Tag: kevin mccarthy

If the Left didn’t hate Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy before now (spoiler alert: they did), giving access to tens of thousands of hours of surveillance footage from January 6th to Tucker Carlson. With Leftists already believing Carlson is a Russian asset, this has given them the opportunity to talk about national security. After all, letting a Russian asset (in their opinion) gain access to security footage from January 6, the most horrifying day in American history up there with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (again, in their opinion), has to be a national security risk, right?

Well, to paraphrase the Commander in Briefs Bill Clinton, that depends on what your definition of national security is.

national security

What the Left believes it means – ummm…they’re still working on it

What it really means – a concept that means less and less with each passing year

To put it mildly, national security is a pretty big fucking deal. It’s essential to all of our lives, even if we don’t give it a first thought, let alone a second thought. It allows us to live free, or at least as freely as the Puddin’ Head Joe Administration will allows us to live. It ensures we don’t have to worry about foreign countries invading us and destroying America.

By the way, I’ve got my eye on you, Canada! No trying to get us to adopt the metric system on my watch!

If you really think about it, and I do because I have to entertain myself somehow since prices are higher than Willie Nelson on any day ending in day, national security touches every aspect of our lives on some level. So, why do we take it for granted?

A huge part of it is how invulnerable we’ve felt as a country since the Cold War. After the Berlin Wall fell, there were no more superpowers to challenge us. The Soviet Union was no more, China was years away from firing up its economic power, and the Middle East was, well, the Middle East. For all intents and purposes, we were untouchable.

Then 9/11 happened. That woke us up, at least for a little while, to how vulnerable we could still be. Granted, the warning signs were there if we had bothered to put 2 and 2 together and come up with something other than potato (thanks to Simon Miller for that joke). After all the outpouring of sympathy, all the brave words that we’d find who was responsible and bring them to justice, all the patriotic bunting and good feelings, we promptly…forgot about it after a year or so. But in our defense “Friends” was on, so…

Since then, our approach to national security has been spottier than a freckled-faced Jackson Pollock impersonator using a cheetah for a canvas. (Not something I’d recommend, by the way, especially if your clothes are dry clean only.) It’s become a stock talking point for both sides that has a level of gravitas and a seemingly untouchable nature about it that prevents Joe Sixpack or Taemmi Soylatte from thinking any deeper about it than “It’s good.”

And that’s where both parties fuck us at the drive-thru.

For decades, our national security has been tied to how much we’re willing to spend on it. With Republicans, it tends to be neat new weapons, gadgets, and tech, and with Democrats it tends to be more “soft” spending on diversity, diplomacy, and making sure other country’s fee-fees don’t get hurt by us. Yet, with all of that spending, we aren’t that much safer. If anything, we’ve gotten more lax due to an unhealthy cocktail of political gaslighting and social media.

Let’s start with the gaslighting since it’s the most pervasive and, thus, more fun to talk about. Both sides use this tactic to bolster their own version of national security. If you don’t approve of spending $450 on a screwdriver you can get at Home Depot for $8, the Right thinks you support China, North Korea, or dare I say it Trinidad Tobago marching down our streets and making us their bitches. If you don’t agree to using military (i.e. taxpayer) dollars to combat global climate change, the Left thinks you want to pollute the Earth to the point only cockroaches and the Kardashians would survive.

Both sides are wrong in the same bipartisan way. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on a security system if you never turn it on. And guess what, kids? We have been forgetting to turn it on for decades, all the while keeping every door unlocked and all our valuables in one convenient and highly visible spot for anyone to come along and take them.

And, yes, I’m about to talk about the balloon incident.

On January 28th, a Chinese balloon was able to fly over Alaska, western Canada, and parts of the United States before it was shot down over the East Coast. On February 4th. Even if you buy the multiple excuses the Left gave for why the balloon wasn’t shot down over, well, Alaska, the fact remains it took 8 fucking days and an entire cross country trip for us to do anything. And then, as if to try to balance out the dumbfuckery, we got hyper-vigilant and started shooting down balloons that weren’t even Chinese.

