Editorial -- Sorry, Folks, Joe Biden’s Too Busy

On Wednesday, Second Harvest just announced that they would make massive cuts in its popular Fresh Mobile Pantry that delivered food to a number of area communities. Reducing poverty and hunger is key in reducing the number of mass shootings in this country. Poverty and gun violence are directly related. Unfortunately, Joe Biden is too busy to care that inflation, rising fuel costs, and the fact that people are cutting back on giving is creating the groundwork for even more gun violence and mass shootings. He’s too busy trying to figure out new ways to stick it to the Russians.

Recently, the City of Maryville announced that due to supply chain issues, work on the road that links up Hy-Vee with 71, South Avenue, had to be postponed from July 5th to July 25th. Supply chain issues were the reason. But don’t ask Joe Biden to care. Again, he’s too busy finding new ways of sticking it to the Russians.

On July 5th, the Maryville Forum published an interview with Sheriff Randy Strong in which he said he was angry that there was no coordinated national effort to address school safety following the mass shooting in Uvalde (TX), like working to provide each school in the country with a dedicated security officer. While it would not stop all shootings (Uvalde had a security officer), it would help.

Mr. Strong said, “And I’m just gonna say what I think a lot of other people are saying too: Shame on our government, in both parties, that have not come together to put somebody in our schools to deal with this. We could put air marshals in aircraft after 9/11, but where are we now? I think that’s an immediate quick response that you could do, that you train people, and you put them in there, and that’s their sole purpose – is to protect the children and our teachers in the schools.”

The Sheriff is doing all he can to protect the schools in Nodaway County, including Northeast Nodaway and North Nodaway, Deputies who are not on call will begin rotating among the six school districts outside of Maryville. But there is a reason why the government won’t come together to stop the madness. Joe Biden is too busy finding ways of sticking it to the Russians to care. 

These are just a few of the many real life consequences of Joe Biden’s obsession with Russia at the expense of the rest of us. I’m sure he would say that these issues are just a few of the many sacrifices that we all have to make so that we can stick it to the Russians. But Mr. Biden completely misses the point.

Back in 1928, American Legion State Commander Nee, speaking at the dedication of the new Grant City Legion building, talked about the sacrifices that 4 million young men made during World War I. This includes 80,000 who laid down their lives. (Editor -- More recent statistics put US war deaths at 116,516. This includes deaths of all causes.) Millions more made similar sacrifices in World War II. Many gave their lives, and many were so scarred that they literally had nothing more to give. What politicians like Mr. Biden don’t understand is that these young men did not make these sorts of sacrifices in a vacuum. They did so in order that their children and grandchildren would never have to fight such wars again. Mr. Biden’s boss, Barack Obama, got it right before the folks at the Military Industrial Complex got hold of him.

Maybe there is one glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. It is estimated that rebuilding costs for Ukraine will be at least $750 billion to $1 trillion after the war. The corporations and billionaires who stand to profit are going to want a piece of the action as well. They need the shooting to stop in order to begin.

Editorial -- The Iran Deal

Reason number 999,999 why nobody likes Joe Biden – he can’t be counted on to keep his word. While Barack Obama was President, he lived up, for once, to his promise to keep us out of wars by striking the Iran Deal, which limits Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon, which protects one of our closest allies in the region, Israel, from attack.

But when he took office, Donald Trump broke the deal in 2018. When he ran for office in 2020, Joe Biden promised he would heal the soul of the nation. He promised he would return to the Iran Deal. But once he took power, Joe Biden broke his word. 

This is the problem with Joe Biden in a nutshell. He is happy to promise whatever people want to hear when he comes for your votes, but when it actually comes time to do something, he does what his handlers in the Military Industrial Complex want. And besides, given his desire to “stick it to the Russians,” anything that the Russians support, he is automatically against.

While the present administration does not seem interested in conflict with Iran, there is no guarantee that a future administration won’t start one. Donald Trump, on three occasions, brought us to the brink of conflict with Iran. 

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin set out on a course of conflict with the West at the Munich Security Conference, and one of his main excuses was the conflict in Iraq. Continuing to refuse to bargain in good faith with the Iranians when it was the US which broke its word will only give President Putin and other dictators like him further excuses to refuse to listen to the US.

Editorial -- No Ideas. No Solutions

John Bolton came out of the woodworks Saturday and said on CBS that Joe Biden was making “mistake after mistake” on Ukraine. He claimed Biden could have prevented the conflict, but didn’t. He says Biden shouldn’t have announced publicly that troops wouldn’t be sent to Ukraine before the conflict, to leave the burden of ambiguity on Russia. He also said that Biden should have stuck it to the Russians sooner, before the conflict began.

The problem is that John Bolton never met a war he didn’t like. When he worked for Donald Trump, the former President said that he was pressuring him to go to war so much that if he had taken his advice, the US would have been in World War VI. 

