word with them. 

From a Trump rally last night

The decline of the American military is a serious problem.

Crude but merciless satire may not be the solution.  But hopefully it helps lead us there.

After well over a week, the Administration is putting our money where it’s mouth is as re Hurricane Helene.

Just kidding:

It’s sending money to get Hezb’allah back on its feet. 

It’s been a year since the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 Israelis – the worst pogrom since World War 2. 

It’s a year that’s made me even more ashamed of America’s foreign policy than the previous 2.5 years of POTATUS and Harris had managed to do. 

But it tracks with the same I feel when I look at what the American left has done:

The number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. has surged over 200 percent this past year, as Israel’s war against Hamas sparked an outpouring of Jewish hatred on college campuses and elsewhere.

From October 7, 2023, to September 24, 2024, the U.S. saw more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents, an increase of over 200 percent from the same period a year before, which saw 3,325 incidents, according to preliminary data released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a left-wing antisemitism watchdog…

…On college campuses, roughly 1,200 antisemitic incidents took place, a 500 percent increase from the year before, when the ADL had recorded about 200 of them. Earlier this year, anti-Israel demonstrations and tent encampments formed on college campuses nationwide, especially after Columbia University’s anti-Israel encampment received national attention and required the NYPD to break it up.

Antisemitic activity and outright advocacy for the extermination of Israel were common around the encampment sites. A prominent example was the Jew-free zones at the University of California, Los Angeles. A judge ruled in August that UCLA must stop aiding and abetting the antisemitic campus activists who attempted to prevent Jews from passing by certain parts of campus unless they disavowed Israel. UCLA initially decided to fight the ruling but quickly pulled its appeal.

Outside of college campuses, rallies across American cities often featured terrorist banners and chants calling for the destruction of Israel. The ADL found that more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents occurred at anti-Israel demonstrations, where protesters chanted in support of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

The potential of a Harris/Walz administration that continues passive-aggressively coddling Iranian aggression seem to be prompting the Israelis to swing for the proverbial fences, to try to resolve the issue before Harris screws it all up, if worse comes to worst. 

Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park, emails:

Biden says Americans do not need firearms to resist government tyranny because we don’t have F15s so can’t win anyway.

Biden surrendered to the Taliban.  How many F15s did they have?

Asking for a friend

Joe Doakes 

Ooh, I can answer that! None!

Lots and lots of other stuff – enough to resist a pretty good-sized government, in fact.

We were told that Joe Biden is so on top of things, he can type in different languages on different iPhones at the same time.

Remember this?

The most credible people ever – dare I say, our “best and brightest” – assured us that Joe Biden at 82 is like Chuck Norris at 40:

And then came Thursday night:

And it took about four hours for all of that “Joe Biden is a modern titan!” to vanish down the memory hole:

Bear in mind, that the Democrat establishment is panicked about their candidate’s electoral viability.

Not the fact that he’s the guy with “the football”.

Not the fact that America’s enemies, who’ve been feasting on America’s diminishing potency, have got to be looking at the fact that America is led by a senile man, his power-mad Edith Wilson-style wife, and a coterie of useless Ivy League political staffers and grifters, and seeing that the shelf date might just end in 2025, not 2029. And maybe planning accordingly:

U.S. military bases in Europe were put on a heightened state of alert over the weekend as installations urged vigilance among their members. At U.S. European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, the Army garrison on Sunday issued a communitywide alert that the force protection threat level was elevated to condition “Charlie” until further notice. Similar directives were sent to other bases in Germany, including the Army’s Rheinland-Pfalz and Ramstein Air Base, which together form the largest U.S. military community overseas. The Rheinland-Pfalz garrison alert includes Baumholder and outlying installations in Romania and Bulgaria. Aviano Air Base in Italy also rose its condition level to Charlie, and other installations in Italy introduced enhanced security measures. The Charlie threat level “applies when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating some form of terrorist action or targeting against personnel or facilities is likely,” according to the Army’s website.

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2024-06-30/us-military-bases-germany-terrorism-threat-14342506.html
Source – Stars and Stripes

I have a sneaking suspicion Iran and its proxies, and Red China and theirs, are seeing a six month opening to make hummus or kimchi while the sun shines on a world where the keepers of Pax Americana have taken an ice cream break.

Some are saying “I told you so”:

And they – we – are right, because that same media that ran interference and told us not to believe our lying eyes, is trying to gaslight us in the other direction:

So what options do they have?

Pulling the plug on Biden may not be as simple as just having him step aside, even if he releases the 99% of the convention delegates currently committed to him:

That brings us back to [Bill Maher’s proposal, in the post linked] of simply handing the nomination to the nearest white male while overlooking Biden’s current running mate, the black woman Biden selected to be the next in line. The center-Left part of the party might — might — go along with that idea out of desperation. The progressive Left, as Matthews astutely points out, would go into an utter meltdown. Harris’ allies don’t want to win by giving up any power at all. 

