There is a poignant, but recognizable thing that happens to powerful men as they decline. They get bursts of irrational energy. An 85-year-old tycoon marries a stripper. On the face of it, the marriage does not make sense. Everybody groans. How is this arrangement going to work out for him really? How about for his children? 

The tycoon doesn't care. He isn't thinking long term. He's reacting against what he feels inside, which is the steady loss of his power as a man. The faster that power recedes, the more frantically he asserts it. He is raging against the dying of the light. These last embarrassing decisions are, in fact, his death throes. It's sad, really.

Unfortunately, what happens to men also tends to happen to the systems they create. For the last 80 years, our world has been governed by a system formed in the final months of World War II. Its features define our life: free and open global trade routes guaranteed by the U.S. Navy, a universal currency called the dollar and overseeing it all, one supreme power, the world's largest economy, the United States of America.

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It's been a great system in most ways, but for many reasons, including the passage of time, that system is dying. What comes next is not entirely clear, but how to influence it to America's greatest possible advantage is the most important task that faces any U.S. government. Nothing else comes close to that. 

Sadly, the Biden administration, geriatric and irrational in its best moments, is not up to that task. No one in the White House even seems aware that the architecture of the world is changing. They call themselves progressives, but the Biden people think it's 1961 when American power seemed unlimited. Just today, our elderly Treasury secretary scolded the Chinese government like a tardy servant. Shape up, China. We’ll send you back to the cellar. Watch this.

JANET YELLEN: We have made clear that providing material support to Russia or assistance with any type of systemic sanctions evasion would be a very serious concern to us, and we will certainly continue to make clear to the Chinese government and to companies and banks in their jurisdiction about what the rules are regarding our sanctions and the serious consequences they would face for violating them.

We're going to tell them what the rules are. Once they hear the rules, they'll obey. Janet Yellen seems shocked and outraged that China has decided to align with Vladimir Putin in the war in Ukraine. It's an outrage. It's unbelievable. Who could have seen this coming? Well, almost everybody, actually. It was obvious to the world it was going to happen because it was always going to happen if we didn't force a peace in Ukraine.

But somehow the Biden administration didn't see this coming. Now that it has happened, now that the world's largest country has joined with the world's largest economy, which also has the world's largest population, in order to fight a war against us, what do we do? Well, if you're Janet Yellen, you just order them to stop. Stop it, you naughty Chinese, stop it. Otherwise, we will impose some serious consequences on you. We can't tell you what they are, but trust us, they are serious. They might even include further statements of outrage. So, shape up Chinese people.

Pretty amazing to watch, a lady who's never been in a fistfight ordering the Chinese military around like she owns it. You can imagine the laughter in Beijing tonight. Next, we'll have Admiral Rachel Levine wagging his perky finger at Chairman Xi. Surrender your arms, China, because transwomen are women. It's all pretty amusing until you realize it's real. Caught in the middle of a historic global pivot and one of those rare moments when everything changes forever, the Biden administration has decided to live in the past and to pretend that the United States is still capable of imposing unilateral decisions on the rest of the world because we said so. Here's Joe Biden once again playing Churchill to Putin's Hitler.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Freedom is priceless. It's worth fighting for as long as it takes and that's how long we're going to be with you, Mr. President. For as long as it takes. 

JOHN KIRBY: As the president has said, and we're going to support Ukraine for as long as it takes.

KAMALA HARRIS: Again, the United States will continue to strongly support Ukraine, and we will do so for as long as it takes.

YELLEN: As President Biden has said, we will stand with Ukraine in its fight for as long as it takes. 

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Silly, ineffectual buffoons. The world is laughing, the adults are laughing. and in this country it's a measure of our media's total corruption that no one ever asks anyone in the Biden administration what the United States is hoping to accomplish in Ukraine. As long as it takes to do what exactly?

Now, the original answer was, well, to push Russia back to where it was a year ago before it invaded Ukraine and that seemed like a reasonable and measurable objective. The public seemed behind that. Then, without fanfare or even official notice, the goal changed and became taking the Russian port of Crimea just because it would be nice to have that. Always, wanted it. Why not take it now?

Then the goal became overthrowing Putin and putting American tanks in Red Square because sure, we could manage Russia once we overthrow the dictator. We're good at that. We did it in Iraq. We did it in Libya. Now the objective appears to be winning World War III against both Russia and China, a war that would, by definition, include the use of nuclear weapons and the deaths by incineration of hundreds of millions of people. 

At this point, there is no limit to the war in Ukraine. It is all that matters. The war in Ukraine is the focus of the entire U.S. government, all branches, both parties. It is also, as our own economy degrades as huge companies lay off thousands, the war in Ukraine is one of our main expenses. Here's Janet Yellen to explain.

YELLEN: Our economic assistance is making Ukraine's resistance possible by supporting the home front, funding critical public services and helping keep the government running. In the coming months, we expect to provide around $10 billion in additional economic support for Ukraine.

OK, so just to be clear, in case you weren't listening carefully, and it's hard to understand what she's saying, but we have the transcript, that's not 10 billion more in war aid. That's to fund critical services in the government, which is Zelenskyy's political party, which has banned a Christian denomination and arrested priests. That's what we're paying for. And leaving aside the aims, that's still $10 billion more in tax dollars. That's on top of the $113 billion that Congress has already approved. That's $123 billion pledged to Ukraine in a year. And then when you add a thousand other off the book sources of aid, the entire intel world, you're looking at perhaps $200 billion to Zelenskyy and his wife in 12 months. $200 billion! It's truly crazy. How much money is that?

