Biden Needs a War. Don’t Give Him One. - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Biden Needs a War. Don’t Give Him One.
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There is the temptation to rejoice, or at least snicker, over what the legacy media wags are calling Joe Biden’s Week From Hell last week.

The snickering is completely warranted, as Biden’s multiple unfolding disasters, which blew up in his face like a pack of exploding cigars over the last 10 days or so, are almost unanimously self-inflicted.

Can’t kill the filibuster to pass a “voting rights” bill which eliminates voter ID — something nearly four-fifths of the American people support — and institutionalizes practices like ballot harvesting and allowing illegals to vote? Sympathy for your plight is a bit tough to come by. Maybe bring a bill the Susan Collinses, Bill Cassidys and Mitt Romneys can support, and you won’t have to worry about the filibuster.

That obvious solution didn’t seem to penetrate the skulls of Biden’s handlers. These are the same people who not only steadfastly believe that accusing every Republican not named Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney of being a seditionist and a traitor for questioning various items among their 2020 electoral practices is a moral thing to do, but also that it’s a sound political strategy.

To say that strategy has blown up in their faces thus far would be charitable.

Inflation at a 40-year high? Maybe don’t drop trillions of dollars out of helicopters while instituting piles upon piles of regulatory abuse while paying people not to work, and you wouldn’t have a problem you’ll find as politically poisonous as it is intractable when your administration is full of malevolent economic illiterates.

Supply chain troubles? Store shelves empty? Don’t be surprised when your attempts to blame meat packers and retailers fail to convince anyone. America knows who’s in charge at the Department of Transportation, and Gay Mayor Pete isn’t what you’d call the most confidence-inspiring bureaucrat we’ve ever seen. It’s YOUR supply chain, Joe, and we’re going to blame you when it’s broken.

Supreme Court not impressed with your vaxx mandates? That’s too bad. Of course, you yourself said it was a proposition of dubious constitutionality, before you panicked and tried to impose it anyway. Now you’ve been humiliated in terms as stark as any president has ever been by the Court, with a lot more to come in all likelihood. And by the way, the Omicron variant of COVID has destroyed every facet of the Biden virus policy, and there is no longer any debate to be had as to which of the last two presidents has most abjectly failed to shut down the Chinese virus.

He’s cratering. Joe Biden started last week with an approval rating of 33 percent and things actually got worse from there.

And then a crazed Muslim who’d been in America for a grand total of two weeks proceeded to take hostages at a Texas synagogue over the weekend, and the Biden administration couldn’t bring themselves to call it jihad.

None of these events seem to be the major cataclysm which finishes Biden off, which provides the final scene to the third act of this American version of MacBeth. The scary thing is, we haven’t come up against that item yet — and there are three years left for us to do so.

As this column has said several times, the truly frightening thing about the deepening, widening vortex that is the Biden regime is that as he drowns in his own mistakes, he will become more unstable and more dangerous, and he’ll do more damage.

Which brings us to today’s concern.

Writing at American Thinker yesterday, James Mullin offered the very real possibility that a flailing president seeking relief from his critics might do the unthinkable — or at least respond unnecessarily to circumstances in ways which produces the unthinkable.

What do tyrants do when their ship is sinking or, more accurately, when they realize that their house of cards will not hold up?  They divert their populace by starting a war — or at least allowing one to happen.  War isn’t simply a way of diverting attention, either.  The very fact of a war emergency makes it far easier to erode or negate whatever civil liberties still exist.  Think: PATRIOT Act.

Currently, war beckons in two places: the Russian-European border and the South China Sea and Taiwan.  I’m not saying that either Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping is an aggrieved party.  Both could conceivably become the Hitlers of the 21st century.

But ask yourself if the floundering, self-immolating Biden-Harris administration might not rejoice at the gargantuan pass it would get if Americans — including especially conservative Americans — must focus on a foreign enemy.  Gone would be the rightful concerns about vaccine madness, dementia, runaway inflation, Big Tech/mass media fascism, corrupt education unions, failing Democrat cities, ginned up racial hatred, attacks on the Second Amendment, the federalization of elections, a corrupt FBI and DOJ, election fraud, the Russia Hoax, parental rights and school boards, an open southern border, and on and on.

Biden (and Harris, if there’s room) will wrap themselves snugly in the flag, and all will be forgiven.  For a time.  But the theft of civil liberties will make a “comeback” highly unlikely for freedom.  The Uniparty will own everything.

Exactly. We still remember Wag The Dog because it was both completely absurd and entirely realistic all at the same time. We’re in an eerily familiar situation with highly untrustworthy people in our leadership who don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. Clinton had his Kosovo, after all, George W. Bush had his Iraq, and Obama had his Libya. Biden hasn’t had his distractive foreign excursion yet.

And the world is full of hostile tyrants licking their chops at the prospect of capitalizing on the destabilizing weakness of America’s leadership. China leers greedily at Taiwan, Russia masses troops on its border with Ukraine, Iran considers its options.

One possibility closer to home your author can foresee is Venezuela, which represents the logical, perhaps inescapable outcome of Team Biden’s policies, attempting to solve their national implosion with aggressive military action against Guyana, in whose waters a massive oil find is being prepared for development and production.

Political tensions between Guyana and Venezuela are escalating in a longstanding border dispute over an area that comprises two-thirds of the smaller English-speaking South American country. The area in question is the resource-rich Essequibo province, where energy giant ExxonMobil began oil exploration in 2008. The company recently discovered significant oil and gas reserves in Guyana, placing the country on the threshold of an economic boon.

On January 9, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro announced that he would “reconquer” the province, which is situated to the west of Guyana’s Essequibo River. While the area’s riches include gold, diamonds and timber, the focus of Venezuela’s claim is offshore—the location of ExxonMobil’s massive Liza oil field, which the company estimates will produce approximately 120,000 barrels of oil per day. In its project overview, ExxonMobil describes the area as part of the Stabroek Blockcalling it “the first significant oil find offshore Guyana.”

Russia and China have both backed the Maduro government. American adventurism in the south Caribbean, while it may well be warranted from a geopolitical standpoint, nevertheless carries the risk of world war.

Mullin closes his piece with a warning:

Nothing catalyzes governmental, economic, and social change in a country quite like military defeat.  So an urgent message to those still with a shred of patriotism in our leadership: You do not want to go to war under the banner — or at the direction — of this repugnant administration.

He’s right, and the American people are largely at the mercy of the repugnant administration where war is concerned.

It’s time for Republicans in Congress to demand — loudly — reform to the War Powers Act and to take the unilateral power to make war away from Joe Biden. He can’t be allowed to deploy troops without a congressional declaration of war. Not in his current cognitive state, and not in the current condition of his administration. And not given the sad history of fruitless, ill-advised wars for political purposes bad American leaders have become accustomed to launching.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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