 (Image source: iStock) |
"Government is itself an art," wrote the late US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, "one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness."[1]
Of course a leader should be able to do both – "making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness" – but what if there are leaders or the people around them who are, as Frankfurter noted, "those who pursue self-interest through politics"[2]?
As previously asked on these pages, are union moguls, lobbyists and advisors, power players and profiteers trying to do end runs around US election laws (here and here) and the Constitution (here and here)?
Anonymous "dark money" groups are still trying to "shape" our elections without disclosing where the money is coming from.
According to Bloomberg News, "'Dark money' helped pave the way for the Biden campaign" – to the tune of $145 million.
Big Tech has just been found to have been acting as a "state agent" of the federal government in curtailing free speech with which the government did not agree. Twitter just settled a lawsuit by the journalist Alex Berenson after he showed the court that orders to Twitter to ban him had come from the White House. Big Tech cooperates with the government partly because it might agree with positions, partly by donations to elected representatives, and partly out of concern that privileges could be removed. These include working as a message-delivery-system for the government, protection from lawsuits, and being able to continue banning information that its preferred candidates for elected office might not want you to see, such as the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop or "politically incorrect" views about the coronavirus.
Looking at the president's track record, the nation's highest office seems to have been open to policies of repaying donors by furthering businesses policies that favor donors to Biden's 2020 campaign and to his family, for instance the manufacturers of electric cars and solar panels, most of which are made in China.
President Joe Biden has done nothing to stop Chinese 'cartels' from smuggling deadly drugs, including fentanyl, into the US from Mexico and has "failed to mention top fentanyl exporter China in comments on 100K US drug overdoses" in 2021.
He has also been depleting America's Strategic Petroleum Reserves by a million barrels a day, including by selling US oil "from emergency reserves to [a] Chinese gas giant tied to his scandal plagued-son"? "Biden's Energy Department in April," according to The Federalist, "announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government."
The president also promised to "end fossil fuels" but if he does, how do we power non-electric cars, trucks and airplanes?
The US should instead be increasing our emergency reserves. They are intended for natural emergencies, not political ones.
In addition, Biden is – or was -- apparently planning to sell one million barrels a day for six months "to help cut gas prices" from their roughly $5 a gallon high. So far, they have indeed cut gas prices -- by 40 cents.
Biden, again in a seeming accommodation to China, has been saying that he is "not worried about Chinese aggression toward Taiwan" even though China has been conducting major military exercises near Taiwan that concern British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and that some China experts have called "the real thing." While China has been claiming that the international Taiwan Strait belongs to China, the Biden administration appears to be to be refusing to take China's threats seriously. The administration has been "flip-flopping," delivering confusing messaging , and especially failing to provide Taiwan with sufficient deterrence. This passivity feels as if it isa repeat of Biden's refusal to take Putin's threats seriously before he invaded Ukraine, and that this absence of deterrence will be seen by China the same way it was seen by Russia: as an invitation to attack.
The White House has also been "refusing to say" if Biden, on his recent two-hour telephone call with China , had "pressed China's Xi on COVID origins." The coronavirus has reportedly killed more than a million people in the US and more than six million worldwide.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has done nothing about America's failures to prosecute former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger about removing classified documents in his pants and socks; or Attorney General Eric Holder for Fast and Furious; or Hillary Clinton's 33,000 subpoenaed emails that were deleted; or questions about whether the First Family is compromised [here, here, here here], based on decisions that clearly hurt Americans. These include dismantling the domestic production of energy while buying petroleum -- that is just as harmful to the environment as America's -- at inflated prices from Russia, and calling for "everyone" to have electric vehicles, most of which are made in -- China.
Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.
[1] "The Practical Cogitator: The Thinker's Anthology" selected by Charles P. Curtis Jr. and Ferris Greenslet, Hughton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, Release Date January 1963, p. 401
[2] Ibid. p. 401
