The Final Countdown – 2/12/24 – Senators Advance Bill to Send Billions to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss news from around the globe, including U.S. Senators pushing forward a budget bill that funds Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. 
Aquiles Larrea– CEO of Larrea Wealth Management, Finance Expert
Steve Gill – Attorney 
Dan Lazare – Independent Journalist 
Robert Fantina – Author, journalist, activist 
 
The first hour begins with Aquiles Larrea, a finance expert, who shares his perspective on the Congressional budget, and GOP Senators pushing forth a bill that fuels billions to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. 
 
Then, attorney Steve Gill talks about the latest out of the Fani Willis scandal. 
 
The second hour starts with independent journalist Dan Lazare, talking about a new poll revealing that many Americans believe that U.S. President Biden is too old for another term and the state of his mental acuity. 
 
The show closes with author, journalist, and activist Robert Fantina, about a potential Israeli invasion of Rafah. 
 

Official Lies Aren’t What They Used To Be

            The government’s services keep getting worse.

Even their lies.

            The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam had WMDs. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had proscribed weapons.

            Sure, they were lies. But they were plausible lies. Theoretically, UBL might have snuck into Afghanistan. Saddam might have acquired WMDs. Those things could have been true.

            Now they’re giving us implausible lies. Not only are their lies, well, lies—they say things that are untrue and can’t possibly be true and that no one, no matter how stupid or uninformed, could believe.

            Democrats go on and on about how nothing is more important than defeating Trump. Democracy itself hangs in the balance! After Trump redux, the re-deluge. Like Hitler, but worse.

            But they don’t really believe that. If liberals really actually thought Adolf Trump was going to suspend the constitution and send his enemies—them—to camps, their sense of survival would have prompted them to select the most charismatic, brilliant, popular, vigorous, 2024 Democratic presidential nominee possible. Instead, they gave us Biden.

            You can’t think Trump is dangerous and go with Biden-Harris. For Democrats, protecting their party’s corporatist status quo matters more Trump’s purported threat to democracy. That’s the truth. We all know.

            Republicans won’t shut up about out-of-control deficit spending and the $34 trillion national debt which, according to them, will tank the economy because, like a family that has to live within its means except for credit cards and student loans and car loans and home mortgages, the government can’t keep spending cash it doesn’t have even though it owns the U.S. Mint and has gotten away with it for, like, a century.

            We know that the fake deficit hawks don’t actually believe what they are saying in real time, as they’re saying it, because while they’re threatening to shut down the government every few months, they keep throwing even more billions of dollars at the Defense Department than the DOD even asks for, so much that the military sucks up more than everything else the government does combined, and that’s not including the wars they put “off the books” and the proxy wars and the wars they charge to the State Department, not to mention debt service on old wars.

            These diametrically opposed lines of rhetoric represent a dramatic shift away from old-fashioned political hypocrisy. If the military is your biggest expense by far and you keep raising it, and you claim to worry about spending, you are lying. No amount of cognitive dissonance can convince us otherwise. You know we know it’s crap yet you keep right on going.

            “Normal” communication by political elites has become prima facie impossible to take seriously.

            We used to be able to accept the announcement by a defeated primary candidate that they would endorse their rival and tour for him because primary campaigns involved incremental ideological variations and hadn’t yet devolved to bloodsport.

            No more. Even after Trump implied that Ted Cruz’s father assassinated JFK and had his surrogates impugn Ron DeSantis as a eunuch and a fey cuck, he collected both men’s endorsements. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden red-baited Bernie Sanders as an existential threat to the Democratic Party yet were rewarded with his fealty. This, we are supposed to think, is adults being adults and maybe this is so, but more than that it’s proof positive that nothing any primary candidate claims to stand for or against should ever be trusted.

            Everywhere we look, politicians are deploying lies whose obviousness is evident out of the gate. Elites will never be believed, they know it,  and they don’t care.

            Israel’s war cabinet tells its traumatized citizens that October 7th came as a surprise at the same time countless specific warnings and the IDF’s eight-hour response time (!) prove that cannot possibly have been the case. As people shout “bring them home,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s trying to do just that. But that’s a lie and it has to be a lie because you don’t bomb a place where hostages you care about are being held lest you kill them and anger their captors.

            Families of the doomed hostages cannot believe him and do not believe him yet they do not demand that the bombs stop falling or that those who drop them be removed from power.

            Ukraine, they say, is a fellow democracy even though it has canceled all elections forever and its press is censored and opposition parties are banned, and as a democracy it must be defended by us, who are not really much of a democracy either as Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and others who have been denied access to ballots can attest. The idea that this famously corrupt post-Soviet republic could have posed as a democracy was cute on its face, of course…shut up and fly your blue and yellow flag.

            Taiwan, Biden says, is a country that must be defended from a Chinese invasion. At the same time, Biden also says, Taiwan is not a country at all nor should it become one, China is the One China and Taiwan is part of it so China can no more invade Taiwan than the U.S. can invade Ohio, but still, we’ll defend Taiwan but really we won’t. “Realists” call this “strategic ambiguity“ but really, it’s just one of those lies-you-see-coming.

