biden’s bitter legacy is a culmination of betrayal of post-cold war hopes for peace......

President Joe Biden appeared before Americans Wednesday night to elaborate on the decision announced last week that he would not be seeking reelection for a second term. Commenting on political and historical backdrop to Biden’s remarks, observers John Varoli and Peter Kuznick said they clearly point to a nation and a world in crisis.

“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation,” Biden said in his televised address Wednesday, explaining his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.

“I will keep working to ensure America remains strong and secure and the leader of the free world,” Biden said.

“I will keep rallying a coalition of proud nations to stop Putin from taking over Ukraine and doing more damage. I will keep NATO stronger, and I’ll make it more powerful and more united than any time in all of our history. And I’ll do the same for our allies in the Pacific. You know, when I came to office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably…surpass the United States. That’s not the case anymore. And I’m going to keep working to end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages, and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war,” he said.

Beltway media, including the traditionally Biden-loyal Washington Post, dubbed the lame duck president an “anti-icon,” saying his “brief, targeted” address was “pragmatic, muted and self-effacing,” and “a little bit hard to watch.”

Biden’s top 2024 challenger, former president Trump, took to Truth Social to lambast “Crooked Joe Biden’s Oval Office speech” as “barely understandable, and sooo bad.”

“Crooked Joe Biden and lying Kamala Harris are a great embarrassment to America – there has never been a time like this,” Trump wrote in his traditional bombastic fashion.

Culmination of 35 Years of Disappointed Expectations

“I look at what’s happening today through the scope of what’s been happening since…the end of the Cold War, since 1991,” former NYT and Bloomberg contributor-turned independent foreign affairs observer John Varoli told Sputnik, commenting on the meaning of Joe Biden’s address beyond their immediate implications.

“It’s just been a horrifying time in American history,” Varoli said of this period of roughly 35 years. “It is the most disgraceful, wicked period in American history. And it’s just the feeling of betrayal…The Biden years are the culmination of this betrayal. You have to understand, we Americans, young Americans like myself…met [the end of the Cold War] with enthusiasm, with optimism. We were like ‘this is all great. It’s going to be peace in the world. No nuclear war. We’re going to get along with Russia.’ We were so full of optimism that we were going to build a better world.”

Instead, the journalist recalled, the decades since 1991 have been filled with US wars, regime change operations and other aggression, from the Gulf War and the bombing of Yugoslavia, to NATO’s expansion, culminating with the Euromaidan coup in Ukraine, all in the interest of building and propping up the American unipolar moment.

“What the hell’s wrong with these people?” was the natural reaction to these processes, Varoli said. “Then you realize, it was a plan. Professor Jeffrey Sachs said it. He saw it. He was there...This is nothing accidental…Biden is the culmination of this absolute insanity and madness. Imperial madness, imperial insanity, this bid for global domination.”

What’s taking place today in US politics is “basically the final chapter in [the] collapse” of “this whole imperial project,” according to the observer, with even mainstream outlets basically admitting, by reporting on Biden’s big donors pulling the plug on his reelection bid, that the US has turned into “an oligarchy.”

“We are really now in uncharted territory, people just have no illusions. I did some research…[and] found a poll from 2022 that said 85% of Americans think there are serious problems with our political system. 85%! That was two years ago. Now it’s probably obviously like 100%. People say there could be a civil war. People just zone out. They become apathetic,” Varoli said.

Crucial Inflection Point

“This is a crucial moment in American history,” Peter Kuznick, professor of history at the American University in Washington, DC and co-author of the book ‘Untold History of the United States’ together with film director Oliver Stone, told Sputnik.

The historian pointed out that like Trump before him, Biden surrounded himself with neoconservative hawks, from Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan to Victoria Nuland, bringing the world closer to a world-ending conflict between the superpowers.

