In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

From Reuters on Thursday : Ukraine told critics of the pace of its three-month-old counteroffensive to "shut up" on Thursday, the sharpest signal yet of Kyiv's frustration at leaks from Western officials who say its forces are advancing too slowly. Since launching a much vaunted counteroffensive using many billions of dollars of Western military equipment, Ukraine has recaptured more than a dozen villages but has yet to penetrate Russia's main defences. Stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and other news organisations last week quoted U.S. and other Western officials as suggesting the offensive was falling short of expectations. Some faulted Ukraine's strategy, including accusing it of concentrating its forces in the wrong places. As I've pointed out here many times, Kyiv simply has to wrap up its counteroffensive this year. In fact, Ukraine's early success in 2022 for a time prompted the talking-head retired US generals to predict a cap...

Nobody's mentioned this so far, but given the disclosures in recent weeks -- the 5,000 e-mails sent to alias accounts, the 1,000 e-mails sent from Joe's vice presidential office directly to Rosemont Seneca Partners , and the trips on Air Force Two with Hunter, on some of which his presence was concealed -- Joe can no longer hold a traditional presidential news conference. But from the start of his presidency, he's groomed us to get used to it anyhow. The Washington Post editorialized this past May : President Biden hasn’t dropped the microphone; he appears to have lost it. Mr. Biden is turning into a news media evader, and it’s harmful to his presidency and the nation. In the past 100 years, only Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan averaged fewer news conferences than Mr. Biden. (A news conference involves the president taking questions from multiple reporters; a one-on-one interview with a handpicked journalist doesn’t count.) So far in 2023, Mr. Biden h...

I want to make clear from the start that I'm subscribed to, and a daily watcher of, Fr Mke Schmitz's Catechism in a Year series from Ascension Presents on YouTube. In general, I'm a big Fr Mike Schmitz fan. Still, in the video above, which may not have been subject to the same editorial rigor as the Catechism in a Year series, I think he makes some remarks that open a door he may not have intended to open. At about 2:45, he says, Could it be possible that God has made other beings? Well, yeah. He has made angels. Those aren't really, technically speaking, aliens. The same God who created human beings also created angels. He created human beings with an intellect and will and bodies, and he created angels, with an intellect and a will, with no body. Who is to say that God couldn't continue to create? . . . God is infinitely creative. . . . So -- would it make sense that He would create and then just stop? The discussion in the comments, though, wandered off...

It looks like I missed the developing buzz over the past couple of weeks about Franklin Foer's new book on Biden, The Last Politician . Foer, it turns out, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic whose views appear to be as predictable as we might assume given that background. According to Axios , Frank Foer of The Atlantic worked 2½ years and spoke to nearly 300 people for his forthcoming opus on President Biden's first term, the author tells Axios. Why it matters: In " The Last Politician ," Foer concludes that Biden provides "an instructive example of the tedious nobility of the political vocation. Unheroic but honorably human, he will be remembered as the old hack who could." Driving the news: The 432-page book, out Tuesday, "dramatizes in forensic detail the first two years of the Biden presidency, concluding with the historic midterm elections," per the publisher. Foer's work "includes ...

The New York Post has a story about a new book , The Last Politician by Franklin Foer, due out Sept. 5, which is excerpted at The Atlantic behind a paywall . The title of the Atlantic excerpt is "The Final Days", which is clearly meant to echo the title of a 1976 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that covered the end of Nixon's time in the White House. We'll have to see how that goes, but it's intriguing to say the least that the publishers would choose to hitchhike on that story. Foer's book actually covers the decisionmaking process by which Joe Biden overrode his military and diplomatic advisers and ordered the precipitous withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan as of August 30-31, 2021. As deescibed in the Post story, President Biden overestimated his own competence in foreign affairs ahead of the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, making unhelpful and impractical suggestions while displaying a “swaggering faith in himself” that left h...

I'm not posing this question as though I think there may be a specific answer. I'm posing it more in a spirit that there is a range of possible explanations for current US Ukraine policy, of which one answer might be that Zelensky does have something on Biden, but there are other answers that might include policymaker stubbornness, confirmation bias, or conventional-mindedness, but this would be attributable to Joe's handlers, not Joe himself. If the policy decisions are traceable to Joe and not his handlers, the most likely explanation probably does have more to do with pure venality. But I think this also goes to what Trump intended to say on the "perfect phone call", in which he is reported to have asked Zelensky in very general terms to help Trump's people to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company. I think putting this request in the way he did, a by-the-way “I would like you to do us a favor, though”, was in Tr...

The "perfect phone call", as Trump himself characterized it, was a heavily monitored 30-minute conversation on July 25, 2019 with current Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. Zelensky, a political outsider but a well-known media figure like Trump, had defeated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a runoff election 73%-24% on April 21 of that year. Thus this call would be a get-acquainted opportunity that would set the tone for ongoing relations between the US and its relatively new client state Ukraine. As far as I can tell, since the "perfect phone call" has simply faded away in the wake of two Trump impeachments, the 2020 campaign and its continuing controversies, as well as Joe Biden's own scandals, nobody has tried to put that 2019 call in the context of what we now know about developments in Ukraine between 2014 and the call itself. As a result, for instance, Wikipedia still has an entry on the Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory that dismisses the story as...