Virtually everything Joe Biden has to say is, when parsed, bizarrely irrational. From Patrick Lawrence at scheerpost.com:
Biden wastes an additional $105 billion.
Whenever Joe Biden speaks, you have to make sure your bullshit detector is switched on, to borrow Hemingway’s pungent phrase. As is well-documented, our president has spent his public life making it up as he goes along. No surprise, there was a lot of boilerplate junk in the two much-noted speeches Biden gave last week, one in Tel Aviv after attending a session of Israel’s war cabinet, the other when he dropped it on the American public that they were about to spend a lot more money financing Israeli violence, war in Ukraine and provocation across the Taiwan Strait.
We had better listen carefully this time. Biden has sold a lot of snake oil off the back of his buckwagon over the past half-century. What he has on offer now is too consequential simply to dismiss. Biden is diabolically leveraging the obvious urgency of the Israel–Palestine crisis to lock us into confrontation with most of the world—or at the very least a great deal of it. Late-imperium America would darken the 21st century but for the lights others, primarily in the non–West, insist upon to illuminate our way forward from the mess U.S. hegemony has made.
After addressing Americans from the Oval Office last Friday, Biden went to Congress with a request for new aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, with assorted odds and ends bringing the total spend to $105 billion. Here are the passages in Biden’s address that, amid perilous crises in West Asia and across both oceans, we ought to scrutinize carefully, the deceptively simplistic phrasing notwithstanding:
American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s not worth it.
That’s why, tomorrow, I am going to send to Congress an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners…
It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful, and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren.
