Thanksgiving 2022: The brief

The best meditation for Thanksgiving 2022 would be, I think, a very short one.

In fact, just four brief points.

One, politics aren’t expected to be widely popular at the Thanksgiving table this year.  This from The Hill, citing a Quinnipiac poll:  “A new Quinnipiac poll found that 65 percent of Americans hope they can avoid talking about politics with family and friends this Thanksgiving.”

The White House communication team has put out talking points about President Biden’s accomplishments, as the White House sees them.

Advertisement

TOC Ready Room 22 November 2022: Drive-by edition; Poland missile impact, Biden FBI/Israel, Special Counsel and other Trump

Increasingly, I agree with those who say we need an “audit” of U.S. support to Ukraine.  I put “audit” in quotation marks because a mere audit of the tens of billions flowing to Ukraine – and to military contractors – won’t get the job done.  What’s needed is a wholesale policy scrub of the Biden administration’s handling of the problem.

As always, I begin by affirming that the U.S. needs to support a fight to reverse and end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The U.S. shouldn’t have direct military engagement in the fight, nor should NATO.

But it matters what strategy we’re supporting and how military assistance to Ukraine is executed.

It matters at least as much how the fight in Ukraine is affecting NATO’s security conditions, posture, and unity.

Veterans Day 2022: The torch of freedom

Last year, I posted for the second time a recurring Veterans Day article, long a tradition at TOC and Liberty Unyielding 1.0.  In 2022, it appears for the third time.

In the preface for last year (2021), I felt that much had changed since the current article first appeared in 2020.  (An earlier article was published annually from 2009 to 2018.)

Oddly, though, in 2022 my sense is that the sentiments of 2020 are being reaffirmed.  The problem of threats to freedom continues:  more intensely, and in the same patterns.

The creed of American veterans, the yeoman warriors who have taken up arms for our nation’s purposes, has not changed,

U.S. bombers to Australia: New deployment, old issue

In 2016, I wrote about the recent purchase by a China-based company of a 99-year lease on parts of the port of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory.  The company, Landbridge, would execute the terms of the lease, which included port operations and a commercial fuel depot at a location close to where the U.S. Marines are deployed to Darwin, through an Australian subsidiary set up for the purpose.

Landbridge has connections to the Communist Party through its interactions with government officials in its homebase of Rizhao, a port city in Shandong Province.  The company’s owner, Ye Cheng, has also referred to Landbridge’s port lease in Darwin as Landbridge’s participation in Xi Jinping’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative – certainly not evidence of detachment by the company from the Party.  One Belt, One Road is a government project, not the vision of Chinese “private” industry (to the extent there ever was such a thing, or still could be a year on from the Xi regime’s comprehensive 2021 business crackdown).

When the Landbridge deal was being negotiated,

TOC Ready Room 26 October 2022: 101st Airborne in Romania; Kanye, China, and other wonders

This will be a rough-and-ready Ready Room, intended to spray a few current topics out there without going in-depth on any of them.  I really mean it this time, so throw rotten fruit if you catch a glimpse of over-analysis out here in the heathery rough.

The first topic is the headline teaser:  deployment of the U.S. 101st Airborne to Europe.  CBS did a segment this past week in which its crew accompanied soldiers of the 101st on field activities in Romania, just “a few miles” from the border of Ukraine.

CBS gets an exclusive sneak peak: "The US Army's 101st Airborne is practicing for war with Russia just miles from Ukraine's border"

"It's not just about defending NATO territory," correspondent @charliecbs reports. "They're fully prepared to cross over into Ukrainian territory" pic.twitter.com/XE2OfHZV4o

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 22, 2022

A great deal was made of the point that the 101st hasn’t deployed to Europe since World War II.