            Gender identity, woke elites insist, is not merely psychological but physically real as well: a transwoman is a woman, period. This cannot be true; a transwoman swimmer is not generically the same as her cis female competitors but they tell us that we should tell cis female athletes to chill, it’s not an issue when clearly it’s an issue but the authorities don’t want us to take their ridiculous word for it, just as it is with DEI and its clumsy flip-replacement of one form of systemic discrimination with another, they just want us to shut up.

            The era of the lie-you-know-from-the-start may be over soon.

            Next up: insane truths without the thinnest varnish of deception.

            Though not a renowned rhetorician, our president surely deserves historical credit as the first American leader to say, at the start of a war, that we will lose. Days after the U.S. military began what it plans to be a prolonged bombing campaign against Yemen, an effort to stop the Houthis from attacking ships in the Red Sea, Biden announced that future strikes would not succeed. “Are they [US airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No,” Biden told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”

            They’re not even trying anymore.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

The Final Countdown – 1/12/24 – Trump Lashes Out at Opposing Counsel in Defiant Speech at Civil Fraud Trial

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss current events from around the globe, including Trump’s civil fraud trial. 

Jeremy Kuzmarov – Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine 
Armen Kurdian – Retired Navy Captain
Steve Hayes– Tax Attorney   
 
The show begins with Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine, joining the show to break down the missile strikes on Yemen’s Houthis by the U.S. and U.K. 
 
Then, Retired Navy Captain Armen Kurdian weighs in on the Fani Willis scandal and Hunter Biden’s guilty plea on federal tax charges.  
 
The second hour starts with tax attorney Steve Hayes who shares his expertise on Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial. 
 
Ted and Angie close the show, breaking down the upcoming Taiwanese elections. 
 
 

One Domino Theory After Another

Over and over, the military tells Americans that grave consequences would follow unless we fight and win in some overseas conflict. Yet we keep losing, and nothing terrible happens. When, if ever, will we see through the military’s fear-mongering?

The Final Countdown – 8/3/23 – Trump Blasts Federal Charges, Presses Forward With 2024 Campaign

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss breaking news, including the latest out of Trump’s indictment. 
Bob Patillo: Attorney and Executive Director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition 
Tyler Nixon: Army Infantry Veteran 
Mark Sleboda: International Relations & Security Analyst 
KJ Noh: Journalist and Political Analyst
 
The show kicks off with Attorney and Executive Director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Bob Patillo to discuss the latest out of the Trump indictment. 
 
In the second half of the first hour, Army Infantry Veteran Tyler Nixon joins to discuss American confidence in the military. 
 
The second hour begins with International Relations & Security Analyst Mark Sleboda discussing the phone call with Putin and Erdogan, and the latest out of Russia and Ukraine. 
 
The show closes off with journalist and political analyst KJ Noh, to discuss the U.S. potentially arming Taiwan. 

Whoever Said Life Was Cheap?

A 23-year-old man was the latest mass shooter to make the headlines, this time at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was an employee. As usual, Democrats called for increased gun control. Republicans blamed the mental health crisis. Both parties have a point. But we also shouldn’t ignore something unique to America, a brutal culture of violence that permeates our politics, pop culture and our everyday lives.

War for Taiwan? It Would Be Our Craziest War Ever

            America and the West have begun promoting the idea of a war against China over Taiwan. If China invades Taiwan, President Biden has said, the U.S. would go further than it has in Ukraine, sending American ground troops as well as weapons. 37% of American voters agree with Biden. But how do you go to war to defend a country from invading itself?

            According to the U.S., the U.N. and most of the world—including Taiwan itself—Taiwan is part of China.

Can the U.S. invade Ohio?

            Like many other nations places, Taiwan is in a tough spot caused by decisions made by U.S. policymakers many years ago.

            Until 1945 Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The birth certificate of my former father-in-law, an ethnic Taiwanese, read “Taipei, Japan.” The end of World War II brought a breather. Occupation forces withdrew. The Taiwanese expected independence as part of postwar decolonization. But America had other plans.

Across the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese civil war was drawing to a close. Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists were beating the far-right Nationalists (KMT) led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists, looting everything they could carry including China’s gold reserves, jumped aboard U.S. ships helpfully provided by President Harry Truman and fled to Taiwan. The exiled KMT took over, purged and murdered Taiwanese intellectuals and independence advocates and established a vicious authoritarian dictatorship of the type propped up by the U.S. around the globe during the Cold War. There was a remarkably calm transition to democracy following Chiang’s death.

            “When,” my father-in-law would ask me during one of our long political discussions, “will the United States give independence to Taiwan?”

            “Whether it’s the U.S. splitting from Britain, or East Timor,” I replied, “independence is taken, not given. You declare independence.” 1,400 Timorese died after declaring independence from Indonesia.

