OPEN THREAD: Comment until the vanishing point.
Archive for 2021
August 18, 2021
WELCOME BACK, CARTER: Consumer sentiment plunges to lowest level in decade as delta variant surges.
It’s not just the delta variant that’s driving low consumer sentiment: Dangerous Joe Biden Delivers Border, Economic, Coronavirus, Crime, and Overseas Chaos.
But hey, no mean tweets.
WE ARE RULED BY IDIOTS, CROOKS, AND INCOMPETENTS: Fiasco: Embassy tells Americans in Afghanistan to “consider” heading to the airport — with no guarantees of safety. “At this point, the only excuse for mass resignations not happening now is that things are so chaotic on the ground that it’s best to continue with the people in place who are up to speed and then ask for resignations once the crisis is over. Whenever that might be. The United States government should never be in the position of saying it can’t guarantee safe passage in a country where thousands of Americans live. Especially when the government is responsible for them living there.”
Are there any people who are “up to speed?”
HMMM: Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp? “WhatsApp is an American product. It can be switched off by its parent, Facebook, Inc, at any time and for any reason. The fact that the Taliban were able to use it at all, quite apart from the fact that they continue to use it to coordinate their activities even now as American citizens’ lives are imperiled by the Taliban advance which is being coordinated on that app, suggests that U.S. military intelligence never bothered to monitor Taliban numbers and never bothered to ask Facebook to ban them. They probably still haven’t even asked Facebook to do this, judging from the fact that the Taliban continues to use the app with impunity. This might explain why Afghanistan collapsed as quickly as it did…There can and should be recriminations for what happened here. It is not solely the Biden Administration’s fault; the military should have been considering how to decapitate Taliban communications for years, which it clearly has not done. The fact that the Taliban is using US-based servers to run its terror state and nobody in the Biden Administration has thought to disconnect it, even as U.S. forces retreat in disarray, is a strategic blunder on par with Pearl Harbor.”
Old and busted: Make America Great Again.
The new hotness? Make America Weimar Again!
DETACHED FROM REALITY: “Today Joe Biden, seeking damage control, was interviewed by Democratic Party loyalist George Stephanopoulos. I am not sure how long the interview was, or whether it is available online in its entirety; this is the longest excerpt I have seen. Biden says nothing went wrong with the withdrawal from Afghanistan that is now under way. Intelligence, planning, tactics–all perfect. Chaos was predestined, in his view, and he wouldn’t change a thing.”
And of course our brave journalistic firefighters aren’t performing any better than the rest: “George S. is apparently too loyal to his party to ask the obvious question: why didn’t you get the civilians out before stopping air support to the Afghan forces, closing Bagram Air Force Base, and starting to pull our soldiers out?”
MICHAEL WALSH: Pullout From Afghanistan Signals End of ‘Liberal World Order.’
During the Civil War, Grant had no sooner received Robert E. Lee’s surrender than he planned to immediately return to Washington because, in the words of his adjutant, Gen. Horace Porter, “he was anxious above all things to begin the reduction of the military establishment, and diminish the enormous expense attending it, which at this time amounted to nearly four millions of dollars a day.”
The idea of a huge, permanent standing army was anathema to American sensibilities. And America as world policeman? Perish the thought.
Since World War II, however, we have rarely stood down. We still have troops in Germany (!), Italy, the UK, Bahrain, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere. Like the British before us, who sought to make the world England, we believe our culturally specific Enlightenment values are shared by all.
“We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom,” Bush said in his second inaugural address in 2005. “We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.”
What naïve foolishness. But it’s thinking like that which has brought us to our present pass. So let it die with the American misadventure in Afghanistan.
What’s needed now is to return to first principles. Cut the Pentagon by at least half and abolish the CIA. Retire every military officer higher than a major general or rear admiral (there must be some penalty for failure and dereliction of duty) and start promoting on the basis of ability, not ideology. Expunge “social justice” from the service academies and refocus on their only mission: winning on the battlefield.
President DeSantis should do a massive housecleaning of the deep state.
Related: Glenn’s latest NY Post column: Fire the military and intelligence bigs who bungled Afghanistan — now.
KAMALA HARRIS TO VISIT VIETNAM, SINGAPORE AMID AFGHANISTAN TURMOIL.
Vietnam, huh? Further proof that the version of the Matrix Tom Wolfe programmed shortly before his death is working perfectly.
Related: Harris Trip To Vietnam Draws Hanoi Jane Comparison.
CRISES BY DESIGN: SecDef Austin and Gen. Milley Defend Operational Decisions That Led Chaos in the Fall of Afghanistan.
Related: Biden doubles down on Afghanistan withdrawal, snaps over question about horrific scenes.
President Biden maintains that no mistakes were made in the US withdrawal from Afghanistan — waving off the scenes of chaos, confusion and desperation in his first interview on the matter since the fall of Kabul.
“So you don’t think this could have been handled — this exit could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?” ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Biden.
And when Stephanopoulos tried to ask Biden about the horrific scenes of people clinging to and falling from departing US airplanes, the president grew combative.
“We’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed in a C-17. We’ve seen Afghans falling –“
“That was four days ago, five days ago!” Biden cut Stephanopoulos, even though the images were taken on Monday.
As Matt Vespa asks: Wait…That’s How Biden Reacted to the Pictures of Afghans Falling From US Planes? “In other words, ‘screw it,’ which seems to be the ethos behind this shambolic exit.”
No, I think it’s more a case of “screw them.” Hey, they fell out of landing gear enclosures to their deaths. It’ll be forgotten once the news cycle gets back to COVID, right Joe?