Mr. Bolton said, “I think now they don’t know what outcome to expect; they don’t know what they want to achieve,” regarding a resolution of the Ukraine conflict. The problem is that Mr. Bolton offers none of his own besides regaining the full territorial integrity of Ukraine, something that is not likely to happen. Neither does President Biden. And then he wonders why polls consistently show him losing to Donald Trump in a rematch of 2020.

The only solution for such conflicts is for the sides to talk. If one round of talks fail, then the only solution is to keep talking. That is how Ronald Reagan was able to strike a deal with the Soviet Union to eliminate intermediate range missiles and lay the groundwork for peace for the next generation. But somehow, the notion that one must talk to one’s enemies is rocket science for people like Mr. Biden or Mr. Bolton, who have a lot more in common than they care to admit.

Editorial -- Joe Biden Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

On Thursday, at the recent NATO summit in Madrid, Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud. When asked how long Americans should expect to pay high gas prices, he himself said that it would be for as long as it takes so that Russia cannot “defeat Ukraine,” whatever that means.

In other words, he thinks we all have to make sacrifices, including high gas prices, so that we can stick it to the Russians. Not only that, he is planning even more unhinged schemes that would drive up gas prices even higher.

One idea he is planning is placing a price cap on Russian oil, which Russia could easily work around by selling it to countries which don’t sanction them, who would then mark it up. Oilprice.com, a website which focuses on the high gas prices, predicts that oil prices could go up to as high as $200 a barrel, which would likely translate to $8 per gallon on gas. 

Not only that, far from curtailing Russia’s oil production, Joe Biden’s attempts to “stick it to the Russians” have had the exact opposite effect. In June, Russia’s crude production went up 5% to 10.7 barrels per day. Russia says it will raise its production again in July. 

Goldman Sachs predicts that even if Joe Biden doesn’t follow through with his price cap scheme, Oil could go up to $140 per barrel.

Editorial: "Stay the Course!"

On Tuesday, May 31st, Joe Biden took to the New York Times opinion pages to defend our country’s escalation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Most notable is what he didn’t talk about – the continued squeezing of Rural America and the continued rise of gas prices and a lot of other goods. Also on May 31st, gas prices in Worth County went up to $4.29, a new all-time high. 

His defense seems awfully familiar – it is very much like George Bush’s “Stay the Course” mantra in Iraq that not only failed to achieve any meaningful gains, but that laid the groundwork for future terrorist organizations such as ISIS. Joe Biden does not speak for the “free world.” He can speak for himself. 

The President talks about providing Ukraine with rocket systems that he says will allow them to strike key targets on the battlefield. This is what the US and their allies have been saying all along. Even if these efforts are ultimately successful, like they were following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, what is to stop these weapons systems from being used against us? As late as 1993, Osama Bin Laden was portrayed as a freedom fighter by the New York Times.

Meanwhile, what about the millions of people here in the US who are hurting from pain at the pump? Joe Biden did not offer one thing in his NYT piece offering relief. Yes, we realize that the US does not directly control the price of oil markets and the price of gas. But the more that the US ramps up war hysteria against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or anyone else that the Very Important People in Washington say we are supposed to hate, oil prices go through the roof, followed by gas prices. 

Our conservative friends would argue that Joe Biden should return to the policies of Donald Trump and engage in more drilling and more fracking, increasing supply and reducing pain at the pump. Our more liberal friends would argue that we should do a whole of government approach to saturate the country with wind, solar, and electric vehicles, freeing us from dependence on Russian oil. However, Joe Biden is doing none of the above. His plan is to stick it to the Russians, expect us to pay the price, and then blame it on the Russians when inflation and gas prices keep going through the roof.

The President’s reassurances in his op-ed are all hollow. He reassures us that Ukraine has promised us that they will not hit Russian territory with the new batch of weapons he is sending them. But Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, ran on a platform of peace with Russia and on stopping the civil war in Ukraine. Instead, he has done nothing but escalate. And what is to prevent a future President from telling Ukraine they can?

The President reassures us that he does not seek a war between Russia and NATO. But what is to prevent a future president from doing so? Mitt Romney, who is a potential candidate for 2024, has been spoiling for a fight with Russia ever since 2012. 

Biden writes, “Unprovoked aggression, the bombing of maternity hospitals and centers of culture, and the forced displacement of millions of people make the war in Ukraine a profound moral issue.” True. But two wrongs do not make a right. Joe Biden’s escalatory policies risk turning our hostile relations into a shooting war, or even a nuclear war, which could get us all killed. 

And if might does not make right, as the President rightly says, then when can we expect Joe Biden to admit that he was wrong to support our war of choice in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy disaster in US history? This is not a matter of “apologizing” for the US. Admitting that one was wrong is a moral virtue in any competent philosophical or religious system.