Joe Biden Warns His Donors Of Doomsday
Joe Biden Warns His Donors Of Doomsday
The opposite of a responsible Commander in Chief
Biden, speaking at the New York home of investor James Murdoch, said the United States had not “faced the prospect of Armageddon” since President John F. Kennedy was mired in the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago…
“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” the president said of Putin, in extended remarks about the conflict. “He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming,” Biden continued, opening a window into how much it has been weighing on him just a month before the midterm elections and amid a spate of domestic campaigning and fundraising.
He also spoke to the delicate — and, in some sense, seemingly impossible — task of managing the crisis from afar while “trying to figure out, what is Putin’s off-ramp? ... Where does he find a way out?”
A key question before U.S. officials and their Western allies, Biden added, is where Putin finds himself if he loses not only face but also significant power.
“We have the threat of a nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going,” he reiterated.
The President’s grasp of history is poor: there have been several close-run nuclear incidents of varying severity since 1962, including the US-Soviet confrontation during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1983 Able Archer / Operation RYaN incident, and the 1995 Black Brant episode. The President was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for most of these, and in the Senate for all of them, so there is no particular reason he would not know. The point in this is not to nitpick, but to illuminate. Having been here several times before, and successfully navigated the straits, what lessons can policymakers and leadership draw?
The relevant lessons are not necessarily obvious or applicable. Taken in aggregate (including a discrete episode within the Cuban Missile Crisis itself), the major historical mechanism saving the world from nuclear conflagration has been Russian officers and leadership, at a variety of levels, who refuse to set in motion a nuclear-weapons attack at the moment of decision. This speaks well of them but it is no basis for policy. (Future historians will have to unfold the paradox of an army that cuts throats with such abandon, and also possesses men of sacrificial restraint who happen to be present when needed by the world.) American policymaking requires something else.
The template for successful navigation of nuclear crises, beyond providential men, is of course rooted in traditional deterrence. Drawing upon the Cuban Missile Crisis, we can note that the then-President doubled down on it, and actually broadened the American nuclear umbrella well beyond what treaty demanded. If you’ve never watched President Kennedy’s full speech to the nation on 22 October 1962 — interestingly enough, exactly sixty years ago in just two weeks — it’s worth your time.
Here’s the key passage, coming at the eleventh of the speech’s eighteen minutes:
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
It’s quite a statement. Although Kennedy explicitly invoked the 1947 Rio Pact in his remarks, that multilateral structure never covered the entire hemisphere. The other hemispheric organization invoked, the Organization of American States, is not a defense pact. The American-governmental response to Soviet nuclear arms in Cuba, then, deliberately foreclosed the option of a Soviet “demonstration” or third-party attack, in declaring an automatic escalation to full strategic-nuclear exchange even if the nation attacked was not an ally of the United States. It was not the only reason the crisis ended peacefully — nothing in history has a singular cause, and trust none who say otherwise — but it was a significant reason. Depriving the Soviets of escalatory options, which is to say communicating American escalation dominance, had the effect of opening them to the eventual compromise that terminated the confrontation.
A parallel in this moment, with the present-day Russian dictator plausibly contemplating nuclear-weapons use against Ukraine, would be for the United States to extend the same nuclear guarantee to Ukraine in 2022 that it extended to even the most picayune Caribbean island and Latin American republic in 1962.
SCOTUS To Take On Section 230
Justice Clarence Thomas has argued that the role of major internet platforms is so critical in modern society that it now reaches the level of common carrier regulation. With regard to Section 230, he has suggestedthat the court should consider “whether the text of this increasingly important statute aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by the Internet platforms.”
Despite the hair-raising rhetoric from the tech press and Big Tech’s network of paid policy groups about any changes to Section 230 heralding “the end of the internet,” it is not unreasonable that Congress or the courts would revisit a statute that now applies to platforms and, indeed, a comprehensive internet that didn’t even exist when the original law was passed.
Clarification is especially warranted as the platforms have made it a pattern to try to have their cake and eat it, too — that is, argue the contradiction that all their content moderation is not their speech and thus Section 230 protected, while at the same time arguing that their content moderation is also their speech, and thus protected by the First Amendment. This is facially ridiculous and something neither the courts nor Congress should let stand.