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Well, to make it easier, let's pretend we'd only spent 100 billion in Ukraine so far. We know we have. What can we do with $100 billion here in the United States. For one thing, and this is kind of in the news recently, we could modernize our rail system to avoid the thousand derailments we have every year and the mushroom clouds over Ohio that sometimes result from them. $100 billion is more than five times the entire discretionary budget of the Department of Transportation. There's just 13 billion in the DOT's budget for transit and less than $3 billion for Amtrak. Remember that? The artery that connects the cities on the East Coast. Then there's the FAA. That's the government agency that sought to prevent planes from crashing into each other and killing hundreds of Americans.

The FAA got $20 billion in the last budget. $20 billion! So given that planes seem to be coming very close to hitting each other lately, it might be worth funding the FAA a little more. Oh, but no Zelenskyy's political party needs it.

And then, of course, with that money, we could do things that matter long term, like building a wall along our southern border. We could build four of them for that. That would save, in addition to a lot of other things, hundreds of thousands of American lives by blocking drug traffickers from entering the country, and then you wouldn't have a cartel war in Texas and Arizona, which we're absolutely going to get.

With $100 billion, we could pay off half the medical debt in the entire country. We could pay for two years of community college tuition for every young person in the United States. We could fund all out-of-pocket expenses for cancer patients for five years. That's a lot of money. We could do a lot with it. Why isn't Bernie Sanders doing the math on this? Why isn't he even talking about it? Why is it left to some right-wing TV show to figure out what could be done with that money domestically? Bernie Sanders is all for saying that money to Ukraine and it turns out most so-called progressives are.

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Sandy Cortez, voice of the people, she's for it, too. It's fascinating. Of course, we could also keep the money. That'd be useful. We need it. Our national debt is now over $31 trillion. It's bigger than our GDP. Our debt is bigger than our GDP. In just the last 27 months, the Biden administration has increased the national debt by $7 trillion. How much is that? I mean, it's an incomprehensible number, but here's the context. It took 215 years from George Washington to George W. Bush to accrue that much debt. 

Interest payments on that debt have hit more than $400 billion this year. So, according to calculations by Pew, that's $100 billion more per year than we spent on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture and environmental protection combined. Within the next decade, interest costs on the debt will be greater than spending on national defense and Medicaid. Within 30 years interest payments will be the single largest expenditure in the entire federal budget, bigger than Social Security. And a lot of that debt, you should know well over a trillion dollars is owned by China, the country we're now fighting in Ukraine.

You see how this works? Most Americans do see how it works and they oppose it. They're afraid of it. They should be. Polls show clearly they oppose it, but here's the interesting thing. Neither party in Washington cares what their voters think. Here, for example, is Republican Michael McCaul. He is the Republican Party's head foreign policy genius in the House, a man completely controlled by the intel agencies, but here he is on television explaining that in a democracy, it doesn't matter what voters think.

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PAMELA BROWN: And a new poll is showing support among Americans for arming Ukraine is dropping. How concerned, Congressman McCaul, are foreign leaders you're speaking to that American support for Ukraine, particularly within your own party, is weakening?

REP. MICHAEL MCCAUL: I would say that support is still very strong and this delegation, this bipartisan, very strong support for Ukraine, I think we're you're seeing a split from the administration, though and I have to say, this is bipartisan as well, is that for the past year, we've been very slow in getting these weapons in the name of it being too provocative, whether it be stingers, javelins, these short range artillery, now longer range artillery attack ATACMS they can take out the Iranian drones in Crimea and also aviation like F-16. If we put this stuff in from the very beginning of this conflict, a year from now may have been very different.  

You'll notice that whenever there's a bipartisan consensus on something in Washington, it's a bad idea. Usually, it's the worst idea. There's no bipartisan consensus on saving middle class America or rescuing rural Americans from fentanyl. There's no bipartisan consensus on that. Nobody cares. The bipartisan consensus is that we should send the contents of the U.S. Treasury to a corrupt Eastern European country to facilitate World War III

And why is that? Well, the truth is, Washington is so dysfunctional that funding a war, destroying things is like the one thing they can do. And that's why they love it so much, because they can get something done. Of course, it's purely destructive.

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So, we wanted to talk to Congressman Michael McCaul of Texas, the foreign policy genius, more about this. You don't care what your voters think, really? So, we asked to come on tonight. Why do you support a war that your constituents oppose? How does this benefit the United States? Were you proud that you helped Russia and China align in a bloc that's more powerful than the United States? Is that good for us? How does that work, Congressman? 

He can't make it, unfortunately. Congressman Mike Turner can't come either. He represents Ohio. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah didn't respond at all. Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell were, of course, hard no's. No way. We're not going to answer questions. Shut up, we'll do CNN first. 

You should know that everyone we just mentioned is a Republican. They can't defend this, of course. Only a very tiny number of Republicans voted to stop this insanity before it destroys the economy of the United States and triggers World War III, and they've been punished for it. And a lot of Republicans care because on MSNBC, if you're against World War III, you're an agent of Putin. Watch. 

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NICOLLE WALLACE: Ten House Republicans voted against military aid for Ukraine, the usual suspects, but I'll read them out here: Andy Biggs, Dan Bishop, Warren Davidson, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, Scott Perry and Tom Tiffany. The point is Marjorie Taylor Greene and Vladimir Putin and too often than I think anyone would like to acknowledge, Tucker Carlson, are all on the same page.

We're on Putin's side. It's funny how the people who hate the United States the most, spend the most time tearing it down – oh, it's tainted by the original sin of slavery. It's a terrible country! 1619 project – truly hate the United States, are the ones who accuse people trying to save the United States from being destroyed in a pointless war of siding with a foreign dictator. 

Ignore them. They do not speak in good faith. They're liars.