(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Unlike kowtowing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who was blasted for her overseas bowing and pandering to China officials, President Joe Biden’s “climate envoy,” John Kerry, started his own obsequious groveling ahead of his trip to Beijing slated for next week.
When he wasn’t lying about his jet-setting travel habits, Kerry refused multiple times during a Congressional hearing Thursday to call CCP ruler Xi Jinping a “dictator.” Kerry even chided Biden for using the term in a self-aggrandizing boast last month about shooting down China’s spy balloon after letting it fly across the U.S and several major military sites.
“There’s no question at all that President Xi is the major decider of the direction and of the policies of China,” Kerry dodged when asked by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., if he agreed that the brutal communist dictator was a dictator.
“Is he in fact, effectively a dictator?” asked Issa. When pressed, Kerry again refused to state the obvious.
“No, I don’t even, I don’t, I just frankly all of that is water off the duck’s back and you know I don’t think we ought to get tangled up in, you know, labels and names and whatever,” Kerry blustered. “What we ought to do is look at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”
Kerry’s mission on behalf of the Biden administration is to continue turning a blind eye to China’s atrocious human rights abuses, argued Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s oversight and responsibility subcommittee. They also ripped the administration for allowing China to call itself a “developing nation” to skirt climate emissions standards.
“How in the world can the second largest economy maintain to you and the rest of the world, with a straight face, that they’re a developing nation, giving them preferential treatment?” demanded Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Kerry whiffed on a reply, conceding that his trip won’t make any difference convincing China to drop its phony developing nation sham.
“That’s not going to happen in this visit,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”
The president’s climate envoy made clear, as he has in the past, that China’s human rights abuses would take a back seat to his obsession with climate alarmism.
“The last time you were here, I asked you the impact [the Uyghur] genocide would have on your climate agenda,” McCaul reminded Kerry. “And you said, ‘well, life is full of tough choices.’ Well, when it comes to ending genocide, there are no tough choices.”
Remember that time when John Kerry dismissed the Uyghur genocide and slave labor as mere “differences”?
“That’s not my lane here.” https://t.co/sbIK5ksxUL pic.twitter.com/S5uyxOQYEI
— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) July 6, 2023
Kerry indicated on Thursday that as long as those “tough choices” didn’t make him look bad in headlines, he was likely willing to once again overlook China’s human rights abuses with little more than lip service.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t talk about them, but it means that they’re not going to become showstoppers,” Kerry said Thursday.