The View from Right Field

Joe Biden’s Priorities: Gasoline Prices > Ukraine

The Financial Times reported on Friday:

“The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warming that the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. …

Washington is also concerned that if Ukraine keeps hitting Russian facilities, including many that are hundreds of miles from the border, Russia could retaliate by lashing out at infrastructure relied on by the west. …

Joe Biden: Getting Foreign Policy Wrong for 50 Years

In 2014, a former cabinet official from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations wrote that Joe Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."¹  Even though this official likes President Biden as a person and has said President Biden “a man of integrity,” he reaffirmed his statement in an interview in May of 2019. 

And President Biden has continued his string of mistakes and bad decisions since he got into office.  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.  President Biden was left with a terrible situation by Donald Trump.  The Trump administration signed what was basically a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.  While President Biden has said the Trump agreement left him no choice but to go forward with the withdrawal/surrender, that’s not true.  President Biden reversed all kinds of Trump administration decisions.  He could have changed this one, too, but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so we did.  It was the Biden administration that organized, or rather didn’t organize, the withdrawal.  If the withdrawal was a disaster, and if it has damaged the United States’ reputation for reliability and competence abroad, then that was on President Biden and his administration.

Voting When It Doesn’t Matter. Because I Was Proud To Be Voting for Nikki Haley.

Back in January I wrote a post about “The Advantage of Living in Illinois.”  As I said, there aren’t many advantages of living in Illinois (other than grandchildren and the Cubs), but there is one: In a Biden-Trump presidential race, if you live in Illinois, you don’t have to vote for either one of them.  Biden is going to win Illinois, and as I said, “one vote, or even one hundred thousand votes, isn’t going to make a difference in the 2024 Presidential race in Illinois.”

So, on that basis, why did I go out and vote in the Republican primary in Illinois today?  Donald Trump has already won the Republican nomination, and Joe Biden going to win Illinois’s seventeen electoral votes in November.  So why did I vote? 

What’s the Matter With China?

As we look at all of the problems in the United States and wonder how we are going to deal with them, perhaps we should give a thought to a country with just as many problems: China.  Recently, I have been watching shows and reading articles about the economic problems in China.  Experts and pundits have been asking what China should do about economic growth, the stagnate real estate sector, youth un- and under-employment, deflation, etc.   And then they go on to offer all kinds of proposed policies and solutions, most of them straight out of standard Western economics theory. 

Which means they won’t be implemented because they miss the main point.  The most important thing to Chinese President Xi Jinping is not solving this problem or that.  It is keeping control.  It's maintaining, and strengthening, the power and role of the Chinese Communist Party – and his own control over the CCP.  President Xi may be a committed Communist and dedicated Marxist-Leninist, but more importantly, he wants to keep control.