“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”
Another quote from Chomsky:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Another:
“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
A day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in a high-profile attempt to mend frayed relations, Biden kicked those efforts in the teeth by telling a crowd in California that Chinese President Xi was a dictator.
But here’s the deplorable rub: the United States is agreement incapable, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has caustically noted. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also recently lamented the complete dearth of American political integrity, at least for the past few generations.
Forked-tongued American politicians should be repudiated until Washington actually begins to behave as a law-abiding entity.
Joe Biden’s penchant for tripping over his feet – and verbally – couldn’t have happened at a most unfortunate moment. Mocking China’s president as a “dictator” just when his administration attempted a big reset in U.S.-China relations has to rank as one of Biden’s clumsiest gaffes.
A day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in a high-profile attempt to mend frayed relations, Biden kicked those efforts in the teeth by telling a crowd in California that Chinese President Xi was a dictator.
Beijing responded furiously, denouncing the American president’s “extreme” disrespect and lack of etiquette. China’s anger is no doubt reinforced because it showed magnanimity in receiving Blinken and affording him a top-level diplomatic meeting with President Xi Jinping.
Biden’s latest gaffe is made all the more absurd because he was referring to the incident of a Chinese weather balloon that had strayed over U.S. territory in February, which Biden ordered an F-16 fighter jet to shoot down with a sidewinder missile. Biden is still claiming that it was a Chinese spy balloon even though the Washington Post had reported earlier that it was a meteorological aircraft blown off course whose errant trans-Pacific course was being monitored in real-time by the Americans.
That crass overreaction by Biden resorting to a military attack over a balloon sent U.S.-China relations into a further tailspin. Blinken canceled a visit to Beijing in February in what was a cheap protest stunt against an alleged Chinese breach of U.S. national security. His trip last weekend was meant to signal a new reset in relations. There was much talk during the U.S. diplomat’s visit about improving communications between Washington and Beijing to avoid a military confrontation.
Then there came the crash, bang, wallop from Biden’s strange outburst insulting his Chinese counterpart.
During the California fundraising foray this week, Biden claimed that Xi knew nothing about the “spy balloon”, implying that he was being kept in the dark by Chinese intelligence officials as befitting a hapless “dictator”.
In reality, it looks like Biden is the one who is hopelessly benighted. Ordering the shoot-down of an errant balloon with million-dollar air-to-air missiles and to continue insisting that it was a spy vehicle shows an abject lack of judgment. Could anyone trust a balloon-popping commander-in-chief who has access to grabbing the nuclear football? This is Doctor Strangelove’s twilight stuff. All the more frightening because it’s real life, not a movie.
But on top of that, Biden then goes on to gratuitously insult the Chinese leader.
Biden’s loose tongue and legs at this frail stage in his half-century political career are beyond parody. Falling on the stairs of Air Force One and tripping over podiums is an embarrassing routine spectacle for this president.
Last December, Biden issued an executive order to “rebuild trust in government.” Unfortunately for Biden, he cannot also command people to have delusions about politicians being trustworthy. Biden’s executive order called for “transforming federal customer experience anBut Biden is failing as badly as Mussolini did when he promised to make the trains run on time. Social Security Administration local offices were shut for more than 600 days straight. Federal bureaucrats stayed home, “imposing hardships on millions of people who need to apply for benefits, apply for a card” and wounding “many of those in greatest need of its services,” according to the Washington Post.
Though Biden took office preaching the need for “unity,” he increasingly rules like an elective dictator, relying on executive orders and dubious decrees. The Constitution is not permitted to impede the president from any action that might temporarily increase his approval ratings by one or two percentage points. Biden’s arbitrary actions are thrilling some of his supporters. Many of the protestors who denounced Trump during his presidency were not opposed to dictators per se; they simply wanted different dictates, and Biden is doing his best to satisfy their demands.
Mandates for all
On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order compelling people to wear face masks any time they were on federal property. The edict had an unwritten exemption for Washington Poohbahs. Biden went to the Lincoln Memorial a few hours after signing the order, where he posed by the statue of Abraham Lincoln; neither Lincoln nor Biden were wearing a mask. Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki scoffed at a reporter’s concern over the apparent crime: “He was celebrating a historic day in our country…. We have bigger things to worry about.”
Biden’s order inflamed legions of junior Stasi, who screamed in rage at anyone hiking in national parks without a mask. If Biden has a right to compel everyone to wear a mask on property controlled by the National Park Service, he would also have the right to dictate that people wear two masks — a policy endorsed by flip-flop king COVID Czar Anthony Fauci on Tuesdays and Thursdays but not on other days of the week.
Biden issued an executive order early last year proclaiming “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” That target would require almost tripling the amount of land under government restrictions — an area twice the size of the state of Texas. Farmers dread future decrees that could hogtie them in perpetuity. The Biden administration is also pushing to revive the Obama-era definition of wetlands that would effectively permit federal control over “virtually any wet spot — or occasionally wet spot in the country, including ditches, drains, seasonal puddle-like depressions, intermittent streams, ponds, impoundments, prairie potholes, and large ‘buffer areas’ of land adjacent to every waterway.”
Last November, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s attempt to perpetuate a national moratorium on evictions of renters. Six justices scoffed that the administration’s legal defense relied “on a decades-old statute that authorizes … measures like fumigation and pest extermination.” The court declared, “Our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.” The decree (initially promulgated by President Trump) profoundly disrupted housing markets in many areas and turned struggling landlords into hostages of renters who were tacitly encouraged by the feds to cease paying their bills. Biden extended the decree even though he publicly admitted, “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster. But there are several key scholars who think that it may — and it’s worth the effort.” Biden’s standard for “constitutional” apparently includes any dictate that might conceivably be accepted by five Supreme Court justices.
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