And in a real sense, they’d be correct to oppose it. Harris may not have been on the primary ballots this year, but Biden won 99% of the delegates with Harris explicitly remaining on the ticket. Newsom never even bothered to enter the race. If Biden pulls out, those delegates may be released in a legal sense, but Harris and her progressive allies have a very good argument that primary voters endorsed her as well as Biden. And you’d better believe that the same progressives that are conducting Occupy operations on college campuses and highways to support radical jihadi terrorists in Gaza will show up in much more force if Democrats pull a back-room switcheroo that leaves Harris without a seat when the music ends. 

And you’d better believe the center-Left knows it, too…having anointed her as capable of being One Heartbeat Away in not one but two presidential cycles now, Democrats can’t just toss her into the garbage now. How do they explain her being competent enough to be Biden’s backup but not to run in his place?

Long story short – the Dems may have no choice but to triple down on gaslighting the public. They can count on it working with 33% of the population, anyway.

I’m going to take a break from dunking on the left’s hysteria and myopia to dunk on some of my own peeps.

Some, broadly conservative, are howling with rage that a Russian “fleet” – a frigate, a submarine, a replenlishment ship and, uh, a fleet tugboat, have been exercising in the Caribbean.

It marks the largest show of force by the Russians with their longstanding ally Cuba in many years. The US assesses that the Kazan does not have nuclear weapons on board, a US official said.

The vessels will carry out a five-day official visit to the Caribbean island – a show of Russian force just 90 miles from Florida as tensions rise between the US and Russia over the war in Ukraine.

And some – again, broadly right of center – are losing their minds.

First: back in the ’80s, this sort of thing was confined to “days ending in ‘Y'”. Overflights, reconaissance planes approaching our ships and aircraft, Soviet spy ships and subs parked off American ports? Unless shots were fired, it was all in a day’s sparring.

And – they brought a tugboat. Because today’s Russian ships are as likely to break down as fight.

Indeed, it’s probably more an opportunity than a threat:

The actual threat is the illegal immigrants.

Normally I’d call this evidence that Joe Biden is the worst president of my life time, Foreign Policy division:

Of course, that’s not quite true; Obama is still the president, in every way that matters.

So Obama remains comfortably ahead of Jimmy Carter.

Believe me – the Biden Administration has kept on giving me moments; the Afghan debacle,, the Nurembadelphia speech; yapping about “shinkflation” of potato chips.

But this may be the big daddy of them all.

So far.

Biden, as we noted yesterday, is playing pattycake with military supplies to Israel as it fights an existential war against Iranian proxies in Gaza:

They are most particularly threatening to cut off supplies of the precision-guided weapons that make it feasible to fight an urban war without indiscriminately slaughtering the civilians that Hamas are using for human shields.

Biden defends his action by saying he wants to emphasize “Defensive’ weapons, like “Iron Dome”.

The problem with seeing defense as being entirely about defending is that it gives the initiative to the attacker.

Let’s say you are worried about a gang of 2-3 people who’ve been doing home invasions. You have two doors (and no windows large enough to let someone larger than Nicole Mitchell) into your house. You have your significant other. All covered, right?

Well, sort of. The home invaders control who comes, and when, and through which door or doors. You have to defend just as actively against them at noon on Wednesday at at 4AM on Sunday morning. And when they come, it’ll be at a time of their choosing, through the door (or, having read about Nicole Mitchell) window of their choosing.

So much better to hit the home invaders first – to choose the time and place of your showdown, and not have to worry nearly as much about your windows and doors, right?

Of course, if it was you and your significant other, literally, you’d be breaking the law – but the metaphor holds for nations. Saying a nation can “just defend their borders, using only defensive, not offensive, weapons”, is simplistic, even childishly naive. It presumes that attackers are stupid, and will attack you exactly when and how you predicted.

Unfortunately, attackers are creative; they’ll attack you in ways you never expect as you stand ready to defend against an attack they never intended to make, or never expected to see again, or by finding weaknesses in your defenses they can exploit at a time and place of their choosing.

“We’ll just defend ” is the fallback position of the illiterate at best, the deluded and bufuddled at worst.

Or, in the case of our current, vile administration, both.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

US put a hold on an ammunition shipment to Israel.

The United States is now objectively supporting terrorism. 

Joe Doakes

When you remember that:

• Biden’s biggest funders (other than sending 10% to the Big Guy) are people like George Soros, who detest Israel, and
• Biden needs that “Uncommitted” pro-genocide vote to “come home” by November…

…it all starts to make sense.