“Imagine all the people, living life in peace,” sang the late John Lennon in 1971. The line was in his song “Imagine,” in which, among other things, he theorizes about a world with “no countries” and “nothing to kill or die for.” In this vein, however, his son may now be imagining an America without the Democratic Party.
This could occur to an observer, anyway, after Seán Ono Lennon asked rhetorically on X recently, “When did Dems transition to becoming the War Party?”
The answer is especially important to consider now that the Biden administration is inching us closer to WWIII (and possible nuclear annihilation) with Russia. And the answer, according to author Ryan James Girdusky, is this:
“Technically they always were the war party.”
Girdusky explained himself in a May 25 tweet (which contains Lennon’s parent tweet):
(Note: The two gulf wars, in 1991 and 2003, and the 2001 Afghanistan invasion were bipartisan affairs.)
As to Girdusky’s latter point, the mainstream media — which act as the Democrats’ PR team — were complicit in the charade, too, of course. That is, they’d notify us daily during the Bush administration of how many American soldiers had died in Afghanistan. Oddly, though, these updates ended the moment Obama took office in 2009 — even though servicemen were still perishing.
Commentator Andrea Widburg adds that this is despite the fact that “Obama liked droning and bombing places, everywhere from Libya to Pakistan.” What’s more, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (an award bestowed based on perceived potential) was flippant about the matter, reportedly telling aides in 2011, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people.”
Obama wasn’t alone, either. His then-secretary of state, Democrat Hillary Clinton, also found humor in warfare, joking when she heard of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s death in 2011, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Does this reflect the seriousness and maturity that should epitomize people with their “fingers on the button”?
This question is most relevant. As commentator Tucker Carlson has pointed out, the pseudo-elites who’ve seemingly gotten every major foreign-policy decision wrong for the last many decades — from Afghanistan to Egypt to Libya to Iraq — are now talking about possible direct confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. This is unprecedented.
Crossing a Red Line
The USSR sent 200,000 troops into Hungary in 1956, and the same number into Czechoslovakia in 1968, to crush freedom-oriented movements. In neither case did we consider, even for a moment, dispatching NATO forces to those beleaguered nations to directly confront the Soviets.
Likewise, President Ronald Reagan was a staunch Cold Warrior, had famously dubbed the USSR the “evil empire,” and did covertly arm Afghanistan’s Mujahideen after the 1979 Soviet invasion of their land. Nonetheless, the prospect of having Western troops directly fight the USSR’s forces was inconceivable with the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head. It was a line you just didn’t cross.
Question: What has changed?
The Russians still have 6,200 nuclear weapons and the capacity to end life as we know it on our planet. MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), which had been a deterrent to direct NATO-Soviet confrontation throughout the Cold War, is still a reality. Yet we now hear talk, from France’s President Emmanuel Macron and others, of sending NATO troops to Ukraine. We now hear about how, for the first time, Ukraine has struck targets inside Russia with American weapons, prompting a Kremlin warning of “fatal consequences.” We now hear about how the Kremlin has been warned that “Russia will turn to ashes” in a NATO nuclear conflict. Gee, thanks, Captain Obvious.
Who knew the globalist capons and clucking hens in charge oozed so much testosterone?
Of course, much of the saber rattling may be bluster, the Russian strategy “escalate to deescalate,” and media hype. But the reality is that unless the pseudo-elites know something we don’t (not a good bet), the turning-to-ashes phenomenon still goes both ways. Is it worth it? Over Ukraine?
Really?
But what should truly give pause is what explains our pseudo-elites’ repeated folly. And I’ll introduce this with a few stories, ones I’ve told before.
After I articulately refuted the speakers’ thesis during a local feminist conference about 30 years ago, some of the organizers approached me, suspicious, wondering what organization I represented (only myself). The group, perhaps four middle-aged women, were uninterested in my thoughts and quickly begged out of the conversation by offering to mail me literature on their positions. I said, jokingly, sure, “as long as you don’t send a hit squad to my house.” The response?
Very seriously and sternly they replied, “We don’t do things like that.”
But perhaps those feminists graduated from the Patsy Schroeder School of Comedy. After all, Schroeder, a liberal congresswoman from Colorado, actually castigated radio host Rush Limbaugh on the House floor in the ’90s, having taken seriously a satirical bit he did about buying his mother a can opener as a present so she could more easily access the dog food she had to eat. That Limbaugh was, quite obviously, spoofing Democratic propaganda completely eluded Schroeder.
The point? The above reflects leftists’ norm: being so detached from reality that they misread others egregiously. Now, consider: Will people who can’t detect basic humor and think kids can switch sexes at will be able to negotiate a geopolitical minefield?
And what could be the result if they misread Putin and the Russian leadership as badly as their co-ideologists did Limbaugh and me?