“I’m very concerned about what’s going on in the world now. The situation in Ukraine is very troubling. As I wrote in a recent article coauthored with Ivana Hughes, the Columbia professor who heads the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we are very concerned that the continued and increasing NATO militaristic policies in Ukraine, on top of the Russian invasion, putting the world on a glide path to World War Three and nuclear war. The fact that the Biden administration has effectively banned any discussion of diplomacy and simply doubles down on more advanced weaponry, and then gives Zelensky permission to use that weaponry to attack inside of Russia, has really made a bad situation even worse,” Kuznick said.

Ditto goes for the situation in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the observer, where President Biden’s “gung-ho militarization” and even talk “about expanding NATO to the Pacific,” alongside the existing network of regional alliances like QUAD and AUKUS, have created a “highly militarized situation there.”

“Whether it’s over Taiwan or it’s over the South China Sea, we’re heading for World War Three in the Pacific also. US Army General Minihan said he expects the US and China to be at war by 2025, and top Republicans in Congress said they agreed. Well, that’s horrifying also,” Kuznick stressed.

Looking back to history, Kuznick recalled that “as Kennedy and Khrushchev learned” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, once an international crisis emerges, “there’s no way to control them.”

“So Khrushchev called for eliminating all conflicts between us that would cause another crisis. Well, that’s what we need today. That’s the spirit we need,” Kuznick said.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240725/bidens-bitter-legacy-signals-culmination-of-betrayal-of-post-cold-war-hopes-for-peace-1119505408.html

By Gus Leonisky at 26 Jul 2024 - 6:34am
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pushed out....

DID SOMEONE ELSE SIGNED HIS LETTER OF NON-CONTESTING THE US PRESIDENCY?:

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By Gus Leonisky at 26 Jul 2024 - 6:38am
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but worship?....

Biden’s parting deluge of deceit deserves damning

BY James Bovard

In a mere 11 minutes on Wednesday night, President Biden settled any doubts about whether he was fit for another four years of the presidency. Uncle Joe wrestled with the teleprompter like a slacker high school boy blindsided by trigonometry questions on the math SAT test. By the end of the Bidens brief spiel, most judges declared that the teleprompter had won by technical knockout.

A few weeks ago, Biden declared that it would take “the Lord Almighty” to get him to end his re-election campaign. Did the Lord make an unannounced visit to Biden’s Delaware vacation home?

When Biden threw in the towel on Wednesday night, everything was sacred - including the Oval Office (“this sacred space”), “the sacred cause of this country,” “the “sacred task of perfecting our Union,” and the “sacred idea” of America. Biden announced that “I revere this office” - a hint that viewers should revere him, too. Biden has worshiped political power his entire life - and so it was no surprise that religiosity suffused his valedictory address.

Biden asked: “Does character in public life still matter?” That signals that the coverups of his abuses and potential kickbacks will continue at least until January. No wonder Hunter Biden had a big smile as he sat just outside of the video sweep in the Oval Office. But will Biden finally permit his Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the audiotape of Biden’s bumbling interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur? Or is official Washington obliged to continue pretending that Biden has not been mentally AWOL for years?

Biden declared Wednesday night: “Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” This was bad news for voters. So Democratic Party bosses had no choice but to nullify 15 million primary ballots cast for Biden and jam a replacement candidate down the nation’s throat. For years, the Democratic Party has equated Trump with saving democracy, justifying any tactic - fair or foul - to thwart Trump. Sending in the FBI to raid and potentially shoot people at Trump’s Florida home? Check. Ginning up bogus criminal charges to get Trump locked way from voters? Check. Using the FBI and other federal agencies to target anyone who is too enthusiastic on MAGA? Check.

There is no freedom or constitutional right that Team Biden would not destroy in the name of saving democracy. But barely a hundred days from the election, Biden got “Julius-Caesared” – knifed in the back - by his own party.

Biden exited as he entered, with a deluge of deceit. Biden reminded viewers of his “promise to always level with you, to tell you the truth.” Is Biden’s biggest lie his boast about always being honest with the American people? His falsehoods have been perpetually burnished with a sham idealism.

