Joe Biden's past catches up with him

Before Joe Biden decides whether he really really wants to run for president he will have to take into account that we are now in a totally differet social era since the last time he had a go. No man, whether he is running for president, governor, senator, congressman or mayor needs to wrack his brains to see if he can remember anything in his past which involved an unwise kiss or a very unwise slap on the bottom or an even unwiser sexual remark/act with a woman. This is the era post-Harvey Weinstein when stuff is coming out of the woodwork like dry rot. It is staggering the number of men who have been exposed as sexual predators at worst or as sexual liberty-takers. Joe Biden now seems to have fallen into the latter category although his spokesman has denied it. A woman has suddenly remembered that on some occasion in 2014, Biden had made her feel uncomfortable. Lucy Flores, Democratic nominee for lieutenant-governor in Nevada in 2014, remembers she recoiled when Biden planted a long slow kiss on the back of her head. From the same event, Biden was photographed burying his nose in the hair of an actress. Neither incident is damning or disgusting or overwhelmingly sexual in nature by the sound of it. But looking back now in 2019, both incidents seem inappropriate, somewhat creepy and definitely overstepping the mark - if true. And are there numerous other examples waiting to be made public? Will dozens of women now come forward with uncomfortable recollections. It is more than likely. Biden hasn't even declared he will run yet but he must surely be having second thoughts. The extraordinary thing is that when much more salacious stuff came out about Trump, he just brushed it aside and survived. But Biden is a different character altogether. He wants to be seen as a nice guy, a gentleman. But creepy stuff from five years ago could chage all that.

Theresa May's last last chance has gone

With absolute predictability Theresa May's bizarre attempt to persuade MPs to vote for half of her deal, leaving the second half for some future date has failed. So now the May deal has failed failed failed. Three times. The EU has thrown up its collective hands in despair and has decided that a no-deal Brexit is now the only way forward. Can that really be true? Are we going to crash out of the EU with no deal because MPs cannot, will not, refuse even to contemplate the May deal as it stands. Even those voting for it seem to hate it. So apart from crashing out on April 12 without any deal whatsoever, the only other alternative it seems is to extend Brexit almost for ever while Parliament spends months exhausting all other options although most MPs apart from the rabid Brexiteers are looking for a soft exit which means staying in the EU customs union and single market, and thus prevent the UK from seeking trade deals outside the EU. Just like old times. Why on earth go for this option when the obvious alternative is just to stay in the EU? By throwing out May's deal for a third time there can't be a fourth or fifth attempt. May should announce from Downing Street that her Brexit deal is now dead, it is no more, it is defunct, dead as a dead parrot, no longer breathing. Then she should either give up and hand over to someone else or do what she promised she would never do which is to stay in the EU for at least another year or two which would mean the UK taking part in the upcoming European parliament election. What a farce that would be. I reckon that's what's going to happen. The UK will NOT leave the EU by May 22 but will agree to suspend Article 50 or as long as posible, take part in the European elections and carry on the bitching in Parliament ad infinitum. What a fine prospect that will be. It is quite clear that after nearly three years, the job of actually leaving the EU is impossible. It can't be done. The EU bureaucrats have been brilliant. They realised that if the UK found it difficult to leave with a consensus then none of the other 27 members would even try to do the same. It can't be done. It's a club which has strict entry rules and closed exit doors. WE ARE STUCK!!!

New gray warfare threat

Fifteen days after the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in the US in 2001, a small team of CIA intelligence and paramilitary officers arrived in the Panjshir Valley in north central Afghanistan for what was to be one of the most successful covert unconventional missions in America's history. Led by veteran CIA officer Gary Schroen, the team which included a young Farsi-speaking operations officer, a former US Marine who always wore a corduroy sports coat and an ex-Seal commando, linked up with the 15,000-strong irregular indigenous force, the Northern Alliance, and began the rout of the Taliban. They were joined three weeks later on October 17 by the first batch of 350 American special forces troops. By December 6, the Taliban had been toppled although the prize target, Osama bin Laden, escaped. This was officially termed "hybrid warfare" by the Pentagon, a non-conventional, covert attack backed by conventional air power. In the intervening years, America's adversaries have developed a new version of hybrid war known in the Pentagon as "gray warfare", acts of undeclared aggression involving a combination of subversive military action along with cyber attacks, disinformation, and political interference. The Pentagon has been forced to develop new capabilities to counter gray warfare now being orchestrated with growing sophistication by Russia, China and Iran: Russia in Ukraine, the Baltics and Balkans and western elections, China in the South China Sea and Iran throughout the Middle East. Last week Steven Walker, head of the Pentagon's Research agency, Darpa, stressed the importance of developing ways to counter this insidious form of warfare. With the Pentagon's strategy now focusing on trying to keep ahead of Russia and China in a big-power arms race, funding for countering gray warfare has to compete with key research projects such as hypersonic weapon systems. One of the challenges is in defining gray warfare. Unlike Operation Jawbreaker, the CIA-led post-9/11 mission in Afghanistan, which was completed in less than three months and was viewed as a legitimate response to 9/11, the activities launched by Russia, China and Iran are long-term and more subtle. "We need technologies and processes that can handle grey-zone activities which are not openly declared or defined," Fotis Barlos, programme manager in Darpa's strategic technology office, told me. Using artificial intelligence technologies, game theory and modelling in a programme codenamed Compass, he and his team work out what an adversary's intentions are and how they might respond if the US were to take specific action to counter their aggression. Russia, China and Iran play the gray warfare game with what has been described by senior US special operations commanders as a "finely-tuned risk calculus", expanding their sphere of influence aggressively but remaining wary of provoking a US or allied military response. "Gray zone warfare is illegitimate and involves military and other capabilities that are not claimed (by the perpetrators) but avoid tripping over the threshold that could lead to confrontation (with the West)," Kathleen Hicks, a former senior Pentagon official, said.

