When you lay down with dogs

An old saying goes, if you lay down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas. Vice President Kamala Harris has learned this lesson well.

The Biden Harris administration, if it should be remembered for one thing, that would be its apparent eagerness to stumble into war while deploying a feckless foreign policy.

Its incompetence was first revealed when they invited Iran – whose leaders regularly chant ‘death to America’ – to make friends by waiving the Trump ordered sanctions against oil sales, transferring billions of dollars of seized funds to Tehran and lifting the terrorist designation of the Houthi organization, one of Tehran’s proxies holed up in Yemen. Those billions of dollars now fund two other proxy forces, Hezbollah and Hamas, who are waging war against Israel, and the latest news is that Iran is manufacturing and delivering short-range rockets to Moscow for use in its war with Ukraine. The Houthis have all but stopped the world from using the Red Sea and Suez Canal to ship oil and other goods, and they regularly attack our Naval ships without significant consequence. And lest we forget, Iran is well on its way to producing nuclear weapons.

Its incompetence took on a new foul odor when President Biden ignored the advice of his generals and ordered a full and immediate withdrawal of all US forces in Afghanistan, without notice to our allies, leaving behind billions of dollars of equipment. The supplies included pallets of cash, weapons, ammunition, trucks, troop carriers, airplanes and helicopters turning the Taliban into one of the world’s most well-armed forces. Biden Harris abandoned thousands of US citizens and Afghans who helped us in the war, and the facility at Bagram Airfield which contained an airport with one of the longest and sturdiest runways in the world and is a one-hour flight to the location of China’s nuclear arms plant.

The manner in which Biden ordered our withdrawal from Afghanistan without prior notice to our ally, the United Kingdom, prompted its Parliament, the Commons and House of Lords, to “condemn the ‘dishonour’ of the US president’s withdrawal and his criticism of Afghan troops left behind to face Taliban.” The Telegraph’s August 18, 2021 headline said “Parliament holds Joe Biden in contempt over Afghanistan.” That condemnation by one of our oldest and staunchest allies has never happened before.

Ms. Harris was the last person in the room when Biden made his Afghan decision, and she recently said she has no regrets.

Not long after we fled Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine, and on October 7, 2023 Hamas invaded Israel and massacred over 1200 men, women and children and kidnapped over 200 hostages now held – if any are still alive – in the dungeon tunnels beneath Gaza.

The Biden Harris team have sent hundreds of billions of dollars of military equipment to Ukraine, they want to send even more and are now considering whether to approve Ukraine’s desire to attack Russia’s homeland with our missiles. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of bodies pile up on both sides, cities are destroyed, our own supplies are drawn down and our defense contractors earn multi-millions in profits.

As for Israel, the Biden Harris team have hamstrung Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas by insisting Israel must agree to limit its assault and implement a ceasefire, while telling the world a “two-state” solution is the only way the war in Gaza will end. Neither Biden nor Harris have bothered to explain to the American people how or why Israel is supposed to agree to a “two state” arrangement when Hamas’s fundamental operating principle is Israel and its Jewish people must be annihilated from the face of the earth.

Back to the fleas, I learned about fleas when I lived in Yalova, Turkey as a young boy in the late 1950’s.  We rented an apartment across the highway from the Sea of Marmara and my mother let my brother and I run where we wanted, it seemed. One day while wandering down a back road I heard a mewing coming from beneath a bush and I crawled in to see what was there when I found a cat with a large litter of nursing kittens. I grabbed one and brought it home.

Mom allowed me to keep the kitten, regretfully, because the next morning we woke to find that all of us and the apartment were infested with fleas. The fleas were in our pajamas, beds, furniture and crawling on our skin.  Mom picked them off us in the morning until we rid the apartment of fleas with DDT.

Ms. Harris brought home a very big dog recently when she proudly boasted of the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, architect of our invasion of Iraq following the September 11 attack and so much more. Happily laying down with this big dog, she is thoroughly infested with fleas.

When Cheney was in office and later, the left could not run out of words to describe his soulless evil character. In 2009, NPR’s Nina Totenberg in measured words wrote,

In the first term, Cheney reshaped national security law, expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch and orchestrated secret, warrantless domestic surveillance, circumventing a court set up by Congress specifically to oversee such surveillance. He presented the president with options that led to a shutdown of negotiations with North Korea and played a major role in persuading President Bush to go to war against Iraq.

The left’s hatred of Cheney did not mellow with time.

Writing for Mother Jones in 2014, David Corn, reported on Cheney’s self-interested pursuit of the Iraq invasion as the former CEO of Halliburton, a multi-billion dollar contractor. He cited Rand Paul’s speech to university students in 2009:

When the Iraq War started, Halliburton got a billion-dollar no-bid contract. Some of the stuff has been so shoddy and so sloppy that our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution. I mean, it shouldn’t be sloppy work; it shouldn’t be bad procurement process. But it really shouldn’t be that these people are so powerful that they direct even policy.

The Biden Harris team expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch with hundreds of Executive Orders, they orchestrated secret, warrantless domestic surveillance of Covid mandate dissenters, Catholics and parents who complain about school boards, circumvented losses in the Supreme Court, while claiming that meeting with the North Korean leader or inviting the Taliban to talk about peace at Camp David is tantamount to treason.  They channel Dick Cheney’s worst totalitarian impulses.

Ms. Harris has no ideas of her own because she has learned how to govern from people like Dick Cheney and no amount of bug killer will rid her of those fleas.