Posts Tagged → Ohio
Does JD Vance have what it takes to be president?
Like nearly everyone, or probably literally everyone, on my side of the ideological spectrum, I have enjoyed watching JD Vance’s political life grow from infancy to Vice President of the USA over the past few years.
The guy went from rural poor house to successful book author (“Hillbilly Elegy”) to state politics to US Senator to Vice President in a short amount of time. Pretty much the American dream. Most people have to spend a lot of time to get this far in politics.
Another dream: Unlike 95% of former Vice Presidents, Vance has been greatly empowered by President Trump to have a robust public life on key policy issues. Historically, most Vice Presidents are shunted aside, or are given vague ribbon cutting ceremonies at best. Under Trump, Vance has been all over the place, all around the planet, speaking his mind, carrying the administration’s messages on fair trade, free speech and Western Civilization, etc.
Vance has thus gained traction among many on the right, who were unhappy with his past vilification of Trump, which we saw as un-earned and more of a publicity stunt than a legitimate policy critique.
Vance’s throaty America First stance certainly gets people like me standing on our feet in full applause. Over and over, Vance has said what conservatives think has been absent from most Republican leaders (or any other elected officials, for that matter) for decades. So, until a week ago, I and many others in my corner were excited about Vance’s prospects as a 2028 presidential candidate.
And then came Vance’s openly arrogant and pompous declaration about Israel’s control of Judea and Samaria, both the current administrative arrangement and the prospective legal annexation. For a guy like Vance, who earlier this year proudly championed the prospective outright American annexation of Greenland, by legal or military means, and who prides himself on maintaining a rational, logical, linear policy perspective, this statement was a non-sequitor surprise.
There are few if any Americans living in Greenland.
America has never claimed Greenland as the USA has claimed Puerto Rico, Guam, or other territories we captured in war.
Israel is 8,019 square miles in size. Greenland is 836,331 square miles in size, literally over a hundred times the size of Israel. Judea and Samaria are the historic homeland of the Jewish People; they comprise 2,183 square miles, nearly 1/400th the size of Greenland, and are home to about a million Jews.
Many of the current Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are built on the ancient ruins of former Jewish settlements dating back 4,000 years. Jews living there today are not newcomers to the area. Rather, they are de-colonizing it. Fact check alert: Arabs are from Arabia, Muslims are from Mecca, neither of which are in Judea or Samaria. Muslims and Arabs who live in Judea and Samaria are the colonizers, as they are the colonizers elsewhere across the entire region.
Israel captured Judea and Samaria in a defensive war, and reaffirmed their hold on the area in subsequent defensive wars. To the victor go the spoils of war, in treasure and in land; this is elementary international law. Israel has every right to control or annex Judea and Samaria. Vance himself invokes this very same principle in his argument for America taking over Greenland (which I support).
To watch Vance on camera on this subject is painful. He comes across as a petulant, arrogant bully, back to where he was when he vilified Trump just a few years ago.
Vance actually said that he was “insulted” that Israel’s democratically elected parliament had passed a bill to annex Judea and Samaria. Why would JD Vance feel personally insulted about the sovereign act of a soverign democratic nation fighting for its life that has zero to do with him, he, JD Vance, late of 1794 militarily conquered and European colonized Maumee Indian lands in Ohio?
If Vance is so opposed to Israel being in Judea and Samaria, to which they have a 4,000 year old claim, then is he going to make a big showy statement and give back his Ohio home to the Maumee Indians? We all know the answer to this. Vance likely believes that the conquest of American Indian tribes and the colonization of their lands is settled business.
Does Vance really think that Israel annexing a small area over which it has maintained control for nearly sixty years is going to somehow hurt the United States?! Even a little bit?
From a rational policy perspective, Vance’s blanket statement on Judea and Samaria is a 180 degree deviation from all of his other American policy statements. Perhaps this is attributable to all of the Qatar money pouring into American politics right now. Or maybe it is attributable to the Vatican’s longstanding antipathy towards Jews, Judaism, and the modern state of Israel. Whatever his reasons for his a-historical rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me statement, Vance is way out of step with Ambassador Mike Huckabee, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the hardest core of American patriots who feel directly connected to Israel, Judea, and Samaria, and who see Qatar’s cash dump into American politics and universities as a huge threat to Western Civilization.
It makes one wonder if JD Vance has what it takes to be our president. An effective president cannot afford to alienate anyone on his side, at least not for long. Trump can get away with pushy bluster, because he is a likable person with a very long track record of positive achievements in both private enterprise and public office. Sometimes his bluster is just that, bluster, to test the waters.
Conversely, Vance’s personal anger about Israel’s one policy looks the equivalent of Joe Biden’s public “I’ll be damned” brag about corruptly quashing Ukraine’s investigation of Burisma and Hunter Biden. This is not presidential stuff, it is not leadership stuff, sad to say. I hope JD Vance fixes this, not just the policy stuff, but his own public performance, his control of his own personal self.
It is one thing to be a heavily battle scarred Donald John Trump and say sh*t, but to be a relative newcomer overnight rock star like Vance, his strange outburst could and should hurt his prospects.
