Thursday, March 10, 2022

Polish MiGs, White House Incompetence


This administration is dangerously inept, and here's the latest evidence that the folks in charge don't know what the hell they're doing.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Tony Blinken told CBS News that NATO nations had a "green light" to share warplanes with Ukraine if they choose to. He added that he was in consultations with Poland to do just that, with the U.S. planning to resupply Poland with U.S.-made planes to "backfill" donated aircraft. (That this might be a major provocation, and mark a potentially dangerous escalation of the war, seemed not to register with the nation's top diplomat, given the way he just blurted it out on national television, with all the discretion of a New Orleans streetwalker.)

On Monday, Poland put forward a proposal to do just that, through an admittedly roundabout way, by flying their Russian-made MiGs to an American base in Germany, from where they would (somehow) be transferred to Ukraine. On Tuesday that offer was summarily rejected as "untenable" by the Pentagon, contradicting what the State Department said Sunday.

Aren't the State Department and the Pentagon part of the same administration? Why aren't they reading from the same script?

A number of news reports published yesterday indicate that the United States was "surprised" by Poland's actions, although we couldn't have been TOO surprised if Blinken was talking about this -- and "green-lighting" such arms transfers -- on a Sunday morning news show. These stories were obviously intended to blame Poland for a Biden administration debacle, which can't be good or NATO unity or for U.S. relations with Poland. Now we've dispatched Kamala Harris to sort the mess out -- just like she sorted out the mess at America's Southern Border. I guess the White House feels that having Harris talk to key allies as though they're 4th-graders will help patch-up any rifts.

We're supposed to be alarmed by the fact that Putin controls nuclear weapons. I'm almost as alarmed by the fact that Biden and his inept minions have access to nuclear weapons.