NO SURPRISE HERE: His Fraudulency waived a law that required him to brief Congress on the potential impact of reducing the U.S. forces below 2,000 uniforms in Afghanistan on our counter-terrorism efforts, according to The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo and Alana Goodman.

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.

TERRORISM IS BACK. THANKS, JOE: Issues & Insights reminds us that it was Trump’s mean tweets, not Islamic Terrorism, that had the American elites panties in a wad. There was a reason for that – Trump destroyed ISIS in Iraq:

“Since then, the number of Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide has plunged. In the U.S., there have been only two acts of terrorism in the past four-plus years that were fueled by Islamic extremism. And in Gallup’s poll of top problems, terrorism stopped even registering. No one mentioned it in the July 2021 survey.

“Then Biden, in an eerie repeat of the Obama years, decided to pull troops out of Afghanistan against the advice of many, after which the country quickly fell to Taliban terrorists – despite Biden’s promise that this wouldn’t happen. And then ISIS suddenly re-emerged, this time called ISIS-K.”

FBI PAID A WHITE SUPREMACIST BEAUCOUP BUCKS: Just the News did a little digging in court records and found the FBI paid a lot of money over a bunch of years to an informant who is/was a publisher of White Supremacists literature. Since the FBI also helped plot the kidnapping of a governor, another such revelation won’t raise that many eyebrows.

FEDS GET A RAISE: Hey, the bureaucrats did such a great job “managing” the Covid crisis from home that His Fraudulency awarded them a nice pay hike, Federal News Network reports.

IF IT WADDLES AND QUACKS LIKE A DUCK: Then odds are, it’s probably a duck. Does the same apply to the universe and the appearance of fine-tuning? Kyle Butt points to the multiple atheist advocates who concede there’s a lot of quacking going on out there.

CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY? HOMELESS? NOT TO WORRY: Ever heard of “Homes Guarantee?” How about the “Housing Justice National Platform for a Homes Guarantee?” Cogs in the Left’s campaign to socialize property and housing in the U.S., as Capital Research Center’s Robert Stilson explains.

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 one who 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.

(Bumped.)

GRANHOLM GOT MILITARY JET DURING AFGHAN EVAC: Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm had a summit to get to in Ukraine, so, naturally, her minions dialed up the Pentagon and presto! There was a U.S. military jet that could possibly have been better utilized a good ways further east of Ukraine.

AFGHANISTAN IS BIDEN’S SLAUGHTERHOUSE: Who knew His Fraudulency would become the procurement chief for the Taliban. If you doubt that, consider this Issues & Insights:

“The country is now a modern arms bazaar, overflowing with designed-to-kill equipment for the Taliban to use on Americans and anyone else they choose to murder, or sell to unsavory characters who want to massacre Westerners. Remaining in Afghanistan after the U.S. quits will be nearly 76,000 military vehicles, 208 American airplanes and helicopters, and almost 600,000 arms.”

ADD BIDEN’S BAGRAM BLUNDER TO: Little Big Horn and Pickett’s Charge as among the biggest military mistakes in American history.

HR4 IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN YOU KNEW: Attorney Cleta Mitchell has been in the front lines of election reform battles for decades, so she knows a thing or thirty-three about how the Left has corrupted the ballot box over the years. And she warns today that HR4, just passed by the House of Representatives, is not about protecting voting rights.

“Instead, the bill cynically adopts into federal law every losing argument advanced by the vast leftwing elections industry to courts across the country for years. Every theory rejected by the courts has been enshrined in HR 4. The bill also hands control of our elections over to the radical leftwing attorneys in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Most importantly, the bill codifies congressional districts as ‘protected’ under federal law even if those districts do not have a majority of minority residents. Courts have recognized the importance of majority-minority congressional districts, but have rejected partisan efforts by Democrat lawyers to extend that recognition to congressional districts that do not have a majority of minorities in the district. HR 4 would put into the federal statute protection for districts with more white voters than minorities, thus expanding legal protections to — you guessed it — Democrat House seats.”

This piece is essential reading for anybody who cares about what happened in the 2020 presidential election and could happen again and again and again in future elections.

CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION HIT WITH FOIA SUIT: Writing at Liberty Unyielding, Hans Bader reports the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) resorted to a ridiculous justification for refusing to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Bader Family Foundation.

The FOIA sought email records for a six-month period for two CCR members, Chairman Catherine Lhamon and Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, the director of its Office of Civil Rights Evaluation. The CCR denied the request, claiming it “fails to describe the information sought.” Typical bureaucratic hair-splitting to avoid accountability and transparency.

Bader explains that “the commission claimed that ‘the request failed to ‘contain a sufficiently specific description of the record requested with respect to names, dates, and subject matter … as required by’ its FOIA regulation.’ But that regulation only requires a FOIA request to ‘contain a sufficiently specific description of the record requested with respect to names, dates, and subject matter to permit such record to be identified and located.'” [Italics added]

The emails could be extremely useful in determining whether Lhamon should be confirmed by the Senate after being nominated by President Joe Biden to be the next Director of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

That is one of those jobs in the federal bureaucracy that is obscure but tremendously powerful because if confirmed Lhamon would have tremendous power over the daily activities in America’s public school system classrooms. Bader quotes Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) saying “Ms. Lhamon has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric, violating students’ constitutionally based right to due process, and abusing regulatory power.”

THE MOST OFTEN HEARD FALLACY OF FAITH SKEPTICS: Leave it to a 19th Century divine to anticipate 21st century arguments.

MEMO TO SKEPTICS: My view and that of a great many Instapundit readers is that politics is downstream from culture, which is downstream from philosophy and theology, so talking about one necessarily encompasses assumptions and principles, often unstated, about one or both of the others. Being a great admirer of James Madison, the First Amendment’s author, I welcome the expression of opinion contrary to my own and hope you will afford me the same.