99 Red Flags
Catastrophic Norfolk Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. “President” Biden still has not visited, but he has flown to Ukraine
Waterways and drinking water in East Palestine, Ohio, are badly contaminated. But the federal government says no aid is available to help
Train wreck mushroom cloud hangs over East Palestine, Ohio, whose toxic mess was greatly exacerbated by the way the federal government employees tried to mitigate the toxic chemicals in it
A red flag is used in car racing, team sports, and other activities to indicate a warning about something dangerous, or as a disqualification of some player or person, usually for breaking the rules of the game.
A new genre of “red flag” laws are being used to illegally disarm law abiding Americans, but that is a whole other subject. Even in this case, the term “red flag” serves the same connotation as elsewhere.
Recently America has experienced a whole slew of red flags as both warnings and as DQs. I don’t know how many red flags there have been, but there are easily a hundred of them. Let’s just say for argument’s sake that there are 99 red flags that we all should have seen in the past two years.
Examples of the warning kind include a handful of planes haphazardly and inexplicably flying into food processing plants out in the middle of nowhere, dozens of catastrophic mysterious fires breaking out at food processing plants and chicken farms, mysterious diseases striking large numbers of beef cattle and chickens at ranches and egg laying plants, adulterated chicken feed suppressing egg laying chickens from laying eggs across America for the past six months, and sophisticated attacks on electricity plants and on public water plants.
Now, when any one of these things happens, it is news. Or at least it should be news, and maybe it is news that such a freak event did not make the regular news. But when all of these things happen all of a sudden, across a relatively compact and short amount of time, with huge shockwaves sent through the American food supply chain that end up with empty super market shelves and very high food prices, it is all beyond news. This is happening on purpose. Each of these events is then a huge red flag that something is wrong. Something bad is happening to the infrastructure of our daily American lives, and if we do not understand what is happening, then we will not be able to address it. And if we do not address it, then we Americans will have little or no food to eat or clean water to drink.
When I talk to friends and strangers alike (I talk to strangers all the time) about these apparent overt attacks on our American food supply, I get a couple responses. One is “Wow, I had no idea. I guess that is why I see empty store shelves and high prices. Hmmmmm.” This response indicates the person is starting to think ahead about what this means for them, and what can they do about it. Self preservation in action.
The other response I get is “Really? I had no idea. Oh well.” And this indicates the person is so deeply asleep in the fat of the land that they cannot imagine either going without food, or how they can go about fixing their situation. Some joke about who will starve during a famine or domestic conflict, and it is no joke – these inattentive and incurious people will end up being the designated starvers. They foolishly take everything we have for granted.
The biggest red flag, both as a warning and as a DQ, was last week’s train crash in East Palestine, Ohio. Not sure why or how it crashed, but it happened in the middle of pristine farmland that grows a lot of important crops Americans rely on to eat every day. And then the Biden Administration’s impotent, uncaring non-response to the initial toxic chemical spill and then to the huge toxic mushroom cloud from the administration’s incompetent explosive “fix” that made the spill even worse said everything about what is happening to our country: HUGE RED FLAG alert. Joe Biden is either super incompetently or purposefully destroying American heartland farmland, and he must be disqualified from doing any further damage
Something bad is happening to America, on purpose. These serious domestic attacks are happening at a frequency too high for random accidents. As we see in other sectors, America’s domestic food production is being sabotaged. And this observation is not even taking into account the effect of giant industrial solar construction on pristine farmland all over the east coast. Farmland that is closest to America’s highest population centers is being destroyed, and will not be able to produce food or fiber (or quarry rock for public roads, or grow timber) for many decades to come, if ever again.
I see red flags all over the place. These red flags indicate that America is being failed from within on purpose, by people who are living inside our borders, who want to use their positions to destroy America. Hello, this is your country, and as it goes, so go you and your family.
As the 1970s bumper sticker read – “If you aren’t mad, then you aren’t paying attention.”
Neil Young’s 1970 Protest Song REWRITTEN for 2016!
Following the 1970 fatal violence at Kent State University, Neil Young of Crosby Stills Nash and Young fame performed a song dedicated to his perspective of that sad event. It was written by Patricia Griffin and Robert Plant and published by Universal Music.
Neil Young named his song “Ohio,” a “protest song and counterculture anthem” representative of the Left at that time, and probably today, too. If you remove the lyrics, or replace them as I have here, it’s actually a good song.
Ain’t it funny how what comes around goes around, Mr. Young. Yesterday was the 46th anniversary of Kent State.
“Four Dead in Benghazi”
(Sung to the tune of Ohio)
A Parody by Josh First
Tin soldiers and Clinton coming,
we’re finally at the “T.”
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi.
Gotta get down to it,
Government letting us down,
she should’ve been gone long ago.
What if you knew Chris,
and saw him in the compound,
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Clinton coming,
we’re finally at the “T.”
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi.
ISIS soldiers and Clinton coming,
We’re finally able to see,
this summer I hear the drumming,
Four Dead in Benghazi
Four dead in Benghazi,
Four dead in Benghazi
Four dead in Benghazi….