Ode to a serial liar

The Friday Letter / No. 524 / January 13, 2023

Edited with typo corrections at 9:39 a.m. ET

Alejandro Mayorkas must feel confident that he won't be removed from office. Biden's handlers never fire anyone regardless of their incompetence or corruption. And while the House may impeach him, he won't be convicted in a Senate controlled by Democrats and McConnell's Uniparty Republicans. That's why he can smugly sit there and say with a straight face that our southern border is secure. A majority of the country believes him.

As he has told this lie to Congress under oath, the Homeland Security secretary has repeatedly looked into television cameras and said our border is under control, that no illegal aliens are invading our sacred land. Asked about Biden's purpose in visiting the area, Mayorkas said it was to show the president what a great job our government is doing there.

Never mind that bulldozers were sent in to scoop up the mess before Biden's visit – the tents, the garbage, the needles, the used diapers, the water bottles.

Mayorkas arguably competes with Pete Buttigieg as the most incompetent public official of the last half century, but he is not completely stupid. He knows he can tell these whoppers because ill-informed voters who get their news from lamestream media have no inkling of what's going on in South Texas.

Just after Christmas as the worst of the disaster unfolded, only Fox News among the TV nets was reporting it. Illegal aliens were storming the border, egged on by Biden's invitation, thousands of them. Most were single men, and many were unaccompanied children dumped off by the coyotes who make millions from the trade.

A writer can type words describing the scene until his fingers fall off, but nothing compares to video showing thousands of illegal aliens lined up to receive our government handouts, many more crossing the cold waters of the Rio Grande.

FNC's aerial drone shots showed this human catastrophe in graphic detail that can be exceeded only by on-sight inspection. Not one of the state-friendly news organizations said a word about it or showed one foot of video: Not NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, not the Washington Post, not the New York Times. Not one of them.

Alejandro Mayorkas can lie to the public because he knows Democrats and other ill-informed voters will believe him. It doesn't matter that Fox News viewers know what's really going on. There aren't enough of them to make a difference.

Why conservatives opposed McCarthy

A political commentator well-known to Glen Beck's Blaze readers, Daniel Horowitz summed up the constitutional conservative opposition to McCarthy's election as House Speaker:

Noting that Republicans have controlled the House for 20 or the last 28 years, Horowitz posed a challenge: “Name me a single trend: fiscal, social, border security, dependency, that has gotten better and not worse.

“. . . This is our party. We already have a Democrat Party. (McCarthy) had his chance for 14 years in leadership. Enough is enough.”

Horowitz' prescriptions would abolish the Education Department and fumigate the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and NSA. And he wasn't finished: “How about terminating all global warming mandates and subsidies that raise the cost of living, that create crappy products, something that affects peoples' lives.”

In the end, it was Rep. Chip Roy of Texas who brought the warring sides together to end the stalemate. It was not without purpose, as he led the successful campaign to squeeze more concessions that conservatives had demanded. On the 12th ballot, Roy flipped to McCarthy, and in three more ballots it was over.

The best part is that we got to see how the sausage is made. That is a very, very healthy outcome. The New York Times says the intra-party squabble will bring nothing but chaos to the House, and nothing could be further from the truth.

Roy and Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida join Jim Jordan, James Comer, and a few others as conservative House leaders. Matt Gaetz, who couldn't bring himself to coalesce despite admitting there was nothing left to ask for, remains an important vote but outside the inner circle.

Digging out from two feet of global warming

Buffalo's worst winter storm since 1950 and its 37 or more weather-caused deaths got me to thinking about global warming and how we can stop it.

If anti-energy leftists had had their way, many more would have died. Reading his handlers' script, Joe Biden vows to end all domestic drilling for oil and gas, probably in his second term. Just this week he ordered the end of gas stoves. How would that have worked in Buffalo if the only heating sources had been wind and solar? We are not speculating here. The 2021 Texas storms demonstrated how wind and solar perform in severe weather. They don't.

Two major factors explain why so many people believe we can meet all our energy needs with renewable sources: government schools and state-friendly agents who control information.

By controlling propaganda, the news and entertainment media brainwash low-information Americans into thinking that ending fossil fuels is compassionate. Don't ask me to explain the logic of this argument. There isn't any.

It goes something like this: Fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide, which blankets the atmosphere and prevents heat from escaping the earth. All breathing animals and humans emit carbon dioxide as well, and plants depend on CO2 to make oxygen. But don't get distracted by minor details. Therefore, the argument seems to go, we must either stop burning fossil fuels or stop breathing. (Don't laugh. The left's most extreme fanatics openly call for an end to the human race in order to save the planet.)

So when Greta Thunberg scolds us for trying to stay warm, the left takes her seriously because she spoke at the UN and therefore is an expert. Actually, she's an ignorant 19-year-old child with no background in climatology, but again, ignore the petty details.

Greta and her friends in the White House want you to think she is compassionate and only trying to save the earth.

“You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not,” C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity. “If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sale of humanity,' and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.”

Short takes on the news

The Federalist
Faithful Christians, Jews, and Muslims can't be licensed to teach in Minnesota unless they agree to teach the belief that a person can change his sex, Joy Pullman writes. “The predominantly white teacher workforce must be equipped to understand their (sic) own implicit bias and the unique lived experiences of all their students as a core requirement of teaching,” the state's public school bureaucracy said in a statement.

The Blaze
Illinois enacts an unconstitutional law banning semi-automatic weapons. Several Illinois sheriffs, elected by voters and not beholden to the governor, said they will ignore the law.

The Washington Times
Great strides in racial equity. Canadian mothers must feel relieved now that the Girl Guides of Canada has changed the name of its 7- and 8-year-old members from “Brownies” to “Embers.” The old racist name had been used, apparently without incident, since the Guides' founding in 1910.

Quote for today

“You, President Biden, you are the first President of the United States in a very long time that has not built not even one meter of wall. And that – we thank you for that, sir, although some might not like it – although the conservatives don’t like it.” – Andres Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, in a joint press conference with PM Justin Trudeau and President Biden

Nomenclature for the sophisticated FL reader

Our correspondent Jake Phake asked me to remind readers of the acronyms we use here, and so:

POTUS – President of the United States
SCOTUS – Supreme Court of the United States
VPOTUS – Vice President of the United States
FLOTUS – Friday Letter of the United States – Secondary use: First Lady of the United States

Jake hopes you find this helpful

Parting shot: Let's you and him fight

So goes the saying of zealous if grammatically challenged war fans. You hear it from politician-generals like Mark Milley and affirmative action generals like Lloyd Austin, but not so much from the second lieutenant platoon leaders and fire team sergeants who have actually stared death in the face.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the most danger I faced in the Army was fake bombs making loud but harmless noises while I crawled through the basic training infiltration course. And of course, a good health hint was to not stand up while live machine gun rounds whizzed overhead.)

The self-styled TV defense experts are the loudest, egging on the politicians from the safety of their warm, dry studios. Raytheon can't buy advertising this good.

In the preface to his 1950 Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote that “Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line.”

We'd like to hear the anonymous opinions of battle troops on their armchair leaders. Mark Milley is an unindicted traitor from when he assured Communist China that he would tip them off if Trump planned military action against them. As for Lloyd Austin, Politico speculated that the Congressional Black Caucus pressured Biden to appoint him as repayment for its leader Jim Clyburn's endorsement, which propelled Biden through the South Carolina primary and into the White House.

The Friday Letter also appears at USSA News