Perhaps it's my biased hearing, but Jake Sullivan, the president's National Security Advisor, seems positively ebullient that the U.S. will be sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. He's in his element, somehow.
Sullivan, notably, is one of the chief purveyors of the Russia collusion hoax. He smeared Trump, and he also lied to Congress about Michael Flynn, whose job he now holds after helping to push him out of it.
No one ever asks Sullivan about that -- or why anything he says about Russia should be considered credible, since he lied about Russia so egregiously, and simply for political gain, in the past.
He has, however, been asked about cluster bombs. The justification keeps changing: first we were told it would help the Ukrainian offensive; now it is a "bridge" because artillery shells are out.
The latter point is really significant: the Ukrainians no longer have ordinary shells, and nor do we. Sullivan says that far-more-deadly (to civilians) cluster munitions are a stopgap "bridge" in the meantime.
As to objections by the UK and others, Sullivan has tried, several times, to minimize these, describing them as a process of checking the legal boxes for signatories to the Oslo treaty banning the bombs.
What happened to the promises of diplomacy? What's the prospect of using these munitions -- a weapon of last resort -- to achieve any kind of battlefield success that translates into diplomatic gains?
I'm not opposed to cluster bombs in certain situations. I just think that there is no real prospect of getting past the stalemate in eastern Ukraine, and it's time to get the sides talking, not just shooting.
This week's show will be slightly different from the norm: we'll focus on clips and topics, rather than guests -- and that, hopefully, will mean more input from the callers (unless you are all watching football on opening weekend).
Topics:
- The state of the economy
- The fight against crime
- The midterm election fight
- The struggle for peace between Russia and Ukraine
- The airstrike on the Venezuelan drug cartel
- The attempt to sink Kennedy
- The war in Gaza
- The case against Harvard
- The Trump presidency
Tune in: SiriusXM Patriot 125, 7-10 p.m. ET / 4-7 p.m. PT
Call: 866-957-2874
This week's Torah portion includes several laws about conduct in civic and personal life, the common theme of which is boundaries -- setting bounds to what one may do at home, at work, and even in the battlefield.
One noteworthy passage concerns Amalek, the evil nation that attacked the Children of Israel as they made their Exodus from slavery to freedom. Deuteronomy 25:17-19 commands Jews to obliterate Amalek's memory.
The South African government accused Israel of genocide on the basis of a story about Amalek in the Book of Samuel, in which King Saul was commanded to wipe out the entire evil Amalekite nation.
Because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted this week's portion -- "Remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17), the South African government claimed he was commanding soldiers to commit genocide.
It was an absurd and malevolent misreading of the Bible and of Jewish tradition. The commandment, as observed by Jews today, is to remember the evil of Amalek and fight ...
