And some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed of sailing that beautiful sea — But I shall name you the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.
"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod" is a poem for children written by the American writer and poet Eugene Field, which was published in March of 1889. The poem is a fantasy bed-time story about three children sailing and fishing among the stars from a boat which is a wooden shoe. The names suggest a sleepy child's blinking eyes and nodding head. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream this past weekend for America’s own Wynken, Blynken and Nod. The harsh reality of unspeakable atrocity and violent murder crashed against the dreams and fantasies of the Biden Administration, when Hamas invaded Israel, butchering innocent civilians, raping women and beheading babies.
Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, is the Wynken of the Field poem. He certainly had to be dreaming, when he cluelessly stated just one week before the invasion, "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades." This dream has turned into a nightmare!
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is, of course, the Blynken of the poem, and he certainly was dreaming when he immediately called for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages. In other words, no consequences for Hamas! Not surprisingly, Israel flatly rejected pleas from the Biden administration to “deescalate,” and Hamas basically spit in Blinken’s face, when it promised to publicly execute hostages if Israel retaliated. Some of those hostages are American citizens.
What about President Biden? He’s Nod, dreaming and nodding off to sleep. On Sunday, the day after the invasion, it was Happy Time as President Biden held a barbecue for White House staff and their families. He even called a lid at 11:34 a.m. - meaning he would not be making any more public statements or be available to the press for the rest of the day. (Maybe it was time for his nap?) Anyway, whatever the reason for his relative silence, it wasn’t until Tuesday that the President finally woke up; in an address to the American people, he condemned the bloody attacks as an "act of sheer evil" and forcefully declared that "we stand with Israel."
The two most obvious questions for the Biden Administration are: who is to blame for this horrific attack, and will there be any consequences that will be coming from the United States? The Wall Street Journal has reported that “Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions,” and “Iranian security officials gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday.” The London Times reported “The British government believes that Iran is linked to the Hamas attack on Israel and that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is likely to have played a role in training and the supply of weapons…A Whitehall source said: “The Revolutionary Guards have their fingerprints all over this multifaceted attack. Hamas is just another tool in Iran’s campaign against the West.”
Does the Biden Administration agree that Iran is responsible for the attack? After all, it is Iran’s professed goal to wipe Israel off the face of the map. On Sunday talk shows, Secretary of State Blinken gave a mealy-mouth response: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.” More telling was Biden’s address to the nation on Tuesday. He spoke for ten minutes, and then walked away from the podium without answering any questions from the press. In his short speech, he never mentioned Iran!
Former President Donald Trump was much more forceful, and he squarely put the blame on Biden’s lack of leadership. In truth, Trump’s crystal ball has been much better than that of Biden’s National Security Advisor Sullivan, for last month he warned about future terror attacks in the Middle East after President Joe Biden released $6 billion in frozen oil revenues to Iran. He also bragged on Truth Social that “the horrible attack on Israel, much like the attack on Ukraine, would never have happened if I were President – Zero Chance!” In predicting the future, we hew to the maxim “Never say Never. However, we will give the former President his due. When he was President, Russia did not attack the Ukraine, and during his Presidency, Hamas did not brutally invade Israel.
More importantly, there was sound policy underlying Trump’s braggadocio. As we have written before, it takes a helluva lot of money to successfully prosecute a war. Russia did not invade Crimea and the Ukraine until they were generating huge amounts of revenue coming from crude oil priced above $100 per barrel; and just look at the hundreds of billions the United States and Europe is giving the Ukraine in order to fend off the Russian onslaught!
We recommend readers take a look at the entire article (see link below) that quotes Robert Greenway, who was director of Iranian policy for President Trump’s National Security Council. According to Greenway, Trump’s policies were diametrically opposed to those of the Obama and Biden administrations. Basically, the Trump Administration tried to attack Iran’s oil revenues. “We had cut off their oil sales to the point where they were averaging 400,000 barrels a day at $55 a barrel, so they were no longer able to sustain their military growth or sustain the level of funding for the surrogates and proxies…This was our going-in proposition. We were going to create a trading imbalance. We were going to prevent them from funding all the programs that threaten the United States and our partners and allies in the region…By the time we left the administration, they had about $6 billion in accessible foreign exchange reserve, which is what Haiti has, which for Iran is near catastrophic.”
“As of last year, the Iranians have completely recovered economically with no enforcement of sanctions on their oil exports—before the Biden administration’s $6 billion transfer. They’re exporting over three million barrels a day at $85 a barrel…They’ve regenerated their accessible foreign exchange reserves to the point where they're north of $70 billion, and they're making more than enough money.”
We note that the price of oil is sharply higher now than what existed during the Trump Administration. That means that the bad guy of the world – the dictators in Russia, Iran, Venezuela, etc. - are making a ton more money from crude oil production, so they have significantly more money to oppress their own people and wage war against their neighbors. Why has this happened?
There are always a number of reasons that can explain huge commodity price swings, but one major and obvious reason is that President Trump promoted policies that encouraged crude oil production in the United States, while President Biden has done everything he can to discourage US oil production. For instance, this September, Biden’s Department of Interior proposed regulations to “ensure maximum protection for 13 million acres of land across the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, and Biden further ordered an additional 2.8 million acres to be withdrawn from oil and gas leasing in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska. His Administration has also canceled seven existing leases issued to the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority.
Biden justifies all of this because he believes that Climate Change is the Existential Threat facing all of mankind. (Am I allowed to use that word anymore?) This belief allows him to ignore the obvious negative effects of his energy policies: Higher inflation afflicting mostly the poor and middle class citizens of the United States (and really the rest of the world), and destructive war in eastern Europe and now in the Middle East.
Speaking of Existential threats, Israel is now once again fighting for its existence. Ask yourself, what will happen if they decide they need to cut off Iran’s major source of revenue – its crude oil production? What do you think will happen to the price of oil if Israel destroys Iranian oil production? It certainly won’t be a Sunday afternoon picnic for staffers at the White House!
Will Israel take any action against the Iranian nuclear program sites?