Mar
26
2024

Shaheen and Hassan Should Say: "Ditto"

But unless I'm missing something, they have nothing to say on this issue, unlike …

On that subject, turning to the NYPost editorialists: Team Biden's ceasefire sellout of Israel is public, monstrous and final.

Desperate to satisfy the Democratic Party’s hard left, the Biden administration just took a giant step toward abandoning Israel by declining to veto the latest UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

The measure from the 10 non-permanent Security Council members demands an immediate ceasefire through the month of Ramadan, while also calling on Hamas to release the 100 or so Israelis it still holds hostage from its Oct. 7 terror raid.

No matter that Hamas will refuse; the measure still adds to the pressure for Israel to end its necessary, justified and humane war against Hamas just as it’s getting close to destroying the terror cadre’s last battalions.

Betrayal is the unifying theme of Biden Administration foreign policy.

The WSJ editorialists are also scathing:

In his State of the Union address, President Biden made a promise to the families of U.S. hostages held by Hamas: “We will not rest until we bring their loved ones home.” At the United Nations on Monday, he undermined that pledge.

The U.S. withheld its veto and abstained as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that demanded a cease-fire in Gaza but didn’t make the cease-fire contingent on Hamas releasing its 134 hostages. That condition, on which the U.S. had previously insisted, has been dropped.

Instead, the resolution’s two demands—“an immediate cease-fire for the month of Ramadan . . . leading to a lasting sustainable cease-fire” and “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages”—each stand on their own. To Hamas, the diplomatic pressure will be meaningless. To Israel, it can be perilous, as Mr. Biden well knows. His fence-sitting opens up Israel to more pressure to end the war while Hamas still reigns in part of Gaza.

White House spokesman John Kirby says, “Nothing has changed about our policy—nothing.” He explains that the U.S. abstained because the Security Council resisted a last-minute amendment condemning Hamas. Yet the U.S. had previously vetoed resolutions that wouldn’t condemn Hamas for Oct. 7. The moral arbiters at the U.N. still won’t do that.

Excerpt from Commentary's commentary:

This will have consequences. Here at home, it will confirm that the president is a doormat not a doorstop. The protesters who follow him around accusing Biden of all manner of crimes against humanity will see this, correctly, as an invitation to kick him some more. In the naïve hopes of appeasing a faction of goosestepping goons, Biden will have instead rewarded their tactics and incentivized more of the same.

I am unsure if the goosestepping goons will ever be appeased unless and until Israel is destroyed and Jews eliminated "from the river to the sea".

But this is what happens when your country's foreign policy is run by the wizards who designed the Afghan pullout and US border security.

Also of note:

  • Or is it a Speedway to Serfdom? Andrew Stuttaford considers the regulatory push to electric vehicles to be The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco.

    Helmuth von Moltke (1800-91), the greatest of Prussia’s nineteenth century generals, so the old (unreliable but enjoyable) story goes, laughed only twice in his life. Once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable and once when told that his mother-in-law had died.

    He would surely have at least permitted himself a smile at the over-confidence with which the EPA is attempting to reorder the American automobile industry. “No plan of operations,” he warned, “extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,” a wordy formulation often condensed into the pithier, but overly simplistic, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Von Moltke did not believe that planning should be dispensed with, but he insisted that its limitations should be recognized: He understood the trap that “certainty” could be. He thought it was far better to think through the various contingencies that might emerge once a battle or campaign was underway, and how to handle them.

    The EPA’s plan for the auto sector, which we discussed (unenthusiastically) on the home page on Friday, reflects a different approach. It has imposed a (declining) CO2 quota on the auto sector, and then passed the buck. Carmakers will just have to find a way to sell the EVs they don’t want to make to consumers that don’t want to buy them (in sufficient quantities). No problem!

    Surprise, surprise, that target is not realistic. Central planners are like that.

    The only bright spot is that the planners' folly will become ever more apparent in the coming years as their mandates collide with reality. (Stuttaford does a fine job of describing the inevitable collisions.)

    Downside: we will have wasted a lot of time and money along the way.

  • But they have to keep their phony baloney jobs! Bureaucrats look bad unless they are Doing Something, even when that Something is "attempting to cripple or destroy a successful company that makes popular products." Elizabeth Nolan Brown takes a gander at The Absurd Apple Antitrust Lawsuit.

    The DOJ's antics are bad. But the really outrageous bit is further down in the article:

    In a civil complaint filed last Thursday, the DOJ and 16 state attorneys general accused Apple of violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a law allowing the government to intervene against companies said to be acting "in restraint of trade or commerce."

    "Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers," the DOJ states in a press release. "Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers."

    That sounds bad—until you read the government's theories about how Apple does this. The feds complain about practices like Apple limiting App Store offerings, charging fees to developers who sell their products there, and making iPhones more compatible with Apple products than with third-party offerings.

    What's the outrageous part? Clicking through to the complaint reveals that New Hampshire's attorney general is one of those 16 participants in the suit.

    My tax dollars at work.