Chinese Dissident Ends Tim Walz's Stupid ‘Grammar’ Excuse for Stolen Valor ... in Two Sentences

Politics RFK Jr.’s Common Good Populism The independent presidential candidate’s recent speech provided a glimpse of a better politics. Last Friday, in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald J. Trump.  As Kennedy noted, the problem with democracy in America in recent decades has been its absence, decrying the Democratic party’s departure from democratic norms. In defense of what amounts to America’s own “managed democracy” the party erected almost insurmountable barriers to the RFK Jr. candidacy, first by putting up onerous petition signature requirements, then by suing Kennedy’s campaign in court.  The irony of a party obsessed with Russia acting in such a manner should not be lost on anyone; indeed it is unarguable that Russia has indeed used the same methods as today’s Democratic Party. When, for example, Lyubov Sobol (an associate of anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny) sought to enter the Moscow City Council race in 2019, her candidacy was derailed by challenging her ballot petition signatures.  This same device has frequently been used to get rid of other unwanted opposition candidates. In 2018, Pavel Grudinin, a successful businessman and populist, ran for the presidency against Vladimir Putin as a candidate of the reformed Russian communist party. When Grudinin became too threatening to the establishment and started to rise in the polls, the mass media went into action with hit pieces that quickly sidelined him.  Sound familiar? To no one’s surprise, Kennedy’s critics were quick to pounce. Kurt Anderson dismissed Kennedy’s remarks in a vicious, self-serving piece in the Atlantic, while the American University presidential historian Allan Lichtman took to Chris Cuomo’s program and denounced Kennedy’s speech as “the most incoherent endorsement I have ever heard.” Any honest piece about Robert F. Kennedy and his politics must come attached with certain disclaimers: Kennedy himself is an imperfect vessel for a better politics. His campaign, launched with so much promise, foundered on allegations of self-dealing and nepotism. His very real and laudable environmental record is difficult to square with Trump’s own record and the former president’s oft-stated promises to gut environmental regulations. And perhaps most importantly, Kennedy’s position on Israel’s war on Palestine differs little from that of either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—which is to say it is appalling. It is Kennedy’s unqualified endorsement of the most exaggerated and often simply false narrative about Palestine that gives us pause, to say the least.  He evinces a cold indifference to Israel’s actions, supported by the U.S., against the entirety of the Palestinian population. And yet, for all that, in Kennedy’s speech we caught a glimpse of what a common good populism might look like. For one thing, unlike the current Democratic and Republican nominees, he seems to understand that the gravest threats to the country come not from beyond our borders—in the form of an alleged authoritarian axis of evil—but from within them. In his telling, “war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money” are among the most pressing of America’s challenges. Kennedy is also correct as to the sad trajectory the Democratic Party has taken since the days of President John F. Kennedy. As Kennedy points out, it was a party that once stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. Of the bankers and corporate interests, Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “I welcome their hatred.” Today, the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama turns to alumni of Goldman Sachs to oversee the nation’s finances. On the subject of Ukraine, Kennedy’s account strikes us as factual. There is a mountain of evidence that the war is indeed, as Kennedy notes, “Russia’s predictable response to the reckless neocon project of extending NATO to encircle Russia” and to force Ukraine into NATO, despite it being “the brightest of redlines” for Russia, in then-ambassador William Burns own words.  Kennedy is also correct when he recalls that President Biden stated that the purpose of this war was ‘regime change’ in Moscow. As night follows day, Kennedy’s account of the war in Ukraine and its causes will be derided as “Putin talking points,” even more so now that Kennedy has allied himself with Trump—himself falsely accused of colluding with Putin’s Russia. Such accusations will echo another case of “collusion”  that took place in 1962–63 when President John F. Kennedy reached out in secret to Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev to initiate a dialogue—a dialogue that was thwarted at every turn by the leaders of the CIA and the U.S. military.  As recounted by historian James Douglass, Kennedy engaged in an extensive exchange of letters and mediated (mostly by journalist Norman Cousins) conversations with his Russian counterpart, all of them oriented to overcoming mutual suspicion and ending the Cold War before it resulted in the nuclear Armageddon that the two leaders had narrowly escaped in October 1962.  In the end, a Kennedy-Trump coalition could be a reason for hope, but these hopes are tempered by our realization that Kennedy and Trump can only ever be relatively better than the alternatives. To be sure, it does not take much to rise above the level of a Kamala Harris, but we do not mean to damn them with such faint praise, as should be already obvious from the above. To say that Kennedy and Trump have their own real limitations, whether intellectual or moral, is to say no more than what Reinhold Niebuhr has noted about anyone at all that has achieved great political power.  