ALMOST 90 RETIRED FLAG OFFICERS DEMAND MARK MILLEY, LLOYD AUSTIN RESIGN AFTER AFGHANISTAN DEBACLE.

STACY MCCAIN: I propose the “Lightning Strike Rule of Journalism” — in order for any dangerous social trend to be considered newsworthy, it must pose a greater risk to the public than being killed by lightning.

YEP.

JOE: It’s time for you to pretend you care about the Americans.

FREUD CALL IT DISPLACEMENT: CNN’s Brian Stelter: Shouldn’t Press Cover Climate Change More Than Afghanistan?

Err, no. But just to play along, let’s start with this:

As the Daily Caller noted in 2016, “Dem Party Platform Calls For Prosecuting Global Warming Skeptics.” And this sort of unnecessary binge flying looks like awfully skeptical behavior from someone whose network had concurrently CNN scheduled a seven hour climate town hall for 2020 Dem candidates and now wants to cover climate change more than Afghanistan.

But then, as Forbes columnist Michael Shellenberger wrote around that same time, “The Real Reason They Behave Hypocritically On Climate Change Is Because They Want To.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

MICHAEL YON: Taliban Hanging Victim from American Black Hawk Helicopter.

ICYMI: KURT SCHLICHTER: Own Your Failure, Biden Voters.

I will admit my own relatively minor failure: I voted for invertebrate-con Mitt Romney in 2012 and have spent the last nine years regretting it, but now I look at the saps who checked the box for that crusty old pervert who’s busy flushing our country down the crapper and I feel really bad for them. Well, at least for those Biden voters who weren’t dead when they cast their ballots.

They thought that mean tweets and dating Playboy models was so outrageously awful that they needed to exchange him for a half-wit plagiarist with busy hands and a slothful mind. He was no prize before he put the “d” in “dementia.” Prior to allegedly being elected president, this dork was, as Democrat Robert Gates famously put it, “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The same genius who thought capping Bin Ladin was a bad idea also thought ditching Bagram was a good one. Well, at least he’s consistent.

Look around, at the $5 gas and the hobos pooping in our parks, at the constantly shifting vaccine/mask goalposts and the cat ladies/public school teachers determined to inject Ibram X. Kendian race hustling into your kids’ cerebellums. Look at the flag-draped caskets coming off the planes at Dover.

You did that, non-dead Biden voters.

You.

This is your failure.

Own it.

Electing Joe Biden was an essentially unserious act by essentially unserious people applying essentially unserious criteria. And these entirely predictable consequences flowed from that failure on the part of people who refused to demand a real candidate instead of this exceptionally dumb ventriloquist dummy. None of the Democrats were prizes, but this guy can’t find his left slipper on his own, much less lead our country.

It’s true that they were encouraged by what Time called a “cabal” of media and political actors, but it was still their vote.

Plus:

For the elite, Trump was a threat to their gravy train and an utterly intolerable insult to their puffed-up self-image. Trump saw the scam clearly because he was of them – he hung out with the elite all his life, and he took pleasure at their pathetic groveling for dollars. But while he sometimes gave them money, he did not give them respect, because he knew they deserve none and he was incapable of pretending that they did. They had to destroy him, and his entire presidency was consumed with demonstrably false pseudo-controversies from the fake Russia nonsense to the fake Ukraine nonsense to the fake insurrection nonsense.

So, the elite were never going to support their nemesis. It was in neither their economic nor aesthetic interest. And, as our ruling caste is defined by its utter refusal to accept any accountability for its myriad fumbles, it will never admit it and conduct the kind of personal inventory that electing this catastrophe of an administration requires.

But the regular people who voted against him – that’s a different story, because they voted against their interests. The economy was humming, and even after the elite’s Chi Com comrades inflicted the pangolin pandemic on us, we were coming back. We were energy independent. The border was getting secure. Taxes got cut. Soleimani was a cinder and ISIS was a skid mark. We had no new wars, and the one in Afghanistan was set to end without a live production of Miss Saigon II: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Airbases.

