On Saturday, Charley Taylor, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame who spent his entire National Football League career with the Washington Redskins, mostly as a wide receiver, died Saturday. He was 79. Taylor is the franchise leader in receiving touchdowns and overall TDs, and he was named to the Pro Bowl eight times.
Taylor, an African-American, was drafted by the Redskins in 1964, just two years after Washington became the last NFL team to integrate. That’s an interesting story, which ESPN doesn’t bother to mention. From 1946, the year before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball, thru 1970, the ‘Skins got what they deserved, they had just four winning seasons and no playoff appearances.
The Washington National Football League franchise has been using the Commanders nickname for not even three weeks. Controversial for years, the Redskins moniker reaches back nine decades, to the brief period when they played in Boston. “Redskins” has always been perceived as a pejorative. No, let me use a stronger term, a racist insult. Native Americans and many other people have long called for a name change, the process accelerated two years ago after the murder of George Floyd, and for the last two years the team known as the Washington Football Team.
“Go team!” Yawn.
But the Redskins they once were. Obscuring or omitting that fact by the media is a disservice to their audiences. Or it could be that ESPN is surrendering to its innate wokeness, or it is afraid the 50 or so people who agitate constantly online about any leftist grievance they can find, such as the storied “Cat Lady” who hounds Dan Bongino.
The New York Times, which hasn’t as this posting has published a report on the death of Taylor, famously says that it publishes “All the news that’s fit to print.”
Instead, the woke media publishes “All the news the way we think it should be or how it should have been.”
Oh, I don’t have a personal horse in this battle, I’m a Chicago Bears fan. Other than their Super Bowl XX win nearly, sob, four decades ago, my favorite memory of the Monsters of the Midway was their upset win of the Commanders–just kidding, the Redskins, then the defending Super Bowl champions–on the road in a 1984 playoff win. Mike Ditka’s Chicago Bears announced to the world that they had arrived as an elite NFL team.
Bumper sticker that reads, in Ukranian, “Putin is a d*ckhead.”
By John Ruberry
“History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” Ronald Reagan.
Contrary to the lessons that are almost certainly taught in American universities by leftist professors, large military budgets are not a precursor to war. In reality history teaches us something different.
As the Ottoman Empire declined in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Turks were faced with numerous rebellions and wars. They were on the losing side in nearly all of them, as ethnic groups and nations saw their opportunities, and for the most part, took them. One of those opportunistic states was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, itself in decline. Its annexation of Bosnia, nominally still part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1908 nearly caused a war in the Balkans. But a few years later there were two conflicts, the First Balkan War and the Second Balkan War, which, along with the assassination of the heir apparent of Austria-Hungary in Bosnia in 1914, and to be fair some other European disputes, set the table for World War I.
The First World War brought us World War II, arguably the same conflict with a two-decade intermission, which led to the Cold War, then the collapse of communism, with eventually, former KGB agent Vladimir Putin becoming the de facto president-for-life of Russia.
Do you see where weakness leads us?
Last year, with the inauguration of Joe Biden, an emphasis on wokeness and diversity was pushed by our military leaders, instead of more important things, such as defending America and confronting enemies. Far worse for the appearance of American military strength was the rapid fall of Afghanistan. As bad as the fall of Saigon was for the image of the USA, the South Vietnamese were able to hold off the communists for two years after the departure of American combat troops. Afghanistan fell before Joe Biden’s pullout date.
Which brings us back to Putin.
Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. As soon as this week, Russian troops, including some in Putin’s client-state of Belarus, could invade the rest of Ukraine. While I am not an advocate of sending troops to Ukraine, now that is, if Biden had sent a tripwire contingent of American and NATO ally troops to Ukraine last summer, that very well may have been enough to scare off Putin. We have troops in South Korea that aren’t sizable enough to defeat the North Koreans, but an invasion from the north would almost certainly lead to a national outrage and call for a swift response to avenge American casualties and to protect South Korea. There are NATO troops in the Baltic States, and yes, Estonia, Lativa, and Lithuania are members of NATO, which are serving a similar role.
For those calling for an economic boycott of Russia. Good luck with that. The best way to punish Russia in the pocketbook is to stop buying Russian oil and natural gas, the latter is a crucial energy source for western Europe. That will not happen.
