In early May of 1940, the British public had had enough of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose fecklessness at Munich two years earlier had allowed Hitler to dominate Europe. Not even the pleas of Winston Churchill, the then-First Lord of the Admiralty, for unity in the face of the enemy could save him. Conservative Member of Parliament Leo Amery summed up the public’s ire by quoting Oliver Cromwell in a fiery speech in the House of Commons: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” Last Sunday, our own beleaguered republic reached its own “Amery moment” with its leader. When he chose to broadly pardon his son Hunter Biden despite his repeated claims that he would not, President Biden once again revealed his utter contempt for the rule of law and the American people. As bitter as this pill is to swallow, it is the price we must pay to turn the page on his disastrous presidency. In a just world, we would never have had to suffer through a Joe Biden presidency. The 2020 “October surprise” of Hunter Biden’s laptop should have killed his candidacy just as cleanly as his plagiarism did back in 1988. It took an unholy alliance of the deep state, the legacy press, and social media companies to guarantee that the truth would not come out in time to tip the election in Trump’s favor. But try as he might, President Biden could not hide the truth forever. When questions kept coming up about the relationship between Hunter and the “Big Guy,” stalling and obfuscation became the order of the day. The president’s Department of Justice slow-walked tax evasion charges related to Hunter’s years working for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and later offered him the sweetest of all plea deals. Only the testimony of IRS whistleblowers and the integrity of a federal judge stopped the truth from being buried. Despite all the legal doublespeak and maneuvering, the American people know when something stinks. At the beginning of this year, only 22 percent of likely voters believed that Joe Biden was somehow innocent of any involvement with Hunter’s corrupt dealings. Reporters asked Karine Jean-Pierre about the possibility of a pardon for Hunter as early as July of 2023. The same question came up multiple times after Hunter’s conviction on federal gun charges in June of this year when his father was still the Democrat nominee. Their need for reassurance on the matter reveals that even these devout partisans sensed that they could not trust the president’s repeated denials. Hunter’s surprise guilty plea to federal tax charges in September, after his father was forced to abandon his campaign in July, is also evidence that he knew that he would never be sentenced for that crime, no matter what lies were used to mollify the public and whitewash the mess. Given the chaotic nature of Vice President Kamala Harris’s replacement of President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, it is probable that pardoning Hunter was a key element in negotiating the president’s endorsement that forestalled any “mini-primary” or convention floor fight. Even President-elect Trump floated the idea of a pardon back in late October. Taking all this into account, absolutely no one should be surprised by the president’s change of heart on this matter. Hunter’s entire life has been an exercise in using his father’s position to both prosper and dodge accountability; this is just the latest and most egregious example of the pattern. The president-elect was right to call this pardon “an abuse and miscarriage of justice.” What’s more, its vague covering of all crimes over the past eleven years is tantamount to an admission of not only Hunter’s corrupt dealings but his father’s involvement in them. But as much as this situation offends any sane person’s sense of justice, the political realities of the moment forbid any substantive effort to circumvent the pardon. An attempt by the incoming Trump administration to do so would needlessly play into the left’s hypocritical narrative that Trump is planning to weaponize the justice system to punish his opponents. It would also bleed time and resources from the much-needed housecleaning he has promised at the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies. Others have noted that the precedent for the broad Hunter Biden pardon is Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974. Though that pardon was controversial at the time, the American people came to understand that the pursuit of justice for Watergate was not worth the societal cost. Trump came to a similar conclusion in his first term when he reconsidered prosecuting Hilary Clinton for her email scandal. Ford was inspired in part by a 1915 Supreme Court decision (Burdick v. United States) in which the court ruled that the acceptance of a pardon is an admission of guilt. If this is true in a court of law for Hunter Biden, then it is certainly so in the court of public opinion for Joe Biden. We may not get the satisfaction of seeing either of them do a perp walk, but at least come January, this corrupt family will slither back to Delaware and never be allowed to darken the door of American politics again. You’ve gotten away with it, President Biden. Now, in the name of God, go! READ MORE from Robert Busack: Radical Feminists Misread ‘Lysistrata’ Is the Educational Establishment Finally Starting to Crack? Democracy Dies in Demagoguery The post Pardoning Hunter Biden Is the Unjust Price America Must Pay to Turn the Page on Biden’s Presidency appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I don’t spend a lot of time in my La-Z-Boy