Yet the Supreme Court, of course, could very well get it wrong. A sweeping ruling that rejects any sort of nuance and instead determines that every moderation decision by the tech companies is protected by Section 230, or that every moderation decision is protected by the First Amendment, would be a huge setback for state attempts to step in and reform the tech companies. State laws, like the one out of Texas recently upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, would be irreparably harmed.
Rather, a limited, case-by-case ruling that takes into account the original intent of Section 230, along with the technology that has developed since its passage, would respect both the public’s interest in preserving the right to have a plurality of voices while immunizing the platforms to moderate for the actual nasty content categorized in the statute itself.
Why Herschel Walker Shouldn’t Have Run
Explosive. But I think Republican strategists misunderstand the scandal, or miss the heart of it. It isn’t really about abortion or hypocrisy. It is about children born and the father says to the mother: You can raise it by yourself or you can abort it but I won’t help you raise it and act as a father. That is the story, that Walker is accused of abandoning his little kids, and it came from his son, Christian, 23, a conservative activist, who made the furious videos that blew the story up. That is the aspect Christian focused on: “My father . . . had all these random kids across the country, none of whom he raised. . . . Family values people: He has four kids—four different women—wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women. . . . You have no idea what me and my mom have survived.”
Voters who would easily forgive abortion or running around or bad breakups or divorce are less likely to give a pass on that, on four children left alone by their father, the rich handsome former football star and candidate for Senate. Christian Walker’s pain is a common one. The U.S. Census Bureau found in 2021 that 25% of American children are raised in households without their father. In Georgia there are more than 261,000 households with children under 18, a female head and no spouse or partner present.
That’s a lot of people. All of them would likely take this part of the story more to heart.
The Leftist Local News Project
Democrats’ swing state local news ploy targets unsuspecting readers.
A network of at least 51 locally branded news sites has popped up since last year under names like the Milwaukee Metro Times, the Mecklenburg Herald and the Tri-City Record.
The sites are focused on key swing states with elections in 2021 and 2022: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Each follows a similar template: aggregated local news content and short write-ups about local sports teams and attractions — interspersed with heavily slanted political news aimed at boosting Democratic midterm candidates and attacking Republican opponents.
"About Us" pages for each of the sites say they're run by a company called Local Report Inc., which was formed in Florida last year. Their mastheads indicate involvement by another entity: the American Independent, a Washington-based progressive news outfit.
Six American Independent writers have each contributed to most or all of the sites in the network, according to an Axios review of bylines on the sites.
While all of the sites aggregate content from other sources, all six of those authors regularly write stories directly for the Local Report network, with numerous articles appearing exclusively on those sites.
The American Independent was launched by Democratic operative and fundraiser David Brock — also known for founding the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America.
TAI's president, Matt Fuehrmeyer, is a former senior aide at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and to Harry Reid, the late former Senate Democratic leader.
The for-profit entity is funded in part by the nonprofit arm of American Bridge, an opposition research-focused Democratic super PAC, according to its website.
CNN Suspended MKH For Complaining About Jeff Toobin’s Return
Mary Katharine Ham on why you haven’t seen her for a while.
I suppose some might reasonably conclude that critiquing CNN's coverage in a factual and calm tweet, or arguing with Kaczynski, could have spurred some disciplinary action, as it violates the rule against “shooting inside the tent” among colleagues. But it turns out that didn’t do me in. Rather, I’m told, “when it got to the comments about Jeffrey Toobin…everyone wanted a bit of a breather.”
Well, everyone but me, who had no idea there was a breather in effect. I was never informed of my punishment until it was rescinded recently by new management. No one called me or my representation about it. There was no announcement of a suspension, or notification of in-house disciplinary action, which I would have preferred, even welcomed by comparison to serving a secret sentence.In case you're wondering, as I did, how my punishment for tweeting about Toobin compares to Toobin's suspension for his offense, I can tell you. He was off air for eight months; I was off for seven. One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work.
On one hand, the people who made this call about me are gone from the network, so maybe I could let it lie. But on the other hand, many of my colleagues no doubt knew about my banning from air, but not the reasons behind it, thereby leaving the impression I must have done something tantamount to Toobining. I did not.
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Podcast
Quote
“In the background there thudded always the hidden metronome of the Casino, ticking up its little treasure of one-per-cents with each spin of a wheel and each turn of a card – a pulsing fat-cat with a zero for a heart.”
— Ian Fleming