Every time you hear “bipartisan”, your wallet just got a little lighter, your border a little less secure, your future a little less certain.
Every time you hear “bipartisan”, a Congresscreature gets a payoff. Every time you hear “bipartisan”, an oligarch smiles.
When the left side of the ruling Party is in the majority, it gleefully loudly forcefully boastfully unaplogetically uses its power to get exactly what it wants. When the center of the ruling Party is in the majority, as they are now in the House, it seeks out support from the left and says, “Let’s bipartisan.”
And the left gets what it wants again.
There is a right side in government, but it is small, perhaps fewer than fourteen of the 435 members of the House; maybe it is one to four in the Senate. The link is to the fourteen members of the House that voted against the four Forever Foreign Wars Omnibus bills over the past weekend. Though some of these fourteen also voted in favor of continuing the spying on Americans.
Which is to say, there is no right party. There are only some rulers who claim to be of the right, and they do this because a majority of their voters are, and they have learned to pander to them. They must. It is the only way they can get into office.
Once there, most of those who claim to be on the right willingly choose the Party over the people. They bipartisan. We have seen this time and time and time again. Promises made to the right, no promises kept. And not only no promises kept, but active hostile traitorous behavior. Bipartisan behavior.
This is why those in the center of the ruling class favor the word “bipartisan”. To signal to the Party that you will have no trouble with them, that they should be admitted to the cool kids table. That they will vote the “right” way.
We saw this in the last two Speaker elections. The fellow before the current promised faithfully to be a man of the right. I’m can’t recall how many days it was before he betrayed that promise, but it is was a very small number. The current Speaker, elected because of discontent over the former, then proceeded to follow the example of his predecessor. He bipartisaned. Johnson, purportedly a man of the right, secured a bipartisan coalition of all Democrats and just enough Republicans to vote for the leftist Forever Wars bills.
The total was some $90 billion, parceled out to, they say, Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Now they don’t have $90 billion of your money to give away, so they’ll have to print it. Which will drive inflation a little bit higher, and rob you of a bit more of your savings and ability to live.
Spending money you don’t have in the hopes more will appear when you need it is magical thinking, fantasy. And the replacement of Fantasy with Reality is what it means to be of the left.
What has your money bought? I was curious, given we discussed Our Greatest Ally last week (to the consternation of some; blog, Substack), just how much we have given Israel over the years, and what effect this has had.
The Council on Foreign Relations, not an unimpeachable source, but useful enough as a starting point, estimated that, in 2022 dollars (now worth less than 2024 dollars), that the ruling party gave about $300 billion to Israel since 1946 (yes, some was before it was officially a country; the $39 billion given the other day of course pushed this total past $300 B). Has that money bought peace?
You know the answer. What is has bought is weapons. From whom? From these guys: “Most of the aid—approximately $3.3 billion a year—is provided as grants under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, funds that Israel must use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.”
You already know this, but let’s remind ourselves of how it works. Congress gives your money to some foreign entity to fight some war we want no part of. The rulers in that foreign party take a cut, and spends the rest on US munitions. The arms makers take their cut, and give part of that back as donations to the Congresscreatures who voted for the “foreign” aid. The Congresscreatures are then reelected—almost all incumbents are—and proceed to vote again for more war money. The circle is complete.
It’s all legal. It’s bipartisan.
Some of you will flinch about criticism of one favorite country’s forever war, yet most will agree that the money given to Ukraine, which fits the exact same pattern, has not been well spent, and has only served to make things worse.
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I sometimes wonder if this “aid” to Israel (and the perpetual conflict there and elsewhere) hasn’t become an industry in itself, with Middle East instability more or less a business model. If more money were the answer, the Middle East would have been a veritable Garden of Eden, Paradise on Earth, long ago. And, curiously, the “aid” goes mostly to fueling bellicosity.
Generations have made careers and fortunes “bringing peace to the Middle East”.
Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole thing.
Every time I hear “bipartisan”, I think, welp, Republicans got fleeced again. Is there ever a time where Democrats “cross the aisle” and vote against their party’s principles? (🤣🤣🤣🤣 Sorry, I’m laughing at Democrats and principles being in the same sentence).