Saturday Miscellany

First, remember Stephanie Ruhle. She is the MSNBC pseudo-journalist who scored a Kamala Harris sit-down interview by saying something stupid.

When arguing about whether or not Harris should answer questions from the press, Ruhle told Bret Stephens that she did not have to do so because we do not live in Nirvana.

So, Ruhle interviewed Harris and did her best to run cover for the mentally challenged candidate:

One could watch and say she didn't give a clear and direct answer. And that's okay, because we're not talking about clear and direct issues.

But at least we could thrill to the fact that Harris, like a diligent student, had learned a new word. She repeated it over and over again, apparently because that was a way to let people see that she did not understand it.

For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars,' she first replied….

 and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people,' 

It is not merely that she is remotely qualified to hold the highest office in the land. She is a walking embarrassment, an argument against democracy.

Second, Stephenie Ruhle has gone the way of Oprah. She imagined that Harris could not possibly be as stupid as people said she was, so she allowed Harris to make a fool of her.

Third, from Alex Jones, a point that I made in a post on Tuesday of this week:

Kamala Harris is a soulless, truly empty flesh bag who was admittedly a sex operative...it's clear that Kamala Harris was a political sex operative. Willie Brown's talked about it all of it. And then she was so soulless and would put innocent people in prison, know they were innocent on death row, home invasions, looking for legal guns, saying she'd do it. Then when she was the attorney general, she would put pro-lifers that exposed the illegal killing of babies right at nine months when they were already born and the selling of their organs, including still beating baby hearts. She would put the journalists in jail for many years. That's her famous cases. So the system has seen her, has passed her around. They know she's super stupid. And they can bring her in like Biden blame everything that bad happens on her. And so she is the greatest example of a mindless puppet that they want to put in to further demoralize us to think that that's America, to make America a further joke around the world. So that's who Kamala Harris is, a clear and present danger and a meat puppet."

Fourth, you may or may not be aware of it, but interesting things are happening in Argentina. A new president Javier Milei has managed to cancel many of the remaining socialist economic policies that had damaged the country and had produced rampant inflation.

This week, Milei was in New York addressing the United Nations. Here is an excerpt from his speech:

"In this very house, that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed the entry of bloody dictatorships, like those of Cuba and Venezuela, without the slightest reproach.

"In this very house, that claims to defend the rights of women, it allows countries that punish their women for showing skin, to enter the committee for the elimination of discrimination against women.

"In this very house, there has been systematic voting against the state of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism."

Fifth, and then there is the USNS ship, The Little Big Horn, a replenishment oiler that went aground in the Gulf of Oman. Since it was the only oiler the Navy has, this was not good news.

As for the salient issue, who was in charge of this ship, we note that it was not being run by the Pentagon, but by the Department of Transportation, led by Pete Buttigieg. It belongs to the nation’s maritime fleet.

Who is directly in charge of said fleet? The responsible party is Read Admiral Ann Phillips. She has said nothing about the latest accident.

Sixth, comparing China and Russia in the Financial Times, Gideon Rachman makes an interesting point or two.

Amer­ica’s sin­gu­lar strength is its mil­it­ary might and its will­ing­ness to offer secur­ity guar­an­tees to its allies. The US has col­lect­ive defence agree­ments with 56 coun­tries around the world — in Europe, Asia and the Amer­icas. It also provides cru­cial mil­it­ary aid to other coun­tries, such as Israel and Ukraine, that are not formal treaty allies.

China, by con­trast, has a mutual defence treaty with just one coun­try — North Korea. Unlike the US, it also has ter­rit­orial dis­putes with many of its neigh­bours, which tends to push them in the dir­ec­tion of Amer­ica.

But, that’s not all, folks.

Aus­tralia’s Lowy Insti­tute cal­cu­lates that 128 coun­tries now trade more with China than with the US. Over the last dec­ade, China has spent more than a tril­lion dol­lars in over 140 coun­tries on infra­struc­ture invest­ment, becom­ing the world’s largest cred­itor and the world’s largest trad­ing power in the pro­cess. The res­ults are on dis­play all over the world, whether it is high-speed rail in Indone­sia, ports and bridges in Africa or an inter­con­tin­ental high­way cross­ing cent­ral Asia.

West­ern coun­tries can and do point to the flaws in China’s Belt and Road Ini­ti­at­ive, not­ably the huge debts owed to Chinese lenders that weigh on coun­tries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Zam­bia. But for devel­op­ing coun­tries that are seek­ing to make rapid eco­nomic pro­gress, the Chinese offer remains attract­ive.

As Daniel Runde, a former USAID offi­cial, told Con­gress this year: “From project iden­ti­fic­a­tion to sign­ing, com­men­cing and com­plet­ing — China is much faster and cheaper than the United States at vir­tu­ally every stage.”

Anyway, we all know that a Chinese submarine sank the other day. We concluded that the Chinese are militarily well behind us, and that we can now break out the champagne.

The Rachman observation suggests that we ought to be a little more circumspect.

Seventh, Franklin Foer is puzzled at the failure of the Biden administration Middle East policy. It takes a special form of blindness not to see the obvious, but clearly Foer cannot bring himself to affix blame where blame is required.

Keep in mind that the Democratic mantra is: it’s someone else’s fault.

Over at Pajamas Media Stephen Green lays out the anatomy of a massive foreign policy failure.

Less than one month into his solitary, sad little term, Biden lifted former president Donald Trump’s restoration of U.N. sanctions on Iran. The White House and the State Steno Pool sold the move as something that "could help Washington move toward rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement aimed at reining in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program." Trump had withdrawn from Barack Obama's "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018, accusing Iran of serious violations.

Trump had Iran broke and boxed in. Biden unleashed the Kraken.

In addition to that, Biden restored US funding to UNRWA (a virtual arm of Hamas) and removed the Houthis from the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist lists that Trump had finally put them on late in his term.

But perhaps the most bone-headed move was Biden's rejection of Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner's Abraham Accords, negotiated under Donald Trump's auspices between Israel and a growing number of Arab states.

How could they be so stupid? Simple. They were so completely enthralled by the notion that Trump is evil that they felt obliged to undo everything Trump had done, indiscriminately.

The result is visible on our television screens every day.

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