He doesn’t get it: Marco Rubio calls Biden national security picks ‘polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline’

By J.E. Dyer
He doesn’t get it: Marco Rubio calls Biden national security picks ‘polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline’
(Image: Screen grab of CSPAN video, YouTube)

Just a few comments on this, as we dangle suspended in the Twilight Zone.  Politico published Tuesday on a Marco Rubio tweet about the individuals Joe Biden has listed for his national security team, including Anthony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as U.S. ambassador to the UN.

No one would mistake Rubio’s tweet for an endorsement of Biden’s selections.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

But it’s not a tweet that frames the issue in the useful light of reality either.  Basically, we have to let our minds be ruled by lies to accept the terms of Rubio’s tweet.

I don’t think Rubio means ill here.  I do think he can’t really see outside the box.  The key phrase is “polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

You could only think these people have been or are going to be “polite and orderly” if you buy the media depiction of them.  The media want us to think they’re a “return” to a polite and orderly normal.  They’ve been flogging that theme since the Biden team began its announcements.

But there’s nothing polite or orderly about the way they have handled policy or treated people.  This is Team Obama, coming back to populate Washington, D.C. again.  We see them coming, and the media can’t deceive Republican voters now, even if it can still deceive Democratic voters and the Republicans and conservatives who live in “Beltway capture.”

The media depicted the Obama administration as mainstream and competent when it actually wasn’t, and gave it every advantage of admiring, incurious, sycophantic coverage for eight years.  That is a far different thing from competence or moderation being the reality of the Obama administration.  As ugly as the protracted agony of Russiagate and Spygate has been, they taught us what was really being done by the Obama administration.  It wasn’t polite or orderly.

Paul Sperry reminded us today that – granted, according to his reporting – Jake Sullivan was the author of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 plan to smear Trump with the “Russia collusion” narrative.

We learned about John Brennan’s version of the staff origins of the plan from notes taken by Brennan in July 2016 and briefed to Obama right about the time Crossfire Hurricane was launched.  DNI John Ratcliffe declassified a substantial portion of those notes in October 2020.

The notes show Brennan writing these comments (emphasis added): “We’re [gaining] additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED].

“Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton [on 26 July] of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

Paul Sperry reported at the time that he learned the foreign policy adviser in question was Jake Sullivan.

Hillary and her campaign in fact participated vigorously in fanning the “Russia collusion” narrative to life.  Considering Sullivan was Hillary Clinton’s closest and most prominent foreign policy adviser during the campaign, there is little reason to doubt Sperry’s information.  Even supposing he was not the author of the plan, it would be non-credible to suggest that Sullivan didn’t know about it, while he remained a willing high-level official of a campaign that was operating in that manner.  And the campaign was acting throughout in conjunction with the Obama administration spying on Trump and his campaign.  All of this is now a matter of public record.

These are things you can’t unsee.  There is no such world in which polite and orderly Ivy League officials are presiding over a melancholy American decline.

There are, instead, stop-at-nothing ideologues who are actively trying to reshape America’s position and role in the world, in a way that guts our national sovereignty and the protection of our rights, and imposes more and more onerous burdens and disadvantages on the American people.

Jake Sullivan (Image: The White House)

It’s important to point out, in the arena of foreign policy, that this attitude is bad for our allies too.  It makes us not just a decreasingly valuable ally, but an actively dangerous one.  An ally who’s shooting himself in the kneecaps isn’t one you want to keep trusting or aligning yourself with.  You might pick over the spoils of his people if he’s offering them up, but taking risks for him will be struck from your list of policy options.

The reason it resonates so empty now, to speak as Rubio did in the Old-Consensus way about merely misguided progressive leftists, is that we’ve spent the last four years watching a horror show of their orchestration play out in front of us, paralyzing our national politics and flailing relentlessly for four solid years to undo the 2016 election.

There’s no going back.  There’s no “consensus” anymore.  We’ve seen what too many of these officials really are: what their methods and objectives are, and the lengths they’re willing to go to get what they want.

We’ve seen also what the inverted Greek chorus of the media is – not the classic Greek chorus giving us an over-narrative of the true story line, but its opposite: a purveyor of lies seeking to deceive us about what the individual characters in the drama are quite obviously doing.

We can’t just pick up the thread that was snipped off in May of 2015 and go back to not seeing, or seeing and pretending, or seeing and seething silently, hoping something will change.  What preceded Trump’s campaign that started in June 2015 was the lie, and what has been punching us silly in the face since June 2015 is the truth.

There’s no constituency for Rubio’s complaint today.  It’s weak sauce and it doesn’t reflect reality or answer the mail.  I don’t mean to pick on Rubio; it could be a number of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, or decorating governors’ mansions and the floors of state legislatures across the country.  It’s not that Rubio or any of those Old-Consensus politicians isn’t “the” way back.  It’s that there is no way back.  It’s only forward from here, with our eyes wide open.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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