being hypnotized by daytime TV. Ok, I’ve spent some time in my La-Z-Boy being hypnotized by daytime TV — at least enough to pick up that “hypnotized” line from the Tom Cruise/Jamie Foxx movie Collateral. But anyway, I did catch a Dec. 4 segment on CNBC. It was an interview between “journalist, author, and co-host of CNBC’s Squawk Box” Andrew Ross Sorkin and centibillionaire Jeff Bezos. Yeah, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Blue Origin, Washington Post, Bezos Expeditions, Bezos Earth Fund, and Bezos Academy fame. In contrast to Sorkin’s performance as a blushing ingénue, Bezos came across as a real mensch. As Sorkin squirmed and wormed in his seat, crossing and re-crossing his legs in some kind of flirty semaphore, Bezos sat foursquare, comfortable in his own skin, responding to Sorkin’s often shrill queries in calm, low tones. In fact, Bezos’s measured responses were so measured and so thoughtfully delivered that the actual content of his replies was tedious to follow. But follow I did. When Sorkin played the mischievous pixie and tried to draw out the centibillionaire on the Washington Post’s “cowardly” failure to endorse Kamala Harris, Bezos calmly and convincingly responded that it was indeed the opposite of cowardly: “You can’t do the wrong thing because you’re worried about bad PR.” (RELATED: Three Cheers for Jeff Bezos) When Sorkin pushed Bezos on Trump’s so-called “hatred of the press,” and how Bezos would move forward as owner of the Washington Post, he smiled and said that he would try to “talk him out of it.” When Sorkin tried to bait Bezos about his “historic clashes” with President Trump during his first term in office, Bezos struck a confident chord. “I am actually very optimistic this time around,” said Bezos, referencing the incumbent’s “lots of energy around reducing regulations.” Adding, “He’s more confident. More settled.” Painting Elon Musk as an insider and hyping the possibility that Musk would use his newfound access to the Oval Office to “harm competition” (Musk’s SpaceX vs Bezos’s Blue Origin), despite Musk’s assurances to the contrary, Sorkin still failed to get a rise out of Bezos. “I believe him,” responded Bezos. “I take him at his word.” (RELATED: Can Musk Dismantle the Deep State?) Confronted with Sorkin’s repeated attempts to enlist Bezos as a voice of despair and gloom at the prospect of four (more) years of Trump, Bezos remained upbeat and positive. And despite Sorkin’s attempts to weaponize the interview in favor of the “mainstream medium’s” party line, Bezos provided true insights into the workings of his own mind and his own life philosophy. “If you think you know a public figure, you probably don’t,” said Bezos, when discussing wealth and influence. “Except for Oprah Winfrey,” referring to her daily exposure to the public during her popular TV show. I particularly enjoyed Bezos’s recounting of an early interview (he couldn’t remember the name of the pundit) when he shared the stage with Bill Gates. The question was how Gates felt about losing the title of “wealthiest man in the World” to Bezos. Bezos answered first, “You are welcome,” before turning to Gates and repeating, “You are welcome.” When it came to Blue Origin and the potential of Space exploration, Bezos waxed enthusiastic about a potential future with Lunar colonies serving as refueling stations to launch colonists to Mars. Of course, he thought it would be “a couple of generations in the future.” (RELATED: Jeff Bezos to Become First Multibillionaire in Space) Maybe not. President Donald J. Trump’s NASA, under the leadership of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and the active engagement of Vice President Mike Pence as National Space Council chair, worked with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to break Russia’s monopoly on U.S. astronaut access to and from the International Space Station. Fully expecting a second term, Trump gave the thumbs up to returning U.S. boots on the Lunar surface no later than 2024. We know how that turned out. The Biden White House lost no time in defunding NASA’s space exploration missions in favor of diversity, employment equity, and “World Peace.” The Moon Mission was diverted to 2026, to 2028, and now? Who knows? Who knows? Well, I bet Trump knows. And with Vice President JD Vance at the helm of the National Space Council, and tech billionaire, jet pilot, and civilian astronaut Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator, you can bet money we’ll be back on track to return to the Moon within the next four years. And Jeff Bezos wants Blue Origin to play a role. Why not? READ MORE from Mike Howard: By Triggering Israel, Terrorists Made Peace a Possibility Elon Musk for President? Whatever Happened to Camel Cigarettes? The post Being Bezos in the Era of Trump appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created by Congress in 1983 to promote democracy and democratic institutions abroad. It performed valuable ideological and propaganda services during the last decade of the Cold War as part of the Reagan administration’s effort to conduct political-subversive warfare against the Soviet empire. With the prolonged collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-91, NED’s real mission was achieved. But like any organization, NED, which receives government funds as a non-governmental organization, wanted to continue its work and to continue to feed off the taxpayers, so it looked to broaden its mandate. As James Pierson notes in a piece in The New Criterion, the NED has become a highly partisan, anti-Trump organization that promotes endless wars, censors opposing views, and conceals its work in what Pierson characterizes as “opaque reports” that render it something less than “open and transparent.” An “America First” foreign policy approach should include the defunding of NED. NED is a Cold War relic, like its predecessor the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded enterprise that used Western intellectuals to wage a cultural Cold War against the Soviet empire. