AHOY! Bill Kristol: People in My Circle Who Voted for Biden Don’t Expect to Support Him Again.
Flashback: Bill Kristol declares Joe Biden ‘the simple answer’ for beating Trump.
Given Biden’s rapidly declining faculties, that was quite a Freudian slip from Kristol.
Related: Bill Kristol and the political defector grift. Since the days of Richard Nixon, you can make a very good living in the DNC-MSM media bubble by being a prominent Republican who never votes for Republicans.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Democrats Angry That Babies and Votes Are Now Safer in Texas. “There were a couple of stories out of Texas on Wednesday that made a little bit of sunshine peek back through all of the dark clouds that we’ve had to endure as a nation, all in the effort to avoid being exposed to mean tweets.”
WIPED CLEAN, LIKE WITH A CLOTH OR SOMETHING: Check Out What the Biden Administration Just Did to Websites Listing Weapons It Gave to the Taliban.
In a darkly and ironically humorous note to all this, the Taliban are upset and want the world to know that they feel betrayed — by Biden. He failed to leave some of the U.S. gear in working order.
Taliban fighters are feeling angry and betrayed Wednesday after discovering that Afghan National Army helicopters abandoned at Kabul’s airport have been rendered inoperable by departing U.S. troops, according to a report.
An Al Jazeera reporter who toured a hangar on the military side of the airport said in a video that the terrorist group “expected the Americans to leave helicopters like this in one piece for their use.”
“When I said to them, ‘why do you think that the Americans would have left everything operational for you’? They said because we believe it is a national asset and we are the government now and this could have come to great use for us,” she continued.
Odds are that exiting units decided to disable this gear on their own. CENTCOM probably didn’t want to have to fight against all that gear left behind, which will eventually happen.
There has been all kinds of speculation that the Biden government left at least some of that functioning gear in some sort of deal with the Taliban to keep them from overrunning Kabul airport during the evacuation. Would you put it past this administration?
And it’s a lot of gear:
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: The Dark Secrets of SHTF Survival: The Brutal Truth About Violence, Death, & Mayhem You Must Know to Survive. I read this when it first came out, it was definitely worth reading.
IT DOES SEEM TO BE AN ONGOING THEME: Amazon asked FCC to reject Starlink plan because it can’t compete, SpaceX says. “SpaceX criticized Amazon for apparently putting more effort into delaying Starlink plans than into updating its own.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Antifa high school teacher suspended, will be fired.
PENTAGON PLANNER AT CENTER OF KABUL DEBACLE: You may recall that Senate Republicans unanimously opposed His Fraudulency’s nomination of Colin Kahl as the Pentagon’s top strategic planner. The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo and Alana Goodman report this morning that Kahl was at the center of the bungled evacuation’s planning.
“In Kahl, we have someone not even qualified for a security clearance at the center of President Biden’s incompetently planned and disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) tell Kredo and Goodman. Even a former Clinton administration State Department official is blasting Kahl’s appointment and his role in the Kabul debacle:
“Kahl ‘owns the [Department of Defense’s] failure to plan and implement a withdrawal that wouldn’t dishonor our veterans, our military, and our values,’ said Josh Block, a foreign policy scholar at the Hudson Institute and former Clinton administration State Department official. Block said Kahl is ‘unqualified for his job, a liability to American national security’ and ‘needs to be removed or made to resign,'” Kredo and Goodman report.
Frankly, if I was Kahl, I would be worried about being made the scapegoat for others’ failures. Spotlighting Kahl may be the start of a familiar Washington ritual that creates a shiny object to distract those calling for genuine accountability.
DON’T GET COCKY: Democrats Running Scared in California Recall. “Backed by Gingrich? Newt Gingrich? He may be the most irrelevant Republican in California. Newsom is so scared of being recalled that he calls out a turn-of-the-century Republican speaker of the house? What’s next? A warning about Barry Goldwater?”
Flashback (From Ed): Remy: It Wasn’t Me (Shaggy Parody).
SYSTEMIC RACISM: Governor Roy Cooper Likes North Carolina’s Jim Crow Gun Control Law Just Fine. Of course he’s fine with it. Democrats invented Jim Crow.
HOW MUCH IS A LAW SCHOOL DEAN WORTH? $500?
SO MY DAUGHTER WENT TO OUTBACK AT THE ORLANDO AIRPORT TODAY AND THEY HAD NO STEAK. Yeah, you read that right. I don’t know why. Couldn’t hire a line cook who could be trusted to cook a steak? Supply chain problems? Whatever, it was weird. I was texting with a friend who commented “No steak at the Orlando airport Outback has a canary in a coal mine sound about it.” Well, maybe. There are a lot of canaries out there and most of them don’t mean anything. Most of them.
I keep getting messages and emails from friends about food shortages in the restaurant industry, but they’re all friend-of-a-friend stuff. I’ve asked some of my friends who actually own restaurants and they say supply is okay but delivery is iffy due to a shortage of truck drivers. Meanwhile my daughter made do with a barbecued chicken sandwich. Me, I had a lovely 16 oz. ribeye at J.C. Holdway last night for a birthday dinner. Also a grilled bone marrow appetizer.
HARSH BUT FAIR: New Ad Highlights Joe Biden and His Afghanistan Exit Mess.
FROM A FRIEND: “Jen Psaki’s heightened vocal fry tells us she’s finally embarrassed by her own lies.”
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN PAYING ATTENTION: Biden Polls Crater: Most Want Him to Resign, Shocking Number Is on Impeachment.
Zhao Wei shot to fame in the late 1990s in China’s most successful television series ever, My Fair Princess. Since then, she’s progressed from being an A-list actress to director, pop singer and businesswoman.
Such success under Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “opening up” China and embracing the incentives of private enterprise made Zhao very wealthy.
But her business empire struck trouble under Xi Jinping. Zhao was accused of being unpatriotic for hiring a Taiwanese actor to play a leading actor in a 2016 film. Beijing had that choice overturned.
Shortly after, Zhao’s business acquisitions began to attract close regulatory and taxation scrutiny. Last month a public relations agency she owns became embroiled in a nationalistic scandal after one of its clients – actor Zhang Zhehan – took a selfie while visiting Japan’s Yasukuni war dead shrine.
On Saturday, reports emerged on Chinese news sites that Zhao had fled the country on a private jet and was spotted at Bordeaux airport in France, where she and her husband Huang Youlong own a vineyard.
Now Zhao appears to have become the highest-profile victim of a Chinese Communist Party crackdown on celebrities and billionaires.
Commies hate alternative power centers, be they uncontrolled businesses, churches, or celebrities. Or, on university campuses, things like fraternities.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA has no plans to exchange lunar samples with China.
PRESIDENT BIDEN AND THE REPUBLIC’S CABARET MOMENT. “The US President, supported by his chorus of back up singer dancers, has in the most direct and theatrical way imaginable, performed one of the most revealing some and dance numbers that exposes the thinking, outlooks, conceits, ambitions, and objectives of the institutions through through which the population of this Republic are led by those human beings that populate its machinery of state . . . The life of this Republic, it seems, ‘is a Cabaret, old chum’ (part of the lyrics of the finale of this musical) but sadly without the choreography of Bob Fosse to add just the right among of physical and performative subtext. Compare the lyrics of Cabaret’s ‘Mein Liebe Herr’ to those just performed by the core of leadership of the United States.”
PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN GREENER NEIGHBORHOODS PROBABLY TAKE BETTER CARE OF THEMSELVES: Study: Heart attacks are less common in greener neighborhoods.
PHARISEES:
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