I guess we'll just have to have a Fourth Reich, then, armed to the teeth with nukes: Millennials Pete Hegseth and J. D. Vance think the Europeans are freeloaders

 

In the chats, the user identified as Vice President JD Vance expresses concerns about the strikes but ultimately agrees to go along with US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth's plan - before adding 'I just hate bailing Europe out again.'

Hegseth responds: 'I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It's PATHETIC.' 

And of course they want to throw Mike Waltz under the bus:

There are claims that Mr Waltz is facing the sack over the saga - as he's believed to have been the official who 'added the editor-in-chief [of The Atlantic] to the group'.

One source told Politico: 'Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a f***ing idiot.'

The Financial Times reports that privately some German officials are starting to wonder out loud whether the time has come to acquire their own nuclear arsenal.

J. D. Vance is fixated on cheaper foreign labor as the cause of American industrial decline when it was the tax preference given to ordinary income over long term capital investment which made it attractive

Vance: The Two Conceits Of Globalization That Squeezed American Manufacturing From Both Ends

 

". . . cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch, and it’s a crutch that inhibits innovation. I might even say that it’s a drug that too many American firms got addicted to . . ."

The indispensable contribution driving investment back home to the United States will have to be penalizing foreign investment's income and rewarding long term domestic investment's income through the tax code, which also means dramatically raising ordinary income tax rates. In other words, returning to the status quo ante-Reagan.

The reason is we have learned that rich people don't know what's best to do with their own money any more than the rest of us do. The rich have not done what's best for the country. Ronald Reagan was completely wrong about that. They took one look at the quick and easy money and immediately started looking to maximize it elsewhere. The tax code used to force them to do the right thing, which was keep it here and invest at home if they wanted to get richer. And that is what made all of us richer, with jobs with which we could afford to marry, buy houses and cars, raise children and send them to college.

People who got rich through Reagan's low ordinary income tax rates fell for the cheap labor abroad to get even richer, but now here they and we sit together beholden to countries abroad who are hostile toward us.

The chart below shows how domestic investment dominated foreign throughout the post-war until the Reagan tax reform of 1986. Investment abroad did not overtake domestic until 1993, at 105% of private fixed investment, after the Reagan tax cuts had taken full effect. Foreign as a percentage of domestic investment is double that and more today. For every four dollars invested at home in 2024, eight were invested abroad.

It took decades to screw this up, and it will take decades to fix it. But as sure as I'm sitting here neither J. D. Vance nor Donald Trump nor any other politician out there has any clue about this. 

 

 

J. D. Vance in September 2021, a year before becoming US Senator from Ohio, is the brains behind Trump seizing the administrative state and firing everybody, Elon Musk is just the henchman

 

Ohio shoulda said pwease

 

Local projects like Milliken Road, Wright-Patt sidelined as U.S. House votes to avoid shutdown

Even as Ohio Republicans stuck with President Donald Trump and voted on Tuesday to approve a six-month government funding bill in the U.S. House, that decision came with a price — as the GOP plan denied federal funding for a variety of local projects across the state. ...

 

When Governor Bill Richardson and Kamala had a baby omg

 

Herrlich schrecklich ha ha

 

Getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government is going to be very difficult

 

Inquiring minds want to know if J. D. Vance ever apologized to Donald Trump for calling him America's Hitler

 

It's catching on

 

Trump's grifting, shape-shifting billionaire crypto czar David Sacks calls Zelenskyy a grifter lol

 

 David Sacks, a Jewish South-African, is another one of Trump's end-run-around-the-rules appointees like Elon Musk.

Like Musk he is one of Trump's "special government employees" who was not confirmed by the US Senate and who has not divested from all of his private business activities while he influences federal government policy. There is no government oversight of David Sacks.

Sacks licks his finger and checks the wind direction like the rest of his parasitical tech bro friends. He has made large political contributions in the past to the campaigns of both Mitt Romney and later to Hillary Clinton, as well as to RFK Jr., among others.

Like J. D. Vance, he believes in nothing very much except what's good for himself and his friends. "They are very rich people who want to buy political power", according to Edward Luce (below).

Sacks spews a litany of falsehoods about Zelenskyy and Russia's invasion of Ukraine here in an interview with the numbskull Jesse Watters. He has stated that Ukraine provoked the Russians to attack in 2022, a belief which Republicans booed last summer because it isn't true, according to Edward Luce of The Financial Times, who was there:

Sacks said on the opening night of the Milwaukee Republican convention, which I am also attending, that the US “provoked” Russia to invade Ukraine. As much as Sacks denies strenuously that he was booed by delegates. I beg to differ. The sceptical reception to Sacks’ Putin-friendly diatribe was the least unreassuring moment of what is the most dystopian political convention I have witnessed.