For at least 15 years, Biden has relied on a two-step routine - ruthlessly vilifying his opponents and then appealing to “our better angels,” a phrase recycled from Lincoln’s first inaugural address. Biden seeks to lull listeners into assuming that he is personally one of those “better angels” as he flails anyone in the way of his latest power grab or Democratic Party victories. From portraying any Republican who wanted to cut domestic spending as a “terrorist” in 2011, to claiming that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back “in chains” in the 2012 presidential campaign, to endlessly misrepresenting the 2017 violence at a Charlottesville protest, Biden out-Nixoned Nixon while his media allies perpetually burnished his “nice guy” image.

Par for the course, it is difficult to tell when Biden is venal or when he is merely clueless. Biden boasted again about appointing the first black female Supreme Court Justice. But why should be proud of a lifetime judicial appointment for a lady who openly fretted in a court hearing about the First Amendment “hamstringing” federal censorship schemes? The media has sainted Biden on civil rights despite his championing crime legislation in the Senate that vastly increased the number of black and Hispanic citizens sent to prison. In a 2019 piece headlined “Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration,” the New York Times hyped Biden’s favorite fix: “Lock the S.O.B.s up!”

Implicitly wagging a finger at Donald Trump, Biden declared that “presidents are not kings.” But how do we reconcile that with his endless boasting about how he scorns the Supreme Court ruling nullifying his illegal decrees abolishing federal student loan debt? Perhaps the media, grateful to Biden for abandoning his campaign, will resume pretending that he is the reincarnation of George Washington, a faultless president and the ultimate role model…

Biden promised that in his final months in office, “I’ll keep defending our personal freedoms and our civil rights.” This was shortly after he announced that he was supporting “Supreme Court reform” - i.e., adding new justices so that the court will no longer even attempt to curtail presidential demolitions of the Constitution. Maybe Biden and other Democrats can find enough judges to formally proclaim that presidents are sacred entities who deserve nothing but worship?

https://mises.org/mises-wire/bidens-parting-deluge-deceit-deserves-damning

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By Gus Leonisky at 26 Jul 2024 - 11:14am
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empire of lies....

The United States long ago became an “empire of lies” as it continues to push false narratives about China and other countries to secure its position globally, Zhang Xiaogang, spokesman for the Defense Ministry in Beijing, has said.

Last month, the US Marine Corps released an unclassified version of an official doctrine titled Deception, which provides insight into the tactics it employs to gain an advantage over a perceived adversary and mitigate risks by relying on “deliberate distortion of reality.”

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Zhang remarked that Washington’s “deceptive behavior” has gone far beyond the confines of military affairs and “has actually penetrated deeply into its bones.” The US “dares to invent falsehoods for its own selfish interests and has long become a veritable ‘empire of lies,’” he added.

The spokesman recalled that the US attempted to actively manipulate public opinion during the Cold War and then engaged in ploys with “washing powder” and relied on the so-called White Helmets to “launch aggressive wars”against Iraq and Syria, respectively. Regarding the former, Zhang was referring to the now-infamous moment in 2003 when US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the UN Security Council with alleged evidence of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction – a claim that later turned out to be false.

The White Helmets is a Syria-based volunteer organization operating in the opposition-controlled parts of the country. While claiming to be engaged solely in humanitarian activities, the group has vocally accused the government in Damascus of war crimes. The White Helmets, however, have been accused of having ties to terrorist groups, a charge the organization vehemently denies.

Zhang also accused the US of launching false information campaigns to discredit Chinese vaccines in the Philippines and other countries. He was referring to a Reuters report earlier this month claiming that the Pentagon had run an undercover social media campaign to discredit the Chinese Covid vaccine.

Zhang went on to stress that “you can deceive for a while, but you can’t deceive forever” while urging the US to “immediately correct its wrong practices, stop spreading false information, stop misleading the world with lies, and stop slandering other countries, and give a clear explanation to the international community for its deceptive behavior as soon as possible.”

https://www.rt.com/news/601682-us-empire-lies-china/

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