The Lizard People Look Toward 2024

I'm starting to see signs that the lizard people are losing patience. As I noted yesterday, the YouTube psychologist Dr Todd Grande, who with his audience sees himself as at least a step up from Dr Phil, has come out and said, "It's hard to imagine how [Biden] is fit to be president under these circumstances." I've been of the position that individual gaffes, ranging just last week from "Where's Jackie?" to the latest instance of Dr Jill giving him orders in public as he wanders around the stage, don't necessarily indicate a medical condition, but whatever they are, they've become a problem.

Thus people like Bill Maher are starting to float tentative strategies:

The liberal comedian and host of the eponymous Real Time With Bill Maher told his audience Friday night that although he considered President Joe Biden’s place on the Democratic ticket for the president in 2024 to be a done deal, he could “see” dumping Vice President Kamala Harris. The audience erupted in applause, showing that even the Left doesn’t think she has what it takes.

Maher is a comic, not a political strategist, but he's a comic with an edge, and he's at least got some clue of what's happening. He goes on,

“What I could see is replacing the vice president,” Maher said. “Because she’s just not very popular anywhere. And it didn’t seem to work out. And, I don’t know, that’s been done before on a ticket….”

“I just think she’s a bad politician, I think she’s a very bright person, but I don’t know—I can see them doing that because a lot of the problem with ‘Biden being old’ is—oh, if he dies, then you’re going to get this person.”

So, what are the alternatives? Former Clinton confidant Dick Morris thinks Hillary may be an option:

Democrats plan to “dump” President Biden and call on Hillary Clinton to run for a third time in 2024 out of fear that a more radical left-wing candidate could end up on the ticket, veteran political consultant Dick Morris said in a new interview.

. . . “Once Biden pulls out, the polling will show that the Democrats are leaning toward some crazy radical like Gavin Newson, Bernie Sanders. Maybe even AOC herself,” Morris opined.

“That’s going to drive the Democratic Party leaders to go to Hillary and say, ‘Hey look. Please run again. We need you to save us from the crazy left,” he continued. “Otherwise we’ll have Sanders as our candidate. We’ll lose Congress by a ton. And we’ll get wiped out in the presidential race.'”

Well, received opinion has it that the lizard people (Morris's "Democratic Party leaders") chose Biden as the most viable foil to Sanders in 2020 for just that reason, with Kamala as vice president as a credible but reliably feckless consolation prize for the left. That formula worked in 2020, but it was understood from the start, I think, that it wouldn't work even in 2022, much less 2024. But of course, just as Biden, Pelosi, and Sanders are all well past their sell-by dates, so is Hillary. My guess is even Dick Morris understands this. As well try to convince Al Gore to run again.

Over the past week, it dawned on me that Antony Blinken, Secretary of State and the generational public face of the Blinken fortune, is a lizard person, i.e., someone who is actually running things. It's plain that the globalist elites support President Zelensky, and his policy proposals are typically adopted within weeks of his initial announcements. He wants EU membership for Ukraine, there's some pro forma dither, but several weeks later, it's under way. He wants secondhand Migs, there's pro forma dither, but a few weeks later, it happens. Now he wants NATO membership -- as happened with the Migs, Jake Sullivan leads the pro forma dither:

Ukraine’s announcement has not met with much enthusiasm in Washington: In response to Kyiv's fast-track application for NATO membership, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. President's National Security Advisor, said that it was “not the right time” for Ukraine’s admission to the alliance. He said he believes the best way to help Ukraine is to provide practical assistance “on the ground.”

It'll take a few weeks, but it's going to happen. Now, I don't disagree with this. Frankly, I think if the lizard people could promote Zelensky to US president, they'd do it, and that would probably be a good idea -- certainly better than Biden.

But here's the rub. I've reflected on Trump's remark, which he's repeated several times, that Putin's invasion of Ukraine "never would have happened" if he'd been president in 2021. That's because the precipitating event for Putin's invasion was Biden's sudden exit from Afghanistan and its inevitable echoes of the US retreat from Saigon. Trump would almost certainly have maintained a balance of power with Putin that would have tacitly continued to grant him Crimea and the Donbas, but nothing more. Putin saw Biden's weakness as an opening to invade the rest of Ukraine.

From the point of view of Blinken and the global elites that he certainly represents, this was a fortunate fall. Completely unplanned and a surprise even to Western intelligence, the ability of Ukraine's third-rate army to fight the Russians to a standstill in the early days and weeks proved the weakness of Russia as a geopolitical power. This has been an opportunity too good to miss, and the elites are going to do everything they can to open Russia fully to Western capital and take the territory away from Putin and the oligarchs.

Thus we have Henry Kissinger, the Antony Blinken of prior generations, remarkably changing his mind on just this issue.

During an interview with him on German channel ZDF, and in response to one of the questions, Kissinger said: “giving up Ukrainian territory should not be one of the conditions we can accept”.

On May 23, two months before the above statement, and while attending the Davos conference, Kissinger said: “Ukraine should give up part of its territory to Russia to help end the invasion”. So, what happened and why did was there a shift from one extreme to the other?

The link, to the organ of the Syrian Marxist-Lenninst People's Will Party, offers an insight into the Ukraine war from that perspective, viz, that it represents a failed attempt to make an overall deal with Putin:

At the time, we essentially said that the man [Kissinger] is proposing with his words a deal to the Russians, in the name of the global elite, the purpose of which was to lure Russia with some of Ukraine’s territory, with a reasonable position within the current world system. However, that was with one main condition: Russia stops its joint war with China, not on Ukraine, but on the global financial system.

Kissinger, in this view, had maintained his posiion on the deal for several months after it had become clear, with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, that the deal had fallen through. Trump had also supported this deal and appears to have felt that Putin was on board with it. Biden, by his disorganized retreat from Afghanistan, caused Putin to miscalculate, and the whole idea of a balance of power on which the putative deal was made went out the window. Since then, the key strategist has been Volodymyr Zelensky, who is de facto running NATO and indeed the US State and Defense Departments.

I'm not joking, either. This is the outcome of the total surprise that Russia's military collapse represents -- nobody else in any Western diplomatic, military, or intelligence establishment anticipated anything like this, and Zelensky has proposed the only workable strategy. There are simply Old Testament echoes here.

I would say that this is the state of affairs that is going to drive the strategy, as yet inchoate, of the lizard people going forward for 2024. They will likely either need to find a Democrat hawk on Russia and Ukraine who can distance himself from a woke platform in his party to get elected, or they will need to find a Republican who can make Kissinger's move, which I would say is a better bet.