Imagine FDR telling Churchill in August 1941 to make peace with Hitler and fork over Britain's coal to America

 

A Day of American Infamy

Bret Stephens, The New York Times

... If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy. ...

J. D. Vance's disgrace: As vice president he berated, bullied, and humiliated a president of a foreign country, in front of God and everybody

Yale's finest!

 

Lindsey Grahamnesty epitomizes everything that's gone wrong with the GOP and America generally: America's interests abroad are purely about money, not at all about freedom

 

John McCain would not be happy with his old friend. McCain was a main agitator for freedom in Ukraine and its alliance with the West. The policy wisdom of that was controversial, but it wasn't framed as purely economic.

Lindsey used to be for freedom in Ukraine like McCain. Lindsey used to be an immigration liberal who advocated for amnesty. Now he's a suck-up to Trump as bad as Marco Rubio, who also used to talk about the old American values preached by Ronald Reagan.

They are shapeshifters all, just like the formerly NeverTrump J. D. Vance.

You cannot trust any of these people any more than we can trust Vladimir Putin. 

Lindsey Graham here:

I told Zelensky we'll talk about security guarantees. We'll talk about ceasefires and how the war ends. This is a process. You have a new relationship with America, a 500 billion, half trillion, dollar deal that President Trump is proud of that gives us an interest worth defending.      

In other words, if it's not about money it's not worth defending.

 

Thy money perish with thee.

-- Acts 8:20

Trump-Vance orchestrate an ambush of Zelenskyy, and when they are bested in the debate by Zelenskyy, Vance accuses Zelenskyy of orchestrating it for the media

 The chutzpah is amazing.

This is the moment when the whole meeting descended into chaos and hurtled toward failure.

Here Zelenskyy explains how Ukraine tried diplomacy with Putin after Putin took Crimea in 2014, but Putin broke the agreements they made.

J. D. Vance then attacked Zelenskyy, as if Zelenskyy had orchestrated this media shit show in the first place to make him look bad.

But J. D. looked bad all by himself. He didn't need any help at all.

What a disgrace.

 

 

 

Trump-Vance throw a fit: Thou shalt not point out that Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted

 

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance tag-teamed Ukraine's Zelenskyy today in front of the cameras for five minutes in a display which disgraces the Oval Office forever

This after reversing himself this week, Trump saying he didn't call Zelenskyy a dictator and then called him the best president Ukraine has had, which was obviously all a set up for this public attack and humiliation.

The attack was telegraphed by the reporter asking why Zelenskyy didn't wear a suit for the meeting. Everyone knows Zelenskyy hasn't worn a suit to meet with anyone since the war started in 2022, an act of solidarity with his troops whose clothing he wears.

 

 

 

I for one am looking forward to J. D. Vance defending the First Amendment rights of Jihadist authors

 

Nutball worlds in collision: Trumpism defends freedom in Europe with its right hand, stabs it in the back in Ukraine with its left, Biden defended freedom in Ukraine with his right, attacked it in America with his left

 

 But The Federalist has its blinders on. Biden baaaaaaad! Trump gooooood!

"Let's see if we can find some naive kid to write a story about it!" 

By Defending Free Speech Worldwide, Team Trump Reclaims America’s Global Moral High Ground:

Under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers will no longer be ignored by the United States.

Yep, J. D. Vance goes to Europe to beat up on our friends. But suppression of freedom will be ignored, in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. And above all in Ukraine.

This is the essence of libertarianism: Make the good the enemy of the perfect.

But defending freedom where it really counts would take some courage, and they don't have it. 

The author of this article, who graduated from college in 2022 with a BA in political "science", ends it touting the execrable Darren Beattie at Marco Rubio's State Department, a Taiwan surrender monkey. 

 

The article is the second in the queue at Real Clear Politics this morning. One goes there looking for some serious editorial judgment and gets this.

Trump/Vance don't have the moral high ground. They are just the cowardly other side of the same old hypocritical American coin.

In his Feb 21 debate with the conservative historian Niall Ferguson, J. D. Vance said Trump was trying to achieve a lasting piece of Ukraine lol

 A very unfortunate but accurate Freudian slip.

And the idea that "we're not going to telegraph our negotiating posture" is just laughable on its face. The administration has publicly said Ukraine won't get any land back and will not become part of NATO, both of which are concessions before negotiations have even begun.

These people are a joke, a very bad joke.

 

 

J. D. Vance says we'll help freedom fighters everywhere . . .

 . . . to surrender.