In the realm of power, the pure of heart are generally crucified or assassinated.  At the very least, they are pushed aside. We have no choice but to make do with those who are imperfect. The post RFK Jr.’s Common Good Populism  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Let’s Be Honest About Taiwan The time in which we could have prepared to contest the island by force has passed. Credit: image via Shutterstock For some years, the main division among self-described foreign policy realists is over what to do about China, and, specifically, what to do about Taiwan. The group led by Elbridge Colby, lately foreign policy advisor for the former President Donald Trump, believes that Chinese hegemony in Asia, the first step towards which will be reunification with Taiwan, will cause the eclipse of American economic power; America must be willing then at least to consider armed support for the Republic of China, if other deterrents fail. A variety of critics, including our own Doug Bandow, suggest the overarching threat is overblown, or, at any rate, not worth risking war between nuclear-armed powers. So things stand in our world. There are merits to each line of argument, but the dispute looks increasingly irrelevant. Irrespective of what ought to be done, it is growing apparent that the United States simply will not be in a position to wage conventional war against China. Consider last week’s news that the Navy plans to mothball 17 Military Sealift Command (MSC) ships because of an ongoing manpower shortage. MSC is exactly what it says in the name, the organ responsible for providing military transports and logistical support by sea. You may be aware that Taiwan is an island on the thither side of the world’s largest ocean, and any American plan to wage war in its environs will involve moving rather a lot of people and stuff there by ship. As we wrote at some length in the latest print issue of The American Conservative, MSC has been suffering a mariner shortage since at least 2017, and structural factors have prevented the supply of mariners from growing quickly enough both to cover turnover and to fill the gap.  Further, a premise of MSC is that in times of war it may call upon the American merchant fleet to aid its efforts. The Chinese merchant fleet outnumbers the American merchant fleet by roughly 50 to 1. Simply put, it is unlikely that we will get men and materiel to the front in anything like sufficient numbers to counter the Chinese, who are far better prepared to supply a front that is anyway much closer to them than it is to us. Or consider the ongoing debacle of the Constellation-class frigate, the warship intended to do the yeoman’s work of any naval operations in coastal waters. The ships were commissioned and their construction begun without a finalized design, which, in the classic bizarro logic of our military–industrial complex, meant it was to be completed more quickly and with better specifications than otherwise. Instead, the real world intruded, and the development has been quagmired by basic design changes. A GAO report in May said the process is “at a standstill” and projected that the first ship will be delivered no earlier than April 2029, three years late. China-watching is a game for fools and fortune-tellers, but the word on the street is that Xi Jinping means to take Taiwan by the end of the decade—2027 gets thrown about a fair bit, with some of our professional seers saying the blow will come as early as 2025. If we accept this broad five-year range as something like the truth, it doesn’t matter whether the United States wants to go to war or not; we simply will not be able to. It isn’t merely a matter of the certain decline that attends a power entering a war for which it is fundamentally unprepared, a la the British Empire in 1938. The invasion will be over by time we put sufficient assets in the neighborhood—or even by time we have assets to put in the neighborhood. To contest the matter on the field of battle, we would have had to begin serious preparations the better part of a decade ago, and we are simply out of time. The question then is how to reduce the upside for China and the downside for the U.S. The American classics, sanctions and proxy war, will get trotted out. Sanctions do not have what you’d call a track record of success in accomplishing their stated policy goals, and, unlike Russia, China is in a position to levy actually painful countersanctions against the U.S. Proxy wars have their own risks, and the American arsenal is significantly thinner than it was in 2022. Nor does it look as if it will replenish meaningfully as we continue our escapades in Eastern Europe and the great, blood-drenched sandbox of the Middle East.  The inertia and dysfunction of the American defense establishment have proven insurmountable; it is not clear that anyone in that establishment is especially interested in trying something new. At this writing, roughly a third of American naval assets are in the Middle East, and there is not a single aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific—a nice snapshot of existing priorities and readiness. American policymakers should begin to consider policies to ameliorate the effects on the U.S. of a Taiwan invasion. Acting as if war is a viable policy is fantasy, nothing more or less. The post Let’s Be Honest About Taiwan appeared first on The American Conservative.

A bold statement. The post The band that changed rock music for the worse, according to Ritchie Blackmore first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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