But then there were those mean tweets, those awful mean tweets. And all the racism and sexism and homophobia and more racism and … well, there wasn’t any of that but there still had to be some because, well, you know, reasons. So, a bunch of people voted for “normality,” which really meant the absence of a perpetual media-fueled ruling class tantrum at the uppity upstart backed by all those red-hatted flag/gun/Jesus people from West Dakota and South Virginia and that other state with all the corn.

Yep. You failed to exercise your franchise intelligently, and were manipulated by a bunch of crooks.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Biden breaks promise to ‘stay’ in Afghanistan until every American evacuated. “Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. announced Monday evening that the last of the U.S. troops stationed at the Kabul airport had left, completing the military’s drawdown in the country, even though hundreds of Americans likely remain. McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, said some American citizens who wanted to leave Afghanistan remain in country. ‘We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,’ he said.”

IT’S OVER: Sen. Ben Sasse’s summary statement of His Fraudulency’s accountability in the Kabul debacle:

“This national disgrace is the direct result of President Biden’s cowardice and incompetence. The President made the decision to trust the Taliban. The President made the decision to set an arbitrary August 31st deadline. The President made the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base. The President made the decision not to expand the perimeter around Karzai International Airport. The President made the decision to undermine our NATO allies. The President made the decision to break our word to our Afghan partners. The President made the decision to tell one lie after another as the crisis unfolded. The President made the morally indefensible decision to leave Americans behind. Dishonor was the President’s choice. May history never forget this cowardice.”

Actually, rather than saying the war in Afghanistan is over, it would be more accurate to say the focus of operations has shifted, back to the U.S.

BRING HER UNDER CONTROL: After Using Unconstitutional Powers to Stop Evictions, CDC Director Sets Her Sights on Guns.

AMERICA’S 20 YEAR WAR IN AFGHANISTAN ENDS AFTER LAST TROOPS DEPART KABUL.

DON’T GET COCKY: Florida Redistricting Has Dems in a Panic Over Losing the House.

R.I.P., L. Neil Smith.

MORE BULLETS: The G43X: Glock’s Expanded-Capacity CCW Pistol.

VICTIMHOOD MENTALITY: James Madison University Teaches Students: Whites, Men, And Christians Are All Oppressors. “The outrageous claims were part of a PowerPoint presentation for new students covering social justice, identity, power and privilege, and white supremacy.”

WHEN POLICE LAWLESSNESS IS APPLAUDED: Capitol Police Officer’s Explanation for Shooting and Killing Ashli Babbitt Is Riddled With Problems.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED BY THE VERY BEST PEOPLE THAT THIS KIND OF THING NEVER HAPPENED: A Stunning Number of Absentee Ballots in DeKalb County, Georgia, Violated Chain-of-Custody Rules.

JAMES WEBB: Afghanistan: A Requiem for an Avoidable Disaster.

In Washington Joe Biden, the president who had ordered that the evacuation of Americans and their allies be accomplished by August 31 so that his new Administration could celebrate finally ending the Afghanistan war on the twenty-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was, characteristically, remaining out of sight. His election campaign had largely taken place in the basement of his home in Delaware, minimizing his tendency to make public gaffes. After the American military was ordered to occupy the Kabul airport following a blitzkrieg of sorts by the Taliban that toppled the Afghan government, he disappeared for days inside the protected isolation of Camp David or at his home in Delaware, from whence he would appear from time to time to read a set of carefully prepared remarks and then again disappear without taking questions.

Vice President Kamala Harris was finishing up a quick trip to Singapore and Vietnam and skipped a stop in California on the way home where she had intended to campaign for its embattled governor as he fends off a voter recall to throw him out of office. At no point in her Asia trip did the Vice President speak directly about the ominous forced error in Afghanistan that had been initiated by the Biden Administration, although the world was waiting for reassurance from America’s top leadership as events on the ground morphed out of control. In a remarkable display of tone-deaf diplomatic naiveté, the Vice President was pictured sitting in front of a sculpture of Ho Chi Minh during a meeting with Vietnam’s President Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the very moment the rest of the world was comparing America’s humiliating and incompetent dilemma in Kabul with the 1975 fall of Saigon.