It’s one thing to double down after making a mistake. But the Puddin’ Head Joe Administration decided to double, triple, and quadruple down on the mistake just to show how serious they were. Which is to say not serious at all. The very fact a single balloon made it into American airspace, was recognized, and was allowed to go coast to coast without so much as a dart thrown at it is a serious breach of national security.

After all, we don’t know what kind of equipment the balloon had, if it had any. We are just being told that it was either harmless due to spy satellites giving better information or that it was made harmless because we jammed any transmissions (neither of which, I might add, has been established with any factual information). In other words, Leftists want us to believe the same balloon was ineffective because shut up.

After the Chinese balloon debacle, it’s a good thing there wasn’t a train derailment or…oh, wait. Never mind.

Even with what people observed, we had to endure Leftists telling us it wasn’t a big deal and people who said we should have shot the balloon down sooner were “bedwetters” as Senator Chris Murphy put it so inelegantly. To try to get Puddin’ Head Joe as far away from the blame as possible, they even tried to pull Donald Trump into it, saying he also had Chinese balloons come into American airspace during his Presidency, a claim that was later debunked by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who said it didn’t happen. I mean, it was obvious, considering it was claimed those alleged balloon flights under Trump weren’t discovered allegedly until the Puddin’ Head Joe Administration…according to the Puddin’ Head Joe Administration.

I’m as shocked as you are the Administration would lie to cover up the Administration’s clusterfuck! And to try to make us feel bad or foolish for not buying the bullshit? That’s lower than an earthworm’s belt buckle.

Now, onto social media. Granted, I don’t have a high opinion of social media to begin with, but there’s one out there that is actually being used for surveillance against us. I’m speaking of TikTok, a popular app that has been linked to spying on journalists and has the potential to track information of American citizens and government workers.

Oh, and it should be pointed out the Trump Administration called this out in 2020, and people mocked them for it, saying it was a conspiracy spun for political advantage. Yeah…chalk up another “conspiracy theory” that wound up being a fact.

Before we take a victory lap at the Left being wrong again, consider the implications of what we know. China has access to information, which is in and of itself a matter of national security, not just because government employees might be doing a stupid dance for tens and tens of people to see. The thing that makes TikTok so dangerous is the fact so many Americans voluntarily give up this information.

In our society’s rush to be “Internet famous,” we have opened ourselves up to invasions of privacy and, yes, security. Say what you will about the Chinese, and believe me I have, but they have figured us out in 2023 America. Just give us a dopamine hit for meaningless videos and we’ll let them mine our data. Brilliant!

Although neither major party has it exactly right, I do have to say Republicans take national security more seriously. After all, the Left keeps saying domestic terrorism is the greatest threat to our national security right now. And by “domestic terrorism” they mean “anybody who disagrees with us and aren’t afraid to say anything about it.”

Look at how they painted parents who were concerned/outraged over pornographic books teaching children about homosexuality and blow jobs in elementary school. You would think these parents were one step below the Manson Family the way the Left talked. But when you get people of all stripes to come out against what you’re trying to push in elementary school, it’s no longer a matter of hatred, fear, or even national security. Maybe, just maybe, your ideas suck ass.

While the Left gets their collectivist panties in a bunch over people pretending to be badasses, we still have real issues with national security we need to address. And with China and Russia united over a) hating us, b) wanting to fuck our shit up as much as possible and c) having the means to do both electronically, we can’t afford to be asleep at the switch anymore.

But we need to be honest here. Neither major party is doing jack shit about protecting ourselves, mainly because we continue to confuse the definition to fit their ideological needs at the time. Is ANTIFA a national security threat? No, nor should they be considered such. Are Trump supporters national security threats? No, and they shouldn’t be considered such either. Once you start pulling away the layers of this fetid onion, you get closer and closer to the core of what national security actually looks like.

And what does it look like? A strong and vigilant population who strive for the same goal of protecting America regardless of their ideological differences. As we’ve seen since Kevin McCarthy’s actions involving January 6 footage, we’re a long ways off from that.

But, hey, at least we can still use TikTok, right?