“We can’t do that,” he’d say. “China will invade. Many people will be killed.”

“Maybe they’d invade,” I’d replied. “Maybe not. But there’s no other way.”

            The Taiwanese people are unwilling to die. So Taiwan has never declared independence. Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the island of Taiwan­—whose legal name is the Republic of China—and mainland China have agreed on the legal fiction that Taiwan and China are part of the same country. Beijing calls Taiwan “a renegade province” it wants back in its fold; Taipei’s government, heir to the defeated Nationalist troops who fled to exile across the Taiwan Strait when the Communists seized power in 1949, officially maintains the ridiculous position that someday it will reconquer the mainland.

Mouse eats cat.

Like Kurdistan, Palestine and Pakistani Kashmir, Taiwan lingers in diplomatic purgatory, its people semi-stateless. It enjoys robust economic growth and de facto independence. But it’s not really a country. It has no seat at the U.N. Only 13 nations, most of the tiny—Belize, Haiti, Vatican City, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu and Guatemala—recognize Taiwan as a country. Even its primary benefactor, the U.S., does not recognize it.

Yet Taiwan is different. Always on the periphery, the Chinese empire’s control of the island waxed and waned in proportion to its political stability and military strength, allowing the Taiwanese as well as the ethnic Han Chinese who migrated there from the mainland, to develop their own arts, food, and political and economic cultures. Seventy years of diplomatic limbo and de facto independence—their own coins, stamps, military—have accelerated those trends and made them feel permanent. They don’t want to be absorbed into the Borg, like Hong Kong.

            It isn’t hard to see why Taiwan’s people embrace the strategic ambiguity of diplomatic limbo. Life is good and getting better, money is rolling in, and—bluster aside—China seems unwilling to risk the chaos and economic cost of reclaiming an island it hasn’t had under direct control since the 19th century. Why fix the unbroken?

            Except—it is a broken situation. You can’t have national pride until you’re a nation. You can’t demand respect unless your people demonstrate courage. Most of all, there’s the question of what the future holds: President Xi Jinping seems smart enough not to try to put the band back together again, at least not via hard (military) power. What about his successor or his successor’s successor?

            Every now and then some Taiwanese political theorist gins up a farfetched workaround that promises to deliver independence without the risk of Chinese tanks rolling through Taipei. The 51 Club, founded in 1994 with 51 members, is a Taiwanese organization dedicated to the goal of turning the island into the 51st state of the United States. Presto! War with Taiwan is war against the United States—something the Chinese would never want.

The idea hasn’t exactly caught fire. “All the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] has to do is lob a few missiles over, and people will be swarming to us,” founder David Choi predicted in 1994. No missiles yet.

            Annette Lu, former vice president of Taiwan under the KMT, promotes One Zhonghua, a scheme under which Taiwan and China would form an economic commonwealth like the European Union, with economic integration and political independence. Neither the Chinese nor the Taiwanese are on board.

            There’s also a theory that the U.S. is, under international law, has been—and still is—the administrator of Taiwan since World War II. In 1945, the U.S. appointed Chiang’s Republic of China (KMT) to administer Taiwan—think of it like a sublet. The San Francisco Peace Treaty didn’t go into effect until seven years later, in 1952. “The treaty never mentioned who would receive Taiwan. Japan surrendered its former colony, but it never said to whom,” writes The Taipei Times. So who gets it? “Regarding Taiwan, the official U.S. position was, is and continues to be that it is ‘undecided.’” Biden may be hanging his hat on this bit of unfinished business.

            From a domestic U.S. political perspective, however, whatever enthusiasm Americans have for defending Taiwan would vanish as soon as they learn that we would be risking World War III over a “country” that isn’t even a country—and doesn’t claim to be. The United States has gotten itself into a lot of stupid wars, but this would be the craziest one ever.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

DMZ America Podcast #60: Pelosi goes to Taiwan, Midterms, U.S.-led Assassinations, Monkey Pox and Ted Reports from Russia

This exclusive episode finds award-winning cartoonist Ted Rall Zooming in a report from St. Petersburg, Russia. He and Scott Stantis (not in Russia) discuss Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s historic trip to Taiwan. Which leads the lads to talk about the assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Scott and Ted also discuss Monkey Pox and, last, Ted delivers a boots-on-the-ground report about life inside the Russian Federation under Western sanctions. Spoiler: it’s nothing like you think.

 

 

Invade This

Whenever there is a foreign-policy crisis, liberals and conservatives alike decry isolationist tendencies and say that we must get involved. They are willing to go anywhere on the planet to help other people but when you ask them to help fellow Americans who are homeless and sick, they are nowhere to be found.

Good Uses for Red Flag Laws

The epidemic of mass shootings has prompted some lawmakers to call for “red flag laws” that would allow people to report those who seem to be getting unhinged before they have the possibility to become a mass shooter. It’s hard to think of a law that could be more easily abused.

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