Trump should move forward and forget witchhunt obsession

Donald Trump is understandably enjoying his triumph arising from the Robert Mueller report into no collusion with the Ruskies. But he is threatening revenge against the people who put him, the president of the United States, into a position where his integrity and honesty and patriotism were all called into question. This sort of thing should never be allowed to happen to the president, he said. Any president, not just him. Well that's a debating point but he now seems determined to launch into his own witchhunt to track down those who dared to speak out against him. And journalists are on his revenge list because he claims America's major newspapers and broadcasters, particularly The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC were guilty of appalling opinionated baseless journalism. Well, with hindsight of course many of the stories that have been published over the last two years have proven to lack proper evidence. But that's hardly the fault of the journalists. They were doing their professional job tryng to make sense of all the allegations flying around, many of which emanated from aides close to Trump who gave their versions of events to the Mueller team. Some of the most dramatic stuff came from Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer, who made very damaging claims in public. What were newspapers supposed to do? Ignore the Cohen allegations? Trump hates most newspapers and abhors CNN but they were doing the best they could to unravel the Russian collusion affair. The most salacious stuff of all came from the dossier drawn up by Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 spy once based in Moscow, including the Golden Shower allegation in which Trump, before he became president, was said to have been compromised by the Russians by being caught with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. Ok, if that stuff was all baloney, a bit of back propaganda fed to Steele by his Russian contacts, I sympathise with Trump. It was an outrageous accusation and if total rubbish it should never have seen the light of day. There will always be doubts in people's mind but Mueller took the Steele dossier into account and, judging by the summary of his report, he clearly did not believe that the Russians had blackmail material against Trump. Despite his urge for revenge, Trump should take the gift handed to him by Mueller and move on. He has already received a mass of positive headlines since Mueller's investigation cleared him of collusion with the Russians. None of his supporters believed it from day one. So, grab your moment by all means, Mr President, but it's time to show the world that you want to achieve some good during your presidency. Otherwise all those Democratic rivals will be head-to-head with you in 2020. I'm not taking sides here. I'm just saying it's time for witchhunts to be cast aside.

Big decision time on Brexit is fast approaching

At the moment there is bedlam in the House of Commons with more Brexit ideas than sense floating around. The so-called indicative votes coming up could mean a Norway-style Brexit, a Canada-style Brexit, a softly soft Brexit, a people's vote or for all I know a combination of all of the above. But Theresa May will have none of it. She doesn't believe that any of these alternatives to her Brexit deal would honour either the 2016 referendum vote or the Tory Party manifesto which was put before the people in her disastrous snap election in 2017. She is determined not to allow a soft Brexit, not to allow a no-deal Brexit and definitely not to allow a no-Brexit-at-all Brexit. What she does believe in, wait for it......is HER Brexit deal which she took more than two years to negotiate with our EU "partners" which is neither soft nor hard but somewhere in the middle. This has been her mantra since Day One, and she's not going to change her view just because a posh Tory MP and former minister Sir Oliver Letwin has succeeded in persuading a majority of MPs to vote for his proposal - looking at all the other options for leaving the EU. All her critics are saying Theresa May is putting her party before the country. But this is a little unfair. After all if she didn't take into account the rabidly right-wing element in the Tory Party she could never get anything done for her country because they would just vote it down and bring the sledgehammer 10-member Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) with them. Without their votes, she loses, the country loses. Ergo, she has to try and win over the Brexiteers who would desperately love to have a no-deal Brexit but fear a soft Brexit so much they might even suport Theresa May after all. Well, the elegant Etonian Jacob Rees-Mogg, of the so-called European Research Group of 60 Tory Brexiteers, has now indicated he might go over to Theresa's side because if Sir Oliver Letwin's intervention leads to a soft Brexit deal - ie staying as close to the EU as legally possible without actually beng a member anymore - all his campaigning and broadcasting will have been for nought. This is what Theresa May is counting on: making the alternatives look so awful for the Brexiteers that they will side with a prime minister they can't stand and a deal they hate. Now that sounds very weird but it's what's called Real Politik. The worst possible solution would be the one Downing Street is now whispering about, a snap election. That would achieve absolutely zilch except more chaos, more delay and probably a Labour government. I think the snap election whisper is just another blackmail component to force the Brexiteers to play ball. Even at this late stage it might work. Provided the DUP ladies and gentlemen come on board too, Theresa May could still be saved by the ERG, and then and only then will she able to shout down her critics and claim she did it all for Queen and country.

