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Buddy’s Soap Box

What we all want

A patriotic Texas howdy from Buddy,

My column this week and the two that follow concern what some people are willing to do to get what they want, and more specifically, the elites here and abroad.

There is nothing inherently wrong in wanting something. We, all of us, want things and—here we are speaking strictly of material things—but for most of us our wants are pretty modest, such things as a good job/putting food on the table, a car for transportation, homeownership, college education for our children, a bit of leisure and travel, a comfortable retirement.  Such is the birthright of the American middle class, and the opportunity for others to attain that birthright is a big part of the American Dream. And in free, democratic nations around the world, a similar birthright exists. A gift that comes not from government but from God.

We, the little people, the many, we the world over are much more alike than we are different, despite our different cultures, different races, different religions, and different histories. Our shared wants are very much the same and are indeed modest, as previously enumerated.

But what of the elites? What do they want? Look closely, and you’ll discover that the world’s elites are likewise very similar in their wants despite any differences, including kind of government.

The worst of the elites are the dictators, Vladimir Putin being a prime example.  While little Putins are peppered here and there about the world and must be watched lest they break out into horrific mischief, a concurrent danger exists in those that make possible the rise of such dictators.

Below the dictator and the would-be dictator exist all sorts of know-it-all bureaucrats, plutocrats and oligarchs, university wise men, parrots of the news, New World order boys, big business and big tech types, and too often your garden-variety politician. Far too many are devoted to power and personal gain. To them you and I do not matter at all, we are in the way.

We would do well to keep a close eye on such people, those who incubate the future Vladimir Putin’s of the world.

2 GUEST COLUMNS

Without shame

by Paul Gleiser  Published March 24, 2022   You Tell Me Texas

Thursday marked the one-month anniversary of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. News coverage of the invasion has brought many in the United States to an appreciation of the fact that Russian president Vladimir Putin is a murderous and thoroughly corrupt thug.

But thanks in large measure to an often supine and always leftist media, a majority of people in the United States underappreciate the corruption of our own politicians – most particularly our elite Democrat politicians.

Though not well covered it remains indisputably true that Democrats bearing the last names Clinton, Obama and Biden have enriched themselves both personally and politically while simultaneously enriching and emboldening Vladimir Putin.

Let’s start with the Uranium One deal. In 2010, Uranium One, which held mining stakes in about 20 percent of total U.S. uranium reserves, was sold to the Russian energy giant, Rosatom. The deal gave an enormous boost to Russia’s stated desire to become a near monopoly in world uranium production.

Because uranium is a strategic mineral, the deal required U.S. approval from the U.S. State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that at about that time, Uranium One donated $145 million to the Clinton Foundation. It’s probably also just a coincidence that Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a 45-minute speech to some bankers in Russia.

Purely coincidental, I’m sure.

Utility conglomerate Exelon Corporation is based in Chicago, owns nuclear power plants in the United States and buys uranium from Russia. Those uranium imports happen to be exempt from the sanctions that were placed on energy imports from Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. But let’s don’t read anything into the fact Exelon Corporation happens to be the largest single donor to the Obama Foundation.

Elena Baturina is the billionaire widow of Russian oligarch and former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzkhov. While the assets of other Russian oligarchs have been frozen, Ms. Baturina is for some reason exempt from such sanctions.

Is it too cynical to believe that Ms. Baturina is untouched by Biden administration sanctions because of the $3.5 million she wired to one of Hunter Biden’s shady companies? Is it also too cynical to believe that the “Big Guy,” referred to often in Hunter’s emails and to whom Hunter was required to kick 10 percent of the action, is in fact his father, now the President of the United States?

There’s more, but we’re out of space.

The shameful truth is that the Clinton-Obama-Biden cabal has been selling us out for more than two decades. They have amassed enormous power and personal wealth while we deplorables worry about rising gasoline prices, declining real income, galloping inflation and shortages of food, housing, building materials and just about everything else. The very last thing any of them cares about is what’s good for the country.

I say shameful. The fact is no one named Clinton, Obama or Biden has any shame at all.

Buddy’s follow up to Paul’s column:

Those of us old enough to remember, recall the $100,000 Hillary Clinton made by investing in cattle futures. She, like Hunter Biden knew nothing about the business she was investing in.

