Nancy Pelosi is finished

 

Nancy Pelosi is finished

no one deserves more blame for Dems’ $1B electoral collapse

Under her ruthless leadership, her party lost the White House, the House, the Senate and the popular vote.

Miranda Devine, New York Post

It’s high time to shatter the myth of Nancy Pelosi as a master strategist. Nobody deserves more blame than the ridiculously self-titled "speaker emerita" for the Democrats’ $1 billion electoral collapse. 

Under her ruthless leadership, her party lost the White House, the House, the Senate and the popular vote. You can’t say that enough. 

Voters rejected the Dems from coast to coast, even in Pelosi’s deepest-blue home city of San Francisco, which saw a 7-point swing to Donald Trump.

She’s the only speaker in history to have lost control of the House twice. 

She’s finished

The empress emeritus has no clothes (perish the thought). 

Yet she still has the nerve to reward herself with another term, filing the papers last week to run for re-election in 2026, at the tender age of 86! She’ll be 88 at the end of Trump’s term.

When is too much enough?

Her saccharine-coated "Mean Girls" style of partisan viciousness and deviousness turns out to have done nothing for her party but postpone the inevitable reckoning between the radical left and common-sense moderates. Unfortunately for the Dems, most of the latter have taken a hike under Pelosi’s reign. 

Lying and infighting

If the GOP is Trump’s party, the Democratic Party is Pelosi’s — and what a viper’s nest of blame-shifting and rancor it has become, as they all blame each other for their humiliating defeat at the hands of the man they derided as a Nazi. Most Americans didn’t agree, and now the Democrats and their media handmaidens stand exposed as frauds and liars.

If Trump is such an "existential threat" to democracy, as Pelosi insisted to the bitter end, why did Joe Biden greet him with open arms and a beaming smile the other day? 

"Welcome back," said the president to the man Pelosi vowed would never again enter the White House.

"I decided a while ago that Donald Trump will never set foot in the White House again as president of the United States or in any other capacity," she told the Guardian before the election when she was trying to justify the coup against Biden, her former longtime friend who, she kept lying, was "sharp as a tack" until he fell apart on live TV.

With her party in ruins, pent-up frustration with Pelosi’s iron grip and flawed judgment is starting to find voice. Expect it to get louder as her efforts to offload blame on Biden leave a sour taste in the mouths of party loyalists. 

Since the humiliating defeat, Pelosi has been filmed publicly squabbling with Donna Brazile, has traded barbs with Bernie Sanders and has been ripped on "The View" and MSNBC. The Washington Post fact-checker even awarded her "Four Pinocchios" for lying that illegal migration was worse under Trump than Biden.

"The View" co-host Ana Navarro called Pelosi "nasty" for telling the New York Times that the Dems would have won if Biden had quit sooner. 

"She wants to make sure people know it wasn’t her, [that] she has no blame in this. … It’s really unseemly." 

Symone Sanders Townsend, MSNBC host and former Biden aide, blasted Pelosi for helping "orchestrate the very public demise of the president."

"Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the speaker emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?" 

Anonymous Dem lawmakers vented their spleen to Axios last week. 

"She needs to take a seat," one senior Democrat said of Pelosi. "Making scattershot comments [blaming others] is not just unhelpful, it’s damaging."

"[House Minority Leader] Hakeem [Jeffries] has been tremendously graceful and respectful of her, but I don’t think she is being respectful of him," said another Dem, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

'She's the enforcer'

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) wasn’t afraid to go on the record to express his frustration at Pelosi’s toxic legacy.

"She embraced this ‘She’s the Godmother, she’s the enforcer’ [image] and now she’s blaming Biden," he told Politico last week. "Well, you can’t have it both ways. You got what you wanted, and now you’re still blaming Biden.

"I think it’s really ironic that you have a woman at age 84 and she is still hanging on. Why not give a younger generation an opportunity to occupy that seat?"

Why not indeed. The only reason she’s hanging around Congress is the same reason she demanded her successor as speaker, Jeffries, bestow on her the "emerita" title: her ego. 

She believes she is the only person capable of crippling Trump’s second presidency like she did his first, and she is addicted to the adulation of a lapdog press overly impressed with the fact that she is female. They even praised her classless, divisive stunt of ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech in 2020, standing right behind him at the podium for all the world to see.

