New York Post, Thursday, December 3, 2020nypost.comForeign desk: Why Biden Will Restart Iran Deal
Joe Biden “will move quickly to lift sanctions” against Tehran, predicts
Lee Smith at Tablet, so the suspended nuke deal can be “completed.” That
deal “was never about the Middle East,” which opposed it, but part of an
American “worldview” President Barack Obama expounds in his latest
memoir. For Obama-ians, America is a place “without borders,” where “Big
Tech oligarchs, social-media warriors and powerful bureaucrats join
hands.” The deal “is a central component of that”: Empowering a regime
that’s “anti-American at its core” will help bring the real, nation-state Amer-
ica “to heel, so it can be transformed into the America” Obama envisions.Media watch: Paul Krugman’s ‘Easy Paycheck’
In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman complained that Joe
Biden will “be the first modern US president trying to govern in the face of
an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy,” prompting The Spec-
tator’s pseudonymous Cockburn to wonder if Krugman even reads his
own columns. The Timesman in 2016 called President Trump’s victory “il-
legitimate in important ways” and the result of a “tainted election,” as he
“won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and gro-
tesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law
enforcement.” Others who called Trump “illegitimate” include Hillary
Clinton, Rep. John Lewis and a host of pundits. All of which shows Krug-
man is a “lazy writer who just says whatever goes to get an easy paycheck.”From the right: Dems’ Vaccine Fearmongering
That two COVID-19 vaccines are ready for FDA approval “is a rebuke to
the cynical fearmongering that liberals pushed surrounding vaccine
development in the run-up to the election,” argue the editors at the Wash-
ington Examiner. Of those spreading the “absurd theory” that President
Trump would force the release of an untested vaccine, “no one was more
irresponsible than Vice President-elect Kamala Harris,” who suggested
experts would have no say in testing and raised doubts about vaccine safety
— deceptions “meant to scare up votes and downplay legitimate progress
on the vaccine front.” Now Democrats will “attempt to memory-hole their
reckless and baseless fearmongering from the fall. But we should not forget
it, because it speaks to their cynicism and their character as leaders.”From the left: A True Swamp Creature
At his Substack blog, Glenn Greenwald seethes at Joe Biden’s choice for
Office of Management and Budget director, Neera Tanden — “a thoroughly
mediocre and ordinary DC swamp creature from the perspective of both
ideology and competence.” What has riled up both right and left is “Tan-
den’s uniquely unhinged, venomous... and patho-
logically dishonest conduct as a Clinton Family and
DNC apparatchik and president of the corporatist-
and-despot-funded Center for American Progress”:
Among other things, she allegedly punched a CAP
staffer after he dared ask Hillary Clinton about her
support for the Iraq War; spent the last four years
pumping toxic conspiracy theories about “collu-
sion”; and viciously attacked Bernie Sanders and his
supporters. “Her face serves as an undeniable and
unavoidable reminder of what the Biden administra-
tion and the Democratic Party really are. She illumi-
nates the truth about their real aims.”Libertarian: Powell’s Mythical Massive Fraud
“I’m going to release the Kraken,” former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell
vowed last month, recalls Reason’s Jacob Sullum, who notes she meant
“overwhelming evidence that supposedly would validate her claim” of mas-
sive fraud in last month’s election. In fact, her “lawsuits challenging the
election results in Michigan and Georgia” are “at least as hideous as the
beast of legend and equally mythical,” with “the same sort of dubious evi-
dence that has failed to impress courts across the country.” Her Michigan
lawsuit, for one, alleges “the unlawful counting, or manufacturing, of hun-
dreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate or purely fictitious bal-
lots” — but her evidence “overlaps a lot with affidavits” already submitted
in a rejected suit that a judge found were “not credible,” “based on misun-
derstandings, offered unsubstantiated suspicions or failed to make specific,
checkable allegations.” — Compiled by The Post Editorial BoardNeera TandenPOSTOPINION
A
RE you ready for the Great
Reset? It’s the Great Leap
Forward of 21st-century
technocracy. It’s time, we
are told by the likes of Davos
guru Klaus Schwab, to reboot
our passé, 18th-century ideas
about rights, democracy and
constitutions — and surrender
to the smooth rule of the
experts and the climate cultists,
not forgetting, of course, their
financial advisers.