Biden projected weakness early in his presidency by waiving sanctions against the Russian company building the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 originate in Vyborg, Russia. It’s important to remember that between the world wars, Vyborg was part of Finland, but the Soviet Union seized it in the Winter War of 1939-1940.
As for fossil fuels in America, Biden is instead hitching his shaky wagon to Green New Deal follies.
Humiliating defeats don’t necessarily lead to more debacles. The first major World War II battle between American forces and the Nazis was the Battle of Kasserine Pass in North Africa, it was a fiasco for the Allies.
What happened next?
The American commander, General Lloyd Fredendall, was sent stateside and was replaced by General George S. Patton.
After the Afghanistan rout, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, still has his job.
Was anyone fired after the fall of Kabul? I don’t believe so.
Worse, Putin likely sees Biden as not only weak, but as someone suffering from cognitive decline. At the very least, Biden and his top aides, were indecisive as Afghanistan collapsed, according to recently declassified documents.
Shortly after Joe Biden declared victory in the 2020 presidential election–one that Donald J. Trump said repeatedly was “rigged,” staff from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared that election “the most secure in American history.”
Left-wingers, particularly those in media, viewed that statement as sacrosanct, a papal bull for liberals. But a radio host, I believe it was Mike Gallagher, issued a sagacious response to that sentiment, which went something like this, “If 2020 was the most secure election in American history, which one was the second-most secure?”
So if the 2020 presidential election, in the mind of leftists, was really “the most secure in American history,” how did we go from that to Biden, in last week’s rambling press conference, questioning the results of elections where the ballots haven’t even been printed yet, the 2020 midterms.
“Well, it all depends on whether or not we’re able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try to alter the outcome of the election,” when asked by a reporter about whether those races would be “fairly conducted” and “legitimate.”
Wow. The Democrats and their media allies continue to pillorize Donald Trump for casting doubt on the results of the ’20 election, but here is Biden calling into question the upcoming midterms.
It’s difficult to say if Biden was having one of his great-grandpa moments or was succumbing to the Democrats’ wont to cast every political issue as an existential crisis. Perhaps both. Jen Psaki once again had to conduct a clean-up in the supermarket aisle as Star Trek’s John Gill created another mess.
The Democrats have been in a hyper-tizzy for almost a year because of the recently-enacted Georgia voting law, which expands early voting but also establishes controls to minimize vote fraud. Biden called it “Jim Crow on steroids,” a hateful insult, because until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black voters were disenfranchised in most of the southern states, including Georgia.
The 2021 Georgia reforms are in fact about election integrity.
Despite multiple calls from conservative pundits, Democrats haven’t come up with a single person who was unlawfully denied the right to vote in 2020.
Adding oxygen to the Dems fire, earlier this month Biden likened opponents to what he calls “voting rights” to notorious racists Bull Connor, George Wallace, and Jefferson Davis. All three were Democrats, by the way. Here is some more history for you. Nineteen senators voted against the 1965 Voting Rights Act, seventeen of them were Democrats. Some of those Dems were still members of the Senate when Biden was elected to that body in 1972.
While of course it is many within the Republican Party, led by Donald J. Trump, who question the result of the 2020 presidential election, it was the Democrats, of course without scolding from their media allies, who did the same after Trump’s victory in 2016 and George W. Bush’s narrow win in 2000. Just two weeks ago it was revealed that Vice President Kamala Harris’ new communications director, Jamal Simmons, repeatedly questioned Bush’s 2000 victory.
At the very least, the overuse of ballot drop boxes in states that Biden narrowly won, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, just might have nudged Biden over Trump in those states. The drop boxes were brought into the voting process because of COVID-19.
Who filled out those drop box ballots? Who deposited them into those boxes?
But don’t worry. The experts said it. The 2020 presidential election was “the most secure in American history.”
With Christmas past us it’s time to look back at the current year, 2021. And with a less than a week left we can say that 2021 was America’s worst year since 1864.
Why was 1864 so bad? While there were significant military successes for the Northern armies fighting to keep the United States together–Atlanta and Savannah were captured and General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was locked into siege warfare in Virginia–and a potential political victory of the Confederacy was averted by Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, Americans were still killing each other by the thousands. The following year was an improvement, despite Lincoln’s assassination. The Civil War ended in the spring of 1865 and the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified.
