Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs op-ed columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column last week entitled “Dems, You Can Defeat Trump in a Landslide.” He recommended that the progressives and so-called “moderates” in the Democratic party unite to defeat President Trump, whom Friedman ignorantly described as an “undiagnosed sociopath.” Friedman would accept Bernie Sanders at the top of the Democratic ticket – the “self-proclaimed socialist” – so long as Sanders is willing to “forge a national unity ticket the likes of which they have never forged before.” Friedman then laid out his unity strategy – assembling a “team of rivals,” whether it be Sanders or a successful challenger to Sanders at the top of the ticket. If Sanders wins, his main challenger (who Friedman thinks will be Mike Bloomberg) would get the consolation prize of Secretary of the Treasury. And vice versa.
Except perhaps for Amy Klobuchar, who just dropped out of the presidential campaign, as the mostly ceremonial vice president, Friedman’s idea of a “team of rivals” reads more like a collection of has-beens and radicals. Selecting socialist Sanders for the cabinet post of Secretary of the Treasury, as his consolation prize for losing the presidential nomination, would be like placing Willie Sutton in charge of the nation’s largest bank. Expect Sanders to raid the till whenever he gets a chance to fund his radical wealth redistribution programs.
Joe Biden would be Friedman’s pick for Secretary of State. Robert Gates, who served as Defense Secretary during the Obama administration, still stands by his statement from his memoir that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Biden is so oblivious to the national security challenges the U.S. faces today that he said last year about the Chinese, “guess what, they’re not, they’re not competition for us.”
But not to worry. Friedman has just the answer to bring a woke perspective to his team of rivals and the nation’s conduct of foreign policy. He would select none other than Democratic-Socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as our UN ambassador. “Can you imagine how our international standing would improve with youth worldwide with her representing next-gen America?” Friedman asked.
No doubt the UN would welcome AOC with open arms. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the socialist former president of Chile, called AOC and her fellow squad members “fantastic.”
AOC’s anti-Israel stance is in keeping with the UN’s institutional bias against the Jewish state. AOC also is all in with the UN’s doomsday predictions if immediate drastic economy-wrecking actions are not taken to stop the use of fossil fuels. “Young people understand that climate change is an existential threat, she tweeted. “The UN says we’ve got 12 years left to fix it.” AOC has credited a UN study for coming up with her radical job-killing Green New Deal. She has compared combating climate change to the challenge posed by Nazi Germany in World War II.
The International Union of Socialist Youth would love to have AOC as the U.S. ambassador to the UN. After all, she is an anti-capitalist globalist just as they are.
AOC believes that “capitalism will not always exist in the world” and has claimed that the United States did not start out with a capitalist economy. She has suggested a top marginal income tax rate for the rich as high as 70 percent to help finance her New Green Deal top-down plan for the government to essentially control the energy industry and the government-controlled Medicare-for-All program that she supports. She believes not only in open borders but also in eliminating the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, and allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally to receive the same welfare benefits as U.S. citizens.
The International Union of Socialist Youth manifesto speaks of “the global crisis of capitalism.” It proclaims, “We consider the United Nations as the only existing legitimate framework for global political regulation. It is time for a global system of governance that includes the economic sphere and that guarantees just distribution and real co-determination.” No argument from AOC there. The manifesto also promotes “an international progressive tax” that “should be immediately applied for raising taxes on arms trade, carbon emission, financial transactions and properties.” The manifesto demands that “all obstacles to migration that are enforced through the system of ‘visa’ have to be abolished.” Expect UN Ambassador Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be advocating these radical ideas and more on behalf of the United States.
Adding to his dream cabinet, Thomas Friedman has suggested Senator Kamala Harris for the position of Attorney General. “She has the toughness and integrity needed to clean up the corrupt mess Donald Trump has created in our Justice Department,” he wrote. Harris is the same person who as senator dishonestly smeared Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing for a seat on the Supreme Court and slammed his eventual confirmation to the Supreme Court as a “sham” and “disgrace.” She added, “Let’s speak the truth that it was a denial of justice for the women of this country and sexual assault survivors, men and women.” Evidently, Senator Harris does not understand the rudiments of due process. This would-be Attorney General in Friedman’s ideal cabinet has forgotten, or never learned, the cardinal principle of justice in the United States regarding the presumption of innocence. Just because someone makes an unproven accusation does not make it so, except for those like Kamala Harris who have adopted the Me Too standard of “justice.”