The following background info is from Wikipedia:

“In 1978 and 1979, lawyer and First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Rodham Clinton engaged in a series of trades of cattle futures contracts. Her initial $1,000 investment had generated nearly $100,000 (equivalent to $356,579.55 in 2020), when she stopped trading after ten months. In 1994, after Clinton had become First Lady of the United States, the trading became the subject of considerable controversy regarding the likelihood of such a spectacular rate of return, possible conflict of interest, and allegations of disguised bribery. It was suspected by commentators that the profits were in fact allocations to her of profits from unrelated large block trades managed by her investment advisor James Blair, outside counsel to Tyson Foods, Arkansas’ largest employer, in an attempt to gain influence with her husband Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas. ”

For more detail, do a Bing or Google search for “Hillary Clinton cattle futures.”

Which is more crooked, the Biden family or the Clinton family? Not really a tough call. The winner has to be the Clintons. Hillary’s invention of the Clinton Foundation eclipses all the Big Guy’s scams, including Hunters art racket.

Both families have been on the street corner selling themselves and their nation for very long time.

The Democrats Are Building Themselves a Suicide Machine

By CHARLES C. W. COOKE – National review – March 18, 2022 11:52 AM

The Democrats are in political trouble, and the media bear much of the blame.

This is not because the media have ceased to be horribly biased in the Democrats’ favor. They remain that, and hopelessly so. Rather, it’s because the media have become more crazy, more self-confident, and less respected than ever, and because this shift has rendered their bias less useful than it once was.

For reasons that remain alien to me, almost the entirety of the American press — as well as much of academia and the entertainment industry — has spent the last five years assiduously adopting an exceptionally weird race- and gender-essentialist ideology that pretty much everyone outside of those institutions absolutely loathes. And, in its infinite wisdom, the Democratic Party has followed suit.

The result has been the creation of a narrow, extremely peculiar feedback loop, within which the institutional Democratic Party and its friends in the press have concocted — and then adopted — a set of bizarro-world ideas that are met with confusion and horror once they are released into the general population. Bit by bit, piece by piece, tweet by tweet, the wagon to which the Democrats have hitched themselves is becoming a suicide machine.

It is this process of mutual reinforcement that has brought us widely mocked and politically toxic neologisms such as “birthing people,” “Latinx,” “BIPOC,” “cisgendered,” and “chestfeeding.” It is this process that has yielded the smashing successes that were the Defund the Police movement, the introduction of critical race theory in schools, and an obsessive focus on the riots of January 6.

It is this process that has led figures such Jen Psaki (who has not only lived in both camps, but who still has a foot in each one) to believe that she can make criticisms vanish simply by pretending that they are “right wing.” It is this process that has led to men trouncing women in women’s sports in the name of an ersatz “justice” in which about seven actual people believe. And it is this process that has convinced the Democratic Party in Florida and beyond that if they insist loudly enough that kindergartners ought to be taught about gender fluidity, the general public will magically come to agree.

Can the Democrats stop this? No, they cannot. The arrangement worked for them when journalists acted as mere stenographers, but now that those journalists have become full partners in the ruse, the tail has started to wag the dog.

Yes, the press still habitually elevates Democrats and their ideas. And, yes, the press still habitually savages Republicans, who are treated reflexively as abnormal. But, as it has grown bolder and more ideological, the journalistic class has become just as willing to use the Democrat Party to spread its own ideas as to be used by the Democrat Party as the promulgators of its cause.

From this predicament, there is no obvious escape. Why did the entire Democratic Party pay for the stupidity of Defund the Police in 2020, even though only the fringes had fully endorsed it? Because the media loved the idea, so they tied it to the Democrats’ brand, cast the Republicans as the bad guys in the story, and pushed it as hard as they could.

Why did Terry McAuliffe blow the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election? Because the press told him that parents loved being cut out of their kids’ educations and that those who didn’t were a troglodyte minority — and, fool that he is, McAuliffe believed them.

Why is Chuck Schumer so baffled by Joe Manchin’s recalcitrance? You get the picture.

Competition keeps people sharp. Antagonism does, too. Without them, one is liable to become complacent, flabby, and dumb. The average elected Democrat now spends his days being agreed with on the Sunday shows, having his slogans and characterizations mindlessly repeated in the newspapers, and watching in false comfort as his stupidest ideas are taken seriously and his critics’ objections are labeled “controversial.”

If he gets any pushback at all, it comes from the left, and it is rendered in a language that none of the voters who pose a threat to him is able to speak.

The Democratic Party’s present plight is in part the product of bad timing and weak leadership at the top, and yet its general inability to cope with the bad hand that it has been dealt is being made immeasurably worse by the decades it has spent being mollycoddled by lunatics.

As a result of its incestuous relationship with the press, the vast majority of elected Democrats have simply not been prepared for battle. The consequence: Calamity.