ONCE THERE WAS A GOP: Newsmax White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson traces the steps by which what was once the party of Reagan, Coolidge and Lincoln has become an adjunct to the Washington Establishment. She’s not one to mince words:
“It’s not just Romney, Sasse, Murkowski, Collins, and the usual cast of “useful idiots” for the Democrat Party either. It’s Lindsey Graham telling you that he’s ‘getting to the bottom of things’ every night on cable TV for five years.
“It’s Kevin McCarthy getting caught renting rooms at the Frank Luntz Day Camp for Future OxyContin Lobbyists after being forced to remove the unpopular neocon gasbag Liz Cheney from GOP leadership even though McCarthy was the onewho had elevated her in the first place. You simply can’t quantify that kind of stupidity.”
You need not agree with every particular to see that Robinson is warning the GOP base is near turning off the life-support.
About a month ago, Afghanistan’s ministry of defense posted on social media photographs of seven brand new helicopters arriving in Kabul delivered by the United States.
“They’ll continue to see a steady drumbeat of that kind of support, going forward,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters a few days later at the Pentagon.
In a matter of weeks, however, the Taliban had seized most of the country, as well as any weapons and equipment left behind by fleeing Afghan forces.
Video showed the advancing insurgents inspecting long lines of vehicles and opening crates of new firearms, communications gear and even military drones.
“Everything that hasn’t been destroyed is the Taliban’s now,” one U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Finally unburdening himself of the truth, Hall’s Nixon is confronted with a vision of his Quaker mother again, like Hamlet and his father’s ghost. This time she beckons him with instructions; he makes his way to his desk, points to the revolver and then picks it up, the muzzle touching his temple. At the last minute, though, he tosses the gun down, saying that they won’t make him do it, even though that was the plan.
“F–K ‘EM!!” he shouts, pumping his fist in the air, the moment captured on all four CCTV screens, turning into a loop while in the background a chant of “Four more years!” is brought up in the mix until the screen glitches and goes black. For a few moments, you really need to process just what kind of craziness the film has just laid out for us.
It’s a hell of an ending, and I remember being breathless as I watched it as a college student, at a screening at the Toronto film festival. There have been a lot of Nixons on film – Anthony Hopkins’ underplayed take in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Dan Hedaya’s twitchy cartoon in Dick, Frank Langella’s sinister Nixon in Frost/Nixon – but Hall’s Nixon, desperate, contrite, spouting a nearly Tourettes-like stream of obscenities, remains my favorite.
It should have been a career-making performance for Philip Baker Hall, and ultimately it was – but only after word of mouth slowly built in the years following the film’s subdued release into film festivals and art houses. Paul Thomas Anderson, a young director and Altman acolyte who says Secret Honor is one of his favorite movies of all time, cast Hall in many of his films, beginning with Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
Robert Altman would ultimately make his triumphant return to Hollywood, beginning with Vincent & Theo in 1990. But it would be The Player in 1992 that made him, well, a player; there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a movie that portrays it as a moral charnel house, especially when it’s a hit. He was a hot property for the critics again, making a big-budget film featuring major stars – Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter, Kansas City, Dr. T & the Women, Gosford Park – nearly every year until his death in 2006.
Pour yourself a Nixonian-sized glass of Chivas Regal and read the whole thing.
YOU CAN’T TEACH AN OLD TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! NEW TRICKS: Roger Kimball (“With an assist from Fyodor Dostoyevsky and H. G. Wells”) Proffers A Lesson for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden apparently thinks, or says he thinks, the Taliban will make nice because it is in their interest to do so.
No wonder the Taliban are busy trolling the Biden Administration, posing with ice-cream cones, re-enacting the iconic flag-raising at Iwo Jima in American uniforms but with a Taliban flag, vowing to battle “climate change” and ensure women’s rights “under Islamic law.” Ha ha ha. That’s the playful side of an ideology whose dark purpose was summed up by an Islamic radical in the aftermath of 9/11. “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something,” he said. “We are fighting to eliminate you.”
Accordingly, the proper response to this ideology is not to offer it partnerships in the hope that you can make a mutually satisfying deal that caters to everyone’s “self-interest.” On the contrary, the proper response is to understand, as Benjamin Netanyahu put it, that we are dealing here with “a war to reverse the triumph of the West.”
Our leaders, from a mentally compromised president through the puffed-up woke triumvirate of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd “stand down” Austin, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark “white-rage–I-read-Karl-Marx” Milley, are constitutionally incapable of taking that reality on board. They are figures fit to lead the Eloi, not patriotic Americans.
As Kurt Schlicter wrote on Friday: Resign. “If you didn’t suck, you’d have quit. When President Durwood told you to ditch Bagram Air Base, you joint chiefs should have got together, realized this was going to get a bunch of the guys that America entrusted to you killed, and decided to resign. You can’t disobey, but you can take a stand. Well, you did take a kind of stand. You just stood there. As one sergeant major told me today, the newest second lieutenant would identify this op as a disaster in the making. Now, far be it from me to contradict an E9, but I expect he would agree that even the greenest Girl Scout recruit would ask, ‘What the unholy hell are you idiots thinking, pulling the military out and giving up our secure airbase before you’ve completed your noncombatant evacuation operation?’”