In her two decades of amoral, divisive leadership, the Democrats have become the party of censorship, scolds, war and corporate interests. 

She devoted the twilight years of her career to her obsession with destroying Trump and his supporters, whom she slyly set up on Jan. 6, 2021, by refusing to give Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund the National Guard backup he begged for, and then turned the Jan. 6 committee into her personal star chamber.

Despot times

All her hatred, the impeachments and lawfare and jailing of Trump allies, served neither her party nor the country. Trump is back, better than ever, her party is in ruins and the country has been through hell for four years.

At the DNC convention that anointed Kamala Harris as their doomed presidential candidate, Dems were seen sporting buttons featuring Pelosi and the word "Godmother" with her face on a poster for the iconic Mafia movie "The Godfather." If that’s not an admission that she still runs the party like a Mafia don, nothing is.

It is true that she is a formidable leader in the Genghis Khan mold, as one GOP semi-admirer describes her. But what good were her dictatorial skills to the party she led off a cliff? 

She needs to ride off into the sunset, for everyone’s sake.

Miranda Devine is a writer, New York Post columnist and Fox News contributor.

Restoring Deterrence Will Prevent Endless Wars

 

Restoring Deterrence Will Prevent Endless Wars

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration conducted a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.

Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath.

After the Trump cancellation of the Iran Deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases—most of which Trump himself ironically wished to remove.

A few days later, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike against Americans in Iraq and Syria, assuming Trump had no desire for a wider Middle East war.

So, Iran launched 12 missiles that hit two U.S. airbases in Iraq. Supposedly, Tehran had warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks that killed no Americans. Later reports, however, suggested that some Americans suffered concussions, while more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed.

Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East while restoring deterrence that prevented, not prompted, full-scale conflicts.

Yet in a second Trump administration, rethreading the deterrence needle without getting into major wars may become far more challenging. The world of today is far more dangerous than when Trump left in 2021.

An inept Biden administration has utterly destroyed U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters: the Chinese dressing down of U.S. diplomats in Anchorage; the humiliating skedaddle from Afghanistan; the brazen flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the U.S.; the invasion of Ukraine by Russia; the October 7, 2023 massacre of 1200 Israelis; the serial Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea; the visible restraint of Israeli from fully replying to Iranian missile attacks on its homeland; and renewed bellicosity on the part of both North Korea and China toward American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Of course, a second-term Trump must radically reform the Pentagon and beef up the military while warning enemies of the consequences to follow from any unwise aggression.

But if opponents believe such admonitions remain only vocal threats, then empty verbiage surely will erode deterrence further—such as Joe Biden’s serial and empty braggadocio, “Don’t!”

Biden’s past theatrical finger-shaking translated into aggressors like Putin going into Ukraine, Iran sending missiles into Israel, and the Houthis serially hitting shipping in the Red Sea.

Given the past messes of the Iraqi, Libyan, and Syrian interventions, and the catastrophic Biden humiliation in Afghanistan, Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such overseas dead-end entanglements or even the gratuitous use of force that historically can sometimes lead to tit-for-tat entanglements.

Still, Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as vice president, along with Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr., and Tucker Carlson as close advisors, coupled with the announcements that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and prior UN Ambassador Nikki Haley will not be in the administration, may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of Trump neo-isolationism.

Moreover, the U.S. is battered by an unsustainable $37 trillion national debt and a nonexistent southern border that saw 12 million illegal aliens enter with impunity.

So, the use of force abroad is now often seen in a zero-sum fashion as coming at the expense of unaddressed American needs at home.

Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has not achieved strategic advantages from wars abroad, while disparaging and alienating the very working-class recruits who disproportionately fight and die in them.

Recently, even as President-elect Trump’s inner circle emphasized an end to endless conflicts, Trump warned Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that advice was followed by a Russian massive drone onslaught against civilian Ukrainian targets.

Putin no doubt wishes to encourage American enemies to test Trump’s deterrent rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home.

Is there a way to square the deterrence circle?

Trump will have to speak clearly and softly while carrying a club. And for the first few months of his administration, he will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, China, North Korea, and Russia that aggression against US interests will be swiftly and quietly met with disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions.

Yet Trump will likely have to rely on drones, missiles, and air strikes and not on major engagements, to deter enemies from aggression—and his domestic critics from claiming he turned into a globalist interventionist.

He is not.