In Kabul, America’s capability to conduct an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan had turned into a disgusting nightmare of incompetence that can only be rectified by holding those responsible accountable. A midnight abandonment of America’s most important airbase in Bagram on July 2 had put a double hex on a proper retrograde from the country, first by giving up a large-scale aviation platform whose massive runways and extensive outer perimeter made it eminently usable and defendable, and second by allowing the Taliban to release thousands of rabid terrorists who had been imprisoned there and were now on the loose. In Kabul, American military units were largely forbidden to leave the airport to rescue and escort Americans and allied Afghans back to the airport. An agreement was reached where the conquering Taliban controlled the checkpoints outside. To make matters impossibly worse, American officials in Kabul were reported to have given the names and locations of some of our citizens and close allies to the Taliban, supposedly for the purpose of expediting their efforts to leave the country but in reality, simplifying the Taliban’s search for the very people whose lives depended on escaping from their clutches in the first place.

In Washington and in command centers elsewhere, those who had concocted this planned withdrawal, both military and civilian, were filling the airwaves with the usual “not me” rhetoric that has sidestepped accountability and enabled promotions, advances, and post-career financial rewards for the past twenty years. The roots of how we reached this final imbroglio can be found in the decisions that were made not just at the end but all along the way. And in the painful events of these final weeks, there are blatant indicators as to how we must rid ourselves of this political pox and proceed into the future.

Failure must be punished, not rewarded, if you want less of it in the future.

Plus:

The military itself is increasingly being used by leftist activists as a social laboratory to advance extreme political agendas. Congressional oversight leans heavily toward social issues, with too many members struggling without success to focus on accountability at the very top when, for instance, good people at the bottom have to implement poorly conceived plans that might kill them.

This is not an exaggeration, and it is not just what has been happening at the Kabul airport and elsewhere in Afghanistan. Those situations merely provide us a microcosm, a symbolic moment in time, that allows us to see the implications of confused or distracted leadership, military and civilian alike, motivated by political machinations. In the American political system, we have the capacity to demand that this inequity change. What we need is the will to do it.

Why change? Our ruling class is doing just fine. Or at least it thinks it is, as the Russian nobles thought in 1909.

UPDATE:

WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT ANALYSTS? Removing Afghan air support was ‘critical error’ say analysts.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. Via a friend.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Los Angeles Magazine Gives Union President the Profile She’s Earned.

Something’s spreading through newsrooms and it’s not the coronavirus.

Soon after Emma Green of The Atlantic challenged the well-worn talking points of NEA President Becky Pringle, we get Jason McGahan of Los Angeles Magazine going several steps further in an exclusive interview with United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz. The piece is titled, “Cecily Myart-Cruz’s Hostile Takeover of L.A.’s Public Schools.”

Here are a few of the more pungent quotes from Myart-Cruz:

• “There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”

Read the whole thing. As Glenn wrote last week, “The answer is purges. Our institutions need to be cleansed of the woke, the crazy, and the inept — but I repeat myself. This would have been gentler by far if Trump had been re-elected in 2020. It will be much less so whenever it comes now. And it will come.”

HMM: Nauka’s Troubled Flight—Before It Tumbled the ISS: Russian space station module revelations—and a movie—raise questions.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: North Korea Restarts Weapons-Grade Yongbyon Nuclear Reactor Halted Under Trump.

QUADPILL: 4 in 1 blood pressure pill: Safe and much more effective than usual hypertension treatment. The quadpill contains “irbesartan at 37·5 mg, amlodipine at 1·25 mg, indapamide at 0·625 mg, and bisoprolol at 2·5 mg.”

ALL THAT AND A BAG OF CHIPS: Unfinished Tractors, Pickup Trucks Pile Up as Components Run Short. “Companies determined to keep factories open are trying to work around shortages by producing what they can, at the same time rising customer demand has cleaned out store shelves, dealer showrooms and distribution centers. As a result, manufacturers are amassing big inventories of unsold or incomplete products such as truck wheels and farm tractors. Companies that are used to filling orders quickly now have bulging backlogs of orders, waiting for scarce parts or green lights from customers willing to take deliveries.”