Senator Harris is another radical whose priorities for criminal justice reform include ending money bail. She would nationalize what has turned out to be a dismal failure in New York so far. By ending cash bails, the New York “reform” has allowed the repeated release of criminal recidivists. She would restore voting rights for all who have served their sentences while at the same time ending the use of fines and fees in sentences for certain convicted criminals deemed too “poor” to pay them. Moreover, she would hobble law enforcement.
Senator Harris has also joined with AOC to push legislation entitled the Climate Equity Act that, among other things, would create more bureaucracy with the establishment of a new independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability. The proposed legislation would also expand judicial authority to review compliance by any government agency with the climate and environmental justice analysis requirements of the proposed legislation.
Friedman has suggested Elizabeth Warren to serve as Health and Human Services Secretary. “No one could bring more energy and intellect to the task of expanding health care for more Americans than Senator Warren,” according to Friedman. The reality is that no one, except Bernie Sanders of course, could bring more energy and insanity to bankrupting the country faster than Elizabeth Warren with her radical Medicare-for-All plan. The one difference is that Warren would take a bit longer to strip many millions of Americans of the private health insurance they currently have and prefer. The result is the same – a top-down socialist-style government takeover of about one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna, an early endorser of Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy, is Friedman’s choice to become Secretary of Labor. This Silicon Valley progressive has pushed for a huge $1.4 trillion expansion of the earned income tax credit. He has co-sponsored legislation that would test a federal subsidized jobs guarantee program for people who have been unemployed for more than 90 days or can demonstrate that they have had earnings for the previous 6 months that are below the poverty line. If Rep. Khanna were to become Bernie Sanders’ Labor Secretary, he would be working to get passed in Congress Sanders’ proposal requiring the federal government to give every unemployed person a job paying a minimum of $15 per hour. A federal government job guarantee program on such a large scale has been estimated to cost as much as $500 billion per year. That’s on top of all the other radical socialist programs that Sanders is pushing.
Rep. Ro Khanna has co-sponsored legislation calling for a new tax on employers with at least 500 full-time employees that would be equal to 100 percent of the qualified federal employee benefits provided to the employees for the taxable year. This would open the door for progressives to push for even more massive federal benefits paid for by massive increases in taxes for employers. Such additional taxes will reduce their competitiveness and cause some firms to either reduce the number of their full-time employees below the 500 threshold or possibly go out of business. Rep. Ro Khanna has also co-sponsored the House’s Medicare-for-All bill and supported the Green New Deal.
Finally, Friedman has recommended William H. McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who commanded the U.S. Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014 and oversaw the 2011 Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to become the Secretary of Defense. At least, Friedman picked a military hero for this post. But the military man Friedman selected is a Trump-hater who has lost all perspective because of his obsession.
According to McRaven, President Trump’s media attacks represent the “greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime,” even greater than the terrorists determined to kill as many Americans as they can. McRaven doubled down on his sharp criticism of President Trump in a New York Times op-ed article he wrote as the impeachment proceedings were underway, entitled “Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President.” McRaven declared that if President Trump does not demonstrate what the former military commander believes is “the leadership that America needs, both domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office — Republican, Democrat or independent — the sooner, the better.”
McRaven not only showed a total lack of judgment in making reckless remarks like these against the president of the United States. He violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which bars “contemptuous words against the President,” and applies to retired members of the armed forces entitled to pay. For that reason alone, William H. McRaven should be disqualified for consideration as Secretary of Defense.
Friedman is right about one thing when he wrote at the end of his column, “you can kiss the America you grew up in goodbye.” But that warning would apply not to the re-election of President Trump, whose first term in office has been a resounding success, but to America’s fate if Friedman were to get his way with his left wing “national unity ticket.”
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