Trump remains a Jacksonian. But such deterrence entails warning from time to time the reckless and adventurous abroad that our allies have no better friend than America and our adversaries no worse enemy.

In other words, Trump must remind Americans only by periodically deterring enemies can he prevent endless wars.

 

What the Hegseth nomination means

 What the Hegseth nomination means

Byron York,Washington Examiner 

WHAT THE HEGSETH NOMINATION MEANS. On Tuesday evening, President-elect Donald Trump shook up Washington by announcing that he would nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. “Pete is a graduate of Princeton University and has a graduate degree from Harvard University,” Trump said in the announcement. “He is an Army combat veteran who did tours in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For his actions on the battlefield, he was decorated with two Bronze Stars.” During his years as co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, Hegseth has focused extensively on military and veterans affairs. This year, he wrote a bestselling book, War on Warriors, in which he decried the new woke military.*

“The military has long been a place for turning mere boys into fighting men not just by teaching them honor and sacrifice but by channeling daring, building strength, and accumulating skills,” Hegseth wrote. “The so-called elites directing the military today aren’t just lowering standards and focusing on the wrong enemy; they are overtly working to rid the military of this specific (essential) type of young patriot. They believe power is bad, merit is unfair, ideology is more important than industriousness, white people are yesterday, and safety! is better than risk-taking.”

The nomination immediately set off an outcry. “Who the f*** is this guy?” said an anonymous defense industry lobbyist quoted in Politico. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who did not serve in the military and chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on personnel, wrote on X: “A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense. … I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.” A liberal veterans advocate called Hegseth “undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history.”

The fact is that despite his impressive qualifications — Princeton, Harvard, two Bronze Stars, and professional success — Hegseth does not have the resume one would expect from a secretary of defense, most notably the management experience to run one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, with an $841 billion budget this year. But Trump clearly wanted a change in direction. 

Trump can look at past secretaries who had the right resumes and didn’t work out. Bill Clinton picked a Democratic member of the House named Les Aspin, who had decades of experience overseeing the Pentagon and turned out to be a terrible secretary of defense. George W. Bush picked Donald Rumsfeld, who had vast experience in government and had even been defense secretary before, and Rumsfeld made grievous errors in the job. Barack Obama had problems with the Pentagon, and Trump himself struggled to find the right man to run the Department of Defense, going through five secretaries or acting secretaries in the first Trump administration.

Most of all, Trump wants a Defense Department that can get things done without all the wokeness and HR department stuff that plagues modern bureaucracies. Trump has an old-movie view of the U.S. military and American generals — he frequently praises this or that general or other leader as being “straight out of central casting.” Above all, he wants military leaders who will accomplish missions rather than explain why those missions cannot be accomplished, which has been a common desire of presidents for a very long time. There is a story Trump tells that illustrates what he has in mind.

In a speech last February to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, Trump told the story of escalating the campaign to destroy the Islamic State. As he usually does, Trump got around to the subject somewhat elliptically. His discussion started with the U.S.-Mexico border and his action forcing Mexico to accept his Remain in Mexico policy. Then, Trump moved to the idea of U.S. policymakers preventing soldiers and law enforcement, such as those at the border, from doing their jobs. Then, he moved on to the people he called “television generals,” such as Gen. Mark Milley, whom Trump called “an idiot.”

Then, Trump moved on to heap elaborate praise on U.S. military men and women. The pilots on Air Force One, he said, were “better looking than Tom Cruise — and taller.” The generals were “really great,” with the exception of Milley and other “TV generals.” And then, there was Air Force Gen. J. Daniel “Razin” Caine, the man who “knocked the s*** out of ISIS.” Trump described being told by his Washington-based military advisers that it just wasn’t possible to eradicate ISIS quickly. It could take years. Progress would be incremental. But then, in December 2018, Trump flew into Iraq on a secret presidential visit, where he met Caine.

Trump went into great detail about the flight, in which the pilots used extensive safety maneuvers, no lights, steep corkscrew approach, and other stealth techniques, to land the plane in a dangerous area. First, it blew Trump’s mind that the United States has spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in the Middle East “and we can’t land a plane with the lights on.” What kind of success is that? Trump described going to the cockpit of Air Force One in darkness to watch the pilots. Trump became more and more anxious as the plane dove toward the airport in the middle of the night. Onstage, he started doing a little Rodney Dangerfield nervous sweating routine — “Does anybody have a towel?” — and then mockingly suggested he should award himself the Medal of Honor for his courage in riding along with the landing. (As he usually does, Trump then said the press would probably report that he said it seriously, and indeed, some did.)

