Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
More than a decade ago, the country was lauded for its treatment program. Now, Venezuela is years into a political and economic crisis.
Juan Coronel was so thin that his kneecaps jutted out like tent poles in his sweatpants. He was 39 when I met him a few weeks ago, with reddish-brown hair that clung to his scalp like a baby’s and deep hollows below his cheekbones. His voice was soft and raspy, and he seemed dazed at his own fragility. “I need to go and look for medicine,” he said, “but I’m having trouble getting around.”
I had not seen a person who looked like Mr. Coronel – a person dying of untreated AIDS – since I covered the pandemic in Africa at its height more than a decade ago. In fact, there is nowhere in the world today where people are dying of AIDS at the pace and in the sheer numbers that they are in Venezuela: Even the poorest African countries today have HIV treatment programs. They still don’t reach everyone, and people are still dying, or getting treatment only after they become very ill – they may come to look as Mr. Coronel did when I met him. But in other countries, they are the exception. Today, in Venezuela, his case is the rule...
This is good, from Shermichael Singleton, at the Hill:
You don’t have to be a seasoned political operative to question the logic behind Democrats investing so much money into a congressional district that has gone Republican for nearly 40 years, yet that is exactly what the Democratic Party did.
They believed they could switch moderate Republican voters to vote for a Democratic candidate and mobilize Independents by spouting a progressive message, which is philosophically antithetical to the values held by most voters — such as limited government due to a fear of government encroachment and excessive regulation — as well as utopian ideas about society, which many frankly believe are unrealistic.
Grand visions about the future are typically distrusted by most people regardless of their ideological leanings because people live in reality, and nothing in reality happens overnight. Most Americans want pragmatism that builds toward a better tomorrow, rather than grandiose promises built on unproven ideas.
Maybe the intent of progressive Democrats is good. Maybe it isn’t. However, what is most concerning about progressive ideology is that it maintains the belief that ultimate good comes from a centrally planned state or in essence the government. Similar to socialism, progressivism advocates for a government built on compulsory force.
The government cannot possibly know the needs of every single person today, so that the needs of the individual are met for tomorrow. Any more than a socialist system knows how much of a product to produce. The two are arguably one in the same.
One of the biggest problems with progressivism is that they advocate the importance of a centralized nurturing state with a moral goal, but that has never been the role of government. Government, as advocated by progressives, is impossible because it is impossible for a government to know exactly what each individual need or how much of it that they need.
Democrats foolishly believed that college-educated Republicans would vote for a progressive Democrat over a Republican because of their disdain for President Trump and his many mishaps. The unknown Jon Ossoff ran against the known Karen Handel, who once chaired Fulton County Board of Commissioners from 2003 to 2006. She was then elected and served as Georgia’s secretary of state from 2007 to 2010.
And she even threw her hat in the ring for the highly contested U.S. Senate race in 2014 to replace former Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). In essence, she isn’t a political newcomer and the fact that Democrats actually believed they could flip a district that has gone Republican for nearly four decades purely because of Trump’s actions shows how out of touch their strategy is.
Handel made the election about issues, pointing out that a vote for Ossoff would be a vote for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is far more unpopular with Republican voters, including those with a disdain for Trump...
About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”
By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.
And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.
n 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.
The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.
Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”
Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”
Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others...
I've never liked nor respected Assange, who I consider an enemy.
But note how Halpern gets the basic background wrong: That "graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis" was actually a video of anti-American journalists embedded with Iraqi insurgents armed with RPGs. The Apache took them out in self-defense, following strict rules of engagement. That story's been totally debunked. But as with most other things in the news, the initial lie becomes the official truth for the radical left. That's why you can never let your guard down.
Media outlets are playing down the victories of the National Front, but Marine Le Pen can now claim she's got governing experience. This seat is a platform for her national aspirations.