And MSNBC is happy to help him speed things up: Biden announces Covid booster shot rollout for vaccinated Americans.
THERE HAS BEEN A MULTIDECADE CONSPIRACY TO MAKE AIR TRAVEL STEADILY WORSE: TSA extends mask requirement for passengers into 2022.
WHEN MEDIA ILLUSIONS BREAK DOWN: Biden Sinks 19 Points Underwater in Daily Tracking Poll, Strong Approval Collapses.
Related: Biden and Kamala Camps Falling Out Over Afghanistan Disaster. But she was the “last person in the room” when the decision was made.
I’VE BEEN VERY HAPPY WITH THE SERVICE ON MY BETA VERSION: SpaceX president says Starlink global satellite broadband service to be live by September.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Chris Rufo more than held his own in this NY Times interview on Critical Race Theory.
Exit quote, and question: “I did a long report on Buffalo. This is a public school district that has, by 5th grade, only 20% of students are proficient in math and 18% are proficient in reading. I mean this is a human tragedy. It’s a disaster. This is something that should be sending red alarms through our society. But instead of reforming itself, the public school bureaucracy in Buffalo has adopted a, quote, Black Lives Matter curriculum that teaches that really the solution is to disrupt the Western nuclear family, to create queer affirming spaces, to dismantle cis gender privilege, et cetera, et cetera — the kind of catch phrases of popular critical race theory ideology. But the question that I think both of you are asking and I’m asking is, what does this do for the kids who can’t read by the end of elementary school?”
Might as well. The place is clearly incapable of governing itself.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: The Atlantic in rare endorsement urges voting for Biden: ‘Vote for the decent man.’
—The Hill, October 22nd, 2020.
● Chaser: Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals. Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
—The Atlantic, today.
READER BOOK PLUG: C. James Brown’s new book Neck & Neck. “A fine thriller that’s also a deliciously cynical sendup of the ghastliness of American politics.” — Kirkus Reviews.
MSNBC COLUMNIST COMPARES PRO-LIFERS TO THE TALIBAN.
Nahh. But they’d be treated much better by Silicon Valley if they were:
● Shot: NARAL head brags about helping remove pro-life LifeSiteNews from Facebook.
—Catholic News Agency, May 7th.
● Chaser: Twitter Says Taliban Spokesman Will be Allowed to Remain if He Doesn’t Get Too Violent.
—Mediaite, yesterday.
UPDATE: And by the DNC-MSM as well:
MICHAEL WALSH: Botched Pullout From Afghanistan Signals End of ‘Liberal World Order.’
It’s fitting that the end should come with Biden, a lifelong, legislatively undistinguished congressman first elected from Delaware in 1973, and who served as President Barack Obama’s vice president from 2009 to 2017. Over the past seven months as president, however, he has ruined the economy, expanded the welfare state, encouraged anarchy, criminalized dissent, destroyed the First Amendment, elevated a superannuated apparatchik such as Dr. Anthony Fauci to a position of unconstitutional authority, and crippled patriotic Americans’ faith in their country and its ideals.
Biden couldn’t do it alone, of course. But with partners such as Gen. Mark Milley as the “woke” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Antony Blinken at State; Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon; William Burns at the CIA, which just put another “O-fer” on the board by failing to accurately assess the situation in Kabul; and veteran Democrat operative Ron Klain as his chief of staff, he’s had plenty of help, particularly from the country’s malignant media, which fans the flames of “social justice,” gender studies, largely manufactured racial resentment, and sexual deviancy.
Biden did stumble upon one important truth in his speech: The United States should never again engage in fruitless wars of choice and nation-building against third-rate, largely imaginary countries in which we have no vital interests. He thus implicitly endorsed the position held by presidents as disparate as George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower, and to whose sage advice about foreign entanglements and the ravenous military-industrial complex we should have been heeding more often, instead of international adventurers such as Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.
Their so-called liberal world order has given us the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War (which ended with Saddam Hussein still in control of Iraq), and the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine a world designed and run by the Council on Foreign Relations and other interventionist think tanks, and you’ve pretty much got it.
In his speech, Biden should have stopped there, but, of course, he didn’t—and that was even more illuminating. Biden directed the bulk of his ire not toward former President Donald Trump, or his defeatist military, or his incompetent advisers or even his AWOL vice president, Kamala Harris, but at the Afghans themselves, including their formerly 300,000-strong armed forces.
“We gave them every tool they could need … every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”
He and the rest of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party establishment should look in the mirror. The will to fight has been absent from American “warfighting” practically since the War Department became the Defense Department, and the Pentagon was built. Warfighting without victory has, in fact, become the Pentagon’s mantra, the better for its insatiable maw to consume American blood and treasure in pursuit of tax dollars. The reason we fight wars of choice isn’t because we need to, but because we can.
During the Civil War, Grant had no sooner received Robert E. Lee’s surrender than he planned to immediately return to Washington because, in the words of his adjutant, Gen. Horace Porter, “he was anxious above all things to begin the reduction of the military establishment, and diminish the enormous expense attending it, which at this time amounted to nearly four millions of dollars a day.”
The idea of a huge, permanent standing army was anathema to American sensibilities. And America as world policeman? Perish the thought.
The “front row kids” haven’t turned out to be very good at what they do, despite their constant references to how smart and competent they are.
Related: The Suicide of Expertise.
WELL, HE’S REALLY STUNK UP THE PLACE: Even lefty media is turning on Biden after Afghanistan debacle.