The reality, however, is less
Great Reset than Great Preset.
What elites who talk this way re-
ally want is to turn the clock
back to circa 2014, before Donald
Trump’s ascent, before Brexit,
before populists swept to power
across the West on a wave of dis-
content with the liberal-techno-
cratic order.
Look at who Joe Biden, the
great hope of resetters, wants to
drive the economic recovery.
Janet Yellen, who was President
Barack Obama’s choice at the
Federal Reserve, for Treasury.
Neera Tanden, the corporatist
Clinton sidekick, for the Office
of Management and Budget.
Adewale Adeyemo, president of
the Obama Foundation, as
Yellen’s deputy.
It’s Obama Time all over again
in defense and diplomacy too.
Antony Blinken, Obama’s dep-
uty national-security adviser, is
Biden’s nominee for secretary
of state. Michèle Flournoy, who
managed Obama’s failed coun-
terinsurgency strategy in Af-
ghanistan and advocated for the
disastrous demolition of Libya,
is Biden’s likely nominee for de-
fense secretary.
Failure falls upward as well as
backward. The Great Reset is a
fantasy that our operating sys-
tems can be reset to the Obama
2.0 program from 2016, if not
the original, notoriously flawed
Obama 1.0 from 2008.
But even Joe Biden must know
that when you reset a device,
you return it to its original set-
tings. In this case, the original
settings are those of techno-
cratic liberalism.
Technocratic liberalism was
the default American system
since the New Deal and the de-
fault system of Western Europe
during the Cold War. It remains
the established and preferred
system in the Western bureauc-
racies. Democrats revere it, and
it is the substitute religion of
the European Union. It unites
moderates, centrists and free-
loaders of all parties in a shared
suspicion of the voters.
The vulgar fly in this elitist
ointment is that the voters don’t
like it. The British rejected it in
the Brexit referendum of 2016.
American voters rejected it that
year when they elected Donald
Trump. And the blue ripple of
the 2020 elections, with its
heavy red undertow in the
House, shows that the voters
still don’t trust it.
Biden wants to take us back to
the future, to before the finan-
cial crash and Obama’s feeble
recovery. Before the Obama ad-
ministration let off Wall Street
scot-free, left the poorest to
drown with their underwater
mortgages and lumbered small
businesses with ObamaCare.
Before, above all, the election of
Trump as the unacceptable face
of “hope and change.”
The failed personnel of the
Obama years are crawling out of
their hiding places in the
Swamp. The failed ideas of the
Obama years are being reheated
by the Blob and hyped by the
same propagandist media who
sold us Russia “collusion.” Even
John Kerry is back, as our am-
bassador to the climate: an old
man shouting at the clouds.
But there can be no going
back. And who wants to go backthere anyway?
We already know how this
Great Preset will go. A low-
growth, high-regulation econ-
omy couldn’t deliver the recov-
ery that Americans needed after- It’s going to fail worse
after the COVID-19 crash. A for-
eign policy of dumb regime-
change wars failed last time
around. With China and Iran on
the rise and Biden boasting that
we’re “back in the game,” the
belligerence, bombing and bum-
bling are back. Followed, inevi-
tably, by the body bags contain-
ing young Americans who
fatally forgot to attend Ivy
League colleges.
We also already know how this
Great Preset will end. Most
Americans have no intention of
allowing the lunatics to take
over the asylum. They refuse to
outsource their morals to the
UN. They see “amnesty” for ille-
gal immigrants as a vote-buying
scam. They resent the cranks
and commissars of the Demo-
crats’ loony left: the speech po-
lice, the BLM hustlers, the gen-
der-reassignment cranks, the
fluffy-lipped Stalinists.
The result of the Great Preset
won’t be the Obama 3.0 that
Biden, Harris and, by the looks
of it, Obama himself have in
mind. In 2010, the voters re-
sponded to Obama’s first two
years by flipping the House to
the Republicans. They will do
the same in 2022.
Dominic Green is deputy editor
of The Spectator’s US edition.
Twitter: @DrDominicGreen
Back to 2014
Technocracy, climate cultism & dumb wars
Welcome back: The new administration will feature John Kerry in the
role of ambassador to the climate, an old man literally yelling at clouds.Zach Gibson / EPA-EFE /ShutterstockDominic green