Then, Trump described walking down the steps of Air Force One and meeting Caine. Trump did a little double-take comedy on Caine’s nickname and described him as looking “better than any movie actor you could get” and “the man I’m looking for” to take down ISIS. Trump said he asked Caine, “Why is ISIS so tough?” and Caine answered, “They’re not tough, sir — they just don’t let us do our job.” Trump asked how long it would take for the military to destroy ISIS if Pentagon leadership freed them to get the job done. A few weeks, Caine said, according to Trump. And that is what happened. Even if parts of Trump’s story are apocryphal, the fact is that the U.S. military quickly “knocked the s*** out of ISIS,” in Trump’s words.

The lesson Trump took from that is that the military is great but that U.S. military leadership is sclerotic, risk-averse, and overly politicized. “We have a great military, and it’s only woke at the top,” Trump told CPAC. “I don’t think it could ever be ‘woke-enized’ at the lower levels because these are great people. It was only at the top.”

So now, Trump is proposing a radical change at the top of the civilian leadership of the military. It could be a breakthrough success, rebalancing the military as a fighting force above all else. Or it could be a failure, and everyone will be asking what Trump was thinking when he put Pete Hegseth in charge of an $841 billion bureaucracy. But if voters sent any message in the election, it is that they want a change from the Biden administration and that they approve, in a big-picture sense, of Trump’s leadership in his first time in office. So now, Trump is, as promised, bringing change.

“All the criticism of him is that he’s not the expected Washington pick, and I’m just saying to you that the American people just voted against the expected Washington pick,” CNN resident conservative Scott Jennings said Tuesday night. Yes, Hegseth will have to run the confirmation gauntlet in the Senate, Jennings continued, and will have to show that he has the knowledge to do that job. “But we ought to give this man a chance, in my opinion.” That’s what the election was about.

IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO GO

 

The end of the Obamaification of American politics? 

IT’S TIME FOR HIM TO GO

Scott Johnson, Powerline 

David Samuels and David Garrow explored “The Obama factor” in the classic 2023 Tablet column/discussion. Commenting on Obama’s post-presidential residence in Washington, D.C., Samuels observed:

[I]it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.

Samuels returns to the subject of Obama’s refusal to depart the scene in last week’s post-election UnHerd column “How Trump crushed Obama’s legacy.” Both of these excellent columns deserve the closest attention.

Washington Examiner editor Hugo Gordon adds this: “It’s eight years since he ended his second presidential term. Yet he lingers like a bad smell. Why is he still here? Because despite his elegance of manner he doesn’t have the grace to get out of the way. He won’t allow others to rise to meet the challenges of today, so Democrats stay as radical as a Chicago South Side community organizer.”

All true, but there is more to that bad odor. Neither Samuels nor Gurdon has had the opportunity to take in the transcript of Remarks by the President in Roundtable with Progressive Journalists (January 17, 2017). “The President” was of course Obama. Although released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2022, it was only posted publicly in recent days. Park MacDougald brought it to my attention last week with this comment:

On four occasions in the conversation, he seeded the Trump-Russia collusion narrative among the journalists, despite knowing that it was a false piece of Clinton campaign propaganda. As usual, Obama spoke in innuendos, rather than directly, but the point of his briefing was clear. He blamed Trump’s victory on the Clinton campaign and the media for not reporting enough on “the Russia leaks.” He stated that “the Russia thing” was a “problem” with the incoming administration and said it’s “hard to know what conversations the President-elect may be having offline with business leaders in other countries who are also connected to leaders of other countries.” That’s an apparent reference to the discredited Alfa Bank conspiracy theory, shopped first to the CIA and then the press by Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman, which held that Trump was secretly communicating with Putin through the servers of a bank. Obama suggested that Trump was receiving indirect payouts from Vladimir Putin through Russian nationals purchasing apartments in his buildings….All this, again, about a piece of Clinton campaign opposition that Obama himself knew was false.

As we saw in the closing days of the Harris campaign, President Obama remains a poisonous blight on our national discourse. As was once said of Al Gore, now it can be said of Obama. It’s time for him to go.