As for 2021, it got off to a wretched start when hostiles, American ones, stormed the US Capitol in a riot. We have to go back to another horrible year for America, 1814, when the British Army seized the Capitol, for the only other time that happened. The hooligans who entered the Senate and House chambers on January 6 were not participating in an insurrection, despite claims made to this day by CNN and MSNBC. Sure, the rioters wanted to keep Donald J. Trump in power, but they had no plans for a coup, such as imprisoning Joe Biden, taking control of the military, and dissolving Congress.
And what about the people who were supposed to protect the Capitol, such as the Capitol Hill Police and the who they report to? You know, Congress, which is run by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They failed America.
In the fraught election of 2020, a feeble old man, Joe Biden, was elected president. “Lunch Bucket Joe from Scranton” was chosen as the Democratic nominee because he was viewed by many as the “safe” alternative to Trump, and not a radical like Bernie Sanders. Biden’s “good years,” assuming he ever had them, are well in the past. Biden, and the people who control him, such as Ron Klain or Susan Rice, went full-blown leftist on Inauguration Day. Economically, the result is the highest level of inflation in decades. These price increases, once dismissed by the Biden White House as “transitory,” will likely continue indefinitely, serving as a hidden tax for all Americans.
While not quite energy independent as Trump claimed, our nation was headed into that direction under his leadership. Shortly after his inauguration Biden suspended new drilling and fracking on federal lands. It has since been reversed in court, but the White House maintains a malevolent attitude towards the world’s most reliable form of energy, fossil fuels. Gasoline costs over $1 more per gallon since Biden became president. Biden also cancelled the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, essentially firing thousands of union workers.
An effective commander-in-chief, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, does his job so well it appears that he is doing nothing at all. While Trump certainly doesn’t have Ike’s soft touch, I’m of the belief that Trump would have seen the possibility of a supply chain crisis coming and would have taken steps to ensure we would not have seen the bottleneck of cargo ships outside America’s largest harbors.
Meanwhile in the Biden administration the cabinet officer in charge of our supply chain, Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, went on an unannounced two-month paternity leave just as the shipping crisis began. Rather than resigning for failure or dereliction of duty, Buttigieg’s is being hawked by some Democrats as a possible 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden choose not to run for reelection. While family is of course important, liberals often claim that public service is the highest calling. Buttigieg could have simply quit as Transporation secretary. Or not taken the job at all.
While not something that the federal government is directly in charge of, violent crime plagued America’s largest cities this year–and all of those cities are run by Democrats. A dozen cities endured record murder totals. Some jurisdictions, such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles County, Milwaukee County, and Cook County (Chicago), are burdened with woke prosecutors engaging in catch-and-release policies regarding criminals.
Biden was elected last November because more voters saw him as more capable to fight the COVID-19 epidemic than Trump. But wait, what’s this? There were more COVID deaths in the United States in 2021 than in 2020, despite the availability of vaccines. And lockdown and mask mandates are ramping up again with the new omicron variant, which so far has killed one American. That number will surely climb but I have a strong suspicion that omicron will not be killing 15,000 Americans a week as soon as next month, which is what the politicized CDC is predicting.
In order to prove Trump wrong, Biden has proved him right in regard to enforcing the law at our southern border. In late October the Washington Post reported that a record 1.7 million people arrested while trying to cross that border. In addition to illegal aliens, it’s believed that large amounts of fentanyl have been smuggled across the border in 2021.
As Biden as Biden is, his vice president is even worse, the inept cackler, Kamala Harris.
I’ve saved the worst for last. America suffered a humiliating military defeat in Afghanistan. Biden vowed that our departure from Afghanistan would look nothing like our bugging-out from South Vietnam in 1975. He was right, it was worse. As with the border crisis, the Biden White House blamed Trump for the debacle. While Trump did enter an agreement to pull our troops out of Afghanistan this year, it was not a treaty. We could have back out. Trump says, and I believe him, that he never would have made our country look so feeble, yes, feeble like Biden physically and mentally is, if we had departed Afghanistan under his watch.
When the next international crisis comes, our allies will have understandable doubts about American resolve.
Datechguyblog 