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom attracted the likes of Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Arthur Schlessinger Jr., John Dewey, Melvin Lasky, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Arthur Koestler, and many others — all committed anti-communists. The focus of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, like the original focus of the NED, was to wage political-subversive warfare against the Soviet empire. It was in America’s national security interest to do so. But, unfortunately, the Wilsonian strain of American foreign policy often results in our government leaders phrasing foreign policy missions in broad, idealistic terms (like “making the world safe for democracy”). So it is with the NED. In the post-Cold War world, NED broadened its real mission to encompass the promotion of democracy around the world. The intellectuals associated with NED are neoconservative and neo-liberal interventionists like Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan, Ann Applebaum, Larry Diamond, and others who have embraced an ideological agenda that views the world as a never-ending struggle between democracy and autocracy. That worldview was also embraced by the Bush 43 administration after the attacks on 9/11, which resulted in a “Global War on Terror” and endless, futile wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that sought to spread democracy in those countries and elsewhere. The Obama administration added to this foreign policy failure with its promotion of the so-called “Arab Spring.” For these ideologues, Russia’s failure to transform into a democracy in the 1990s was reason enough to expand NATO to the Russian border and treat Russia as an enemy. It was also a justification for fomenting so-called “color revolutions,” including in Ukraine, that helped to revive the worst aspects of Russian nationalism and aggressive behavior. NED’s Victorian Nuland is one of the most vociferous supporters of “color revolutions” and U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Even worse, some of the intellectuals associated with NED joined the Democrat and media campaign to characterize Donald Trump as an autocrat — in some instances comparing Trump to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. So NED-affiliated intellectuals effectively meddled in U.S. domestic politics in the name of “democracy.” Pierson points to Larry Diamond’s claim that Trump’s recent electoral victory means that the United States is now a “backsliding democracy” due to his “autocratic tendencies,” and to Rachel Kleinfeld’s statement that “Trumpism” and “Christian nationalism” are being used to build a “wink-and-nod ” base in the Republican Party, and to Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s assertion that the GOP under Trump is an “antidemocratic force that imperils the U.S. Constitutional order.” In August 2024, the Heritage Foundation released a revealing report about the funding and domestic political partisanship of the NED. It shows that NED staff and associates contribute significantly more to Democratic candidates for office than to Republican candidates. The NED board is dominated by Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, and the organization as a whole “acts in the service of the Democratic Party, promotes its politicized memes concerning conservatives as threats to democracy, and poisons conservative reputations overseas.” The ideologues associated with NED want to remake the world in America’s image, except if that America has Donald Trump as President. Democratic elections, it seems, only count as promoting democracy when the NED’s favored candidates win those elections. NED is infested with Wilsonians who are willing to send the sons and daughters of Trump supporters to fight in endless wars abroad. Congress has spent over $1 billion funding this partisan and dangerous organization since 2020. We won the Cold War. The Soviet empire collapsed. The NED’s work was done in 1991. It’s time to defund it. READ MORE from Francis Sempa: Trump Needs ‘Bismarcks’ to Steer Our Foreign Policy James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut Rejuvenating the Monroe Doctrine The post The National Endowment for Democracy Should be Defunded on Principle appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Kurt Schlichter, Townhall: I, for one, am delighted that alleged President Joe Biden pardoned his scumbag, perverted, drug-addled corrupto-kid. I might as well be because there’s not anything I can do about it. We all knew this was coming. We knew it from the beginning. We especially knew it when Joe Biden promised he […]

by William M Arkin and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research: This incisive article by William Arkin summarizes the key elements of America’s nuclear doctrine, formulated both before and in the immediate wake of September 11, 2001.  The article was originally published by the Los Angeles Times on March 10, 2002, a few months prior to the official […]

The Black Crowes' comeback album Happiness Bastards has been voted the album of the year in Classic Rock magazine's annual end-of-year writer's poll