HOW OTHERS SEE US: “As the Afghanistan debacle has unfolded, I have been following the coverage in various foreign newspapers. The coverage I have seen has been harshly critical of the Biden administration, to a degree that more or less equals what we see in the conservative press here in the U.S.”
HARSH BUT FAIR: A full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal.
HAHA: “If Larry Elder is ‘the face of white supremacy’ in California; Gavin Newsom is the butt.” — Comedian Joe Devito.
STILL SELLING: Kurt Schlichter’s The Split (Kelly Turnbull Book 6). It’s a relaxing escape into an America where things make more sense and run better than they do in real life today.
To make Nancy’s job even harder, and frankly more shameful, the FBI quietly admitted what we’ve known all along: January 6 wasn’t a planned insurrection. Tens of thousands of people showed up to topple the most powerful nation in history but forgot their guns? Of the 600 or so arrested, no one has been charged with sedition.
In a move that redefines the word “ghoul,” leftists are trying to attribute the suicides of four Capitol police officers who have taken their lives since January 6 directly to the events of that day.
A retired detective from New Jersey with a background in law enforcement suicide prevention recently told me that police suicides are typically caused by “cumulative stress,” not one bad day. The Capitol riots might have been the “straw that broke the camel’s back” on a job that is traditionally brutal.
Related: The Nation’sElie Mystal wants to use January 6th as a pretense to “nationalizing the midterm elections:”
Actually, nationalizing elections sounds more like a Salon-approved idea:
● Like [the late communist Pete] Seeger and the FDR cargo cult, Salon also harbors turn-the-clock-back fantasies of their own: Last month, the publication called for the nationalization of the news media because it was uncomfortable with the glut of right-leaning news and opinion led by — you guessed it! — Fox News. (Hmmm — I wonder if someone in the FCC read that article?) Now the Website wishes to turn the clock back on the film industry because of a perceived glut of independent films.
In any case, as Charles C. Cooke asked the left in 2016, “Herewith, an under-asked question for our friends on the progressive left: ‘Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?’”
The general officer U.S. military ranks have a big problem: The field grade officer and noncommissioned officer ranks have had enough of the double standards applied to leadership.
Top line: Whereas those out in the field are held strictly accountable for any failure, real or imagined, general officer ranks are rarely held accountable for far worse leadership failures that have a far greater impact.
One Marine lieutenant colonel just evinced this sentiment in a Facebook video post. Looking directly into the camera, Stuart Scheller stated , “I think what you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk. So, if I’m willing to risk my current battalion commander seat, my retirement, my family’s stability to say some of the things I want to say, I think it gives me some moral high ground to demand the same honesty, integrity, accountability from my senior leaders.”
Explaining his “demand for accountability,” Scheller referenced the double standards applied to field grade officers and general officers. He noted that if a “battalion commander has the simplest live-fire incident, [equal opportunity] complaint. Boom. Fired.” But Scheller pointed out that there has been no accountability for the litany of leadership failures that have defined the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He noted that “we have a secretary of defense that testified to Congress in May that the Afghan National Security Forces could withstand the Taliban advance. We have chairmen of the Joint Chiefs — who the [Marine Corps] commandant is a member of [the Joint Chiefs] — who’s supposed to advise on military policy. We have a Marine combatant commander. All of these people are supposed to advise.”
Scheller’s point is well-made. But the lieutenant colonel’s is just one example of the Pentagon’s double standards fetish.
The double standard isn’t just rank. Scheller was relieved. Vindman was promoted.
Meanwhile, just to note where we are: The highest civilian leaders have lost legitimacy. So has the military high command. And the colonels are angry. That’s seldom a recipe for good things.
PHYLLIS CHESLER: Team of Radical Feminists Rescues Thirty Afghan Feminists. “We Jews have an expression. ‘Saving one life is like saving a world.’ And here we are, a band of sisters, well on our way to having saved more than thirty worlds and counting.”
And there was the hastily cobbled together presidential address. Joe Biden’s royal bungling of the Afghanistan withdrawal has drawn comparisons to Saigon under Gerald Ford, but it’s actually par for the course in the War on Terror.
Afghanistan and Iraq have now managed to humiliate four presidents, foiling their attempts at nation-building, transitioning, surging, withdrawing, assassinating, arming, de-Baathifying, COINing and hearts-and-minds winning. Obama and Trump transcended this chaos to a degree, the former by focusing on his domestic agenda and the latter with his emphasis on personal drama. But that chaos was still there, even if it was raging half a world away.
Biden deserves credit for trying to correct the mistakes of his predecessors by calling Afghanistan a day. He appears to be sticking to the mission, even as he throws out his back on every banana peel from here to Jalalabad. But parts of his speech still sounded like they’d been mad-libbed by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.
Addressing the terrorists, Biden pronounced, ‘We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.’ He added, ‘We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and at the moment of our choosing.’ Always ‘at the moment of our choosing’, these things – only to discover it’s the local jihad chapter that’s got nothing but time.
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