Trump "exonerated" over Ruskie affair

The news overnight about Donald Trump getting the green light after Robert Mueller's two-year investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and the Ruskies will probably have one rather significant consequence. I may have to revise my prediction that Trump will fail to win a second term and Kamala Harris will win the Democratic nomination and thus the White House in 2020! The "exoneration" over collusion - not really a surprise - and the announcement by William Barr, the big bloke attorney general, that the president will not face charges for obstruction of justice (over the sacking of James Comey, former FBI director), will give a huge boost to Trump's chances of reelection. Mind you, he would have just shrugged off a Mueller report claiming there WAS evidence of collusion, but it would still have given ammunition to the Democratic Party to batter Trump all the way to the 2020 election. Now all they can hope for is a different sort of finding by the Democrat-run House of Representatives committees pursuing their own investigations. But, again, if they find against Trump, he will just point to the Mueller reort and say the Democrats are all poor losers. Or just losers!! Now, with Mueller effectively backing Trump's claim that there never was any collusion with the Ruskies, the president will go singing and dancing towards a second term. Provided the economy doesn't go into recession - a small chance - or there is some huge domestic disaster or a war with North Korea or Iran, or he does something so outrageous the whole world will erupt, then Trump will win a second term. So, sorry Kamala Harris and all the others lining up for the White House from the Democratic Party, from today your challenge has dropped down the scale by such a huge amount you might as well give up now. Joe Biden, forget it, stay at home and enjoy your family. The Washington Post keeps a tally of the number of lies Trump has told since taking office but it doesn't seem to matter. His supporters believe him, and now after the Mueller report they will believe him even more if that's possible. Unless of course there is some small print in the Mueller report which will never see the light of day until it gets leaked to the New York Times which paints a different picture from the rapid summary provided by Big Bloke Barr. Incidentally why on earth did Barr have to write a summary of the Mueller conclusions? Why didn't Mueller start his report off with a full summary of his conclusions? It's definitely a good week for Trump and he will milk it to death.

A cabinet of disloyalty and treachery

If there is one thing this country needs right now it's a united cabinet talking and singing with one voice to show us voters that the prime minister and all her closest collagues are of one mind and in charge. But no, they're all bitching about Theresa May, putting out rumours about her state of health, whispering to their favourite political journalists about coups and leadership battles. So well done members of the cabinet. You are probably the most disloyal bunch of self-serving backbiting cabinet ministers since the dark days of the end of Maggie Thatcher's era when her most senior colleagues plotted her downfall while she was away at a conference in Paris. The Sunday papers are full of coup rumours, quoting different members of the cabinet, anonymously of course, some of whom are pushing for Theresa to be replaced by the very boring-looking David Lidington, her deputy, and others claiming Michael Gove, Environment Secretary, is being set up to take over. For heaven's sake now is not the time to change the prime minister, or the government. Now is the time in the final two weeks left to come up with a solution - May's Brexit deal or something else - which Parliament will approve before we all get thrown into a disastrous pit of gloom and uncertainty. Whether you like Theresa May or not, nothing is going to be served by having a Downing Street coup and a new face trotting back and forth between London and Brussels. Neither Lidington nor Gove inspire confidence and why would the EU react more favourably to either of these two gentlemen than they have so far with Theresa May? Lidington has already come out in support of May, so that has killed one rumour. Well, sort of. As for Gove, he has made a point of supporting the prime minister in public statements but by now we know quite a lot about Michael Gove. He wanted to be Tory leader before when Theresa May was in the frame for the job (and won) and wonderfully stabbed Boris Johnson in the back, and front, to make sure that he, Gove, and not Johnson, should be regarded as the potential leader. He said something like, "I supported Boris initially but I now don't think he's up to the job". Brilliant stuff. A Shakespearian act of treachery. In my view he should remain as Environment Secretary and concentrate on fisheries, piggeries and wind farms. Theresa is unquestionably suffering from Brexititis, a potentially lethal disease which can eventually drive you mad. But I don't think she is yet ready for the funny farm. She must see this through to the very end and get a deal, whatever kind, through Parliament. She deserves to have her stamp on the deal. So go away all you coup plotters and show a bit of respect and loyalty. Otherwise, resign!!