SEVEN REASONS FOR HOPE DESPITE IT ALL: Yes, admits Joy Pullman, Critical Race Theory (CRT) poison is seeping throughout the public education system, and the Afghanistan debacle tells foreign friends and foes that the U.S. decline is all but irreversible.

But Pullman, writing for The Federalist, offers seven reasons to preserve hope that even amid these multiple dark clouds there may yet be silver linings. To cite but one illustration, Pullman reminds us all that:

“In our time, the failures of our ruling class to effectively govern are sorting people into harmonized communities that solve their own problems. People are now moving states and cities to get away from the incapacity of elites in both parties to address basic human needs like sanitation, evenly applied rule of law, good employment, education, reasonable living costs, and keeping the roads maintained.

“People who are paying attention are starting new publishing houses, experimenting with new artistic outlets, finding doctors who align with their values, and developing parallel networks of educating and caring for the sick outside of the utterly broken systems that elites directly control. People are questioning conventional, Big Pharma “health” prescriptions, and taking charge of their own health.

“Continued repression will catalyze more of this. The more bright quants who are fired and sidelined for being too male and white, the more will be turning their genius to developing and funding pro-American hedge funds and financial instruments. The more parents disillusioned by government-sponsored racism in schools, the more they will demand to directly control taxpayer education dollars themselves rather than be endlessly looted by corrupt institutions.”

Realistic or Panglossian?

TODAY IS WILLIAM WILBERFORCE’S BIRTHDAY: It’s unfortunate that Wilberforce is so little known these days, especially among high school and college students. His 20- year struggle to persuade Parliament to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire stands among the most notable moments in human history. I am indebted to Houston’s Bill King for allowing me today to republish on HillFaith his fine tribute to Wilberforce.

I THINK INSTAPUNDITEERS WILL LOVE THIS GUY: Not just because Doug Wilson is a philosopher of a reformed/evangelical bent who did a widely lauded televised debate series on the existence of God with Christopher Hitchens. But because he recaptures something of the rebellious spirit of the Reformation and the American Revolution.

As a result, Wilson ably makes the case for defying Covid authoritarianism by using fake vaccine passports, in the event our betters make them mandatory for interstate travel across these once-free United States. There were, after all, solid grounds for King George III’s description of the American Revolution as a “Presbyterian war.”

I’m not entirely on board with Wilson, not on principle but on tactical considerations. And I am not an anti-vaxxer. As it happens, I will get my second Moderna shot in three days. But Wilson makes an articulate, historically and spiritually well-grounded case that is worth pondering by anybody who values their liberty.

FOR THOSE WHO MAY BE INTERESTED: It’s Tuesday and that means the seventh installment of HillFaith’s series on Jesus’ seven great “I AM” claims is live.

THEY ACTUALLY SAID THIS WITH STRAIGHT FACES: Speaking of reminders, Issues & Insights highlights the 2020 campaign assessment of His Fraudulency by 70 national security veterans of GOP administrations:

“We believe Joe Biden has the character, experience, and temperament to lead this nation. We believe he will restore the dignity of the presidency, bring Americans together, reassert America’s role as a global leader, and inspire our nation to live up to its ideals.”

Did somebody mention “The Stupid Party?”

FORGOTTEN FACTS ABOUT U.S. AND CHINA: Do you remember which U.S. president condemned his predecessor for being too soft on China, then opened the candy store of U.S. military and digital technology to Beijing?

Writing in The Federalist, Chuck DeVore remembers:

“It was during the Clinton administration, in the heady days of the American hegemony in the post-Cold War world, that the process of accelerating technology transfer to China began in earnest.

“In 2000, at the urging of Silicon Valley, the Clinton administration relaxed regulations to allow the People’s Liberation Army to purchase high-speed U.S. computers capable of simulating nuclear explosions — without an export license or security review.

“But in many ways, strengthening the PRC had already begun a few years earlier when Western corporations, under the thrall of the emergent Chinese market, began to transfer technology to China as a Chinese precondition for access to their markets. One illustrative example of this was the rise and fall of Lucent Technologies, a spin-off from AT&T, and the subsequent rise of China’s Huawei.”

Devore extends the same kind of rigorous analysis to Clinton’s successor, too, in a bracing assessment of how the U.S. policy “clerisy” has profoundly bungled foreign policy for more than two decades.

CUOMO COMEBACK BEGINS: Looks like the Democratic National Committee’s fund-raising arm is helping the soon-to-be-former New York chief executive pay off debts and start a stash for future opportunities.

‘THE CHOSEN’ CROWD-FUNDED HIT CONTINUES: It’s already the most successful-ever crowd-funded streaming TV series and now “The Chosen” is preparing its third season. This clip on HillFaith is from the series’ first season and is about the healing of the leper.

Interesting Note: “Game of Thrones” had a budget of about $1 billion for its eight season run. Dallas Jenkins, the creator of “The Chosen” project, estimates the series can tell the entire story of Jesus in seven seasons at one-tenth the cost of “Thrones.” This series is top-notch acting, scripting, dialogue, the works.

AS CENTRAL ASIA GOES: So goes the future, according to Claire Berlinski, who notes about the vast region stretching across the middle of Asia that:

“Only 20 percent of the population in Central Asia is old enough to remember the fall of the Soviet Empire. The young have no memory of the Soviets; their sense of identity is drawn from legends of earlier kingdoms and the fabled history of such places as Samarkand and Bukhara. The region’s governments have deliberately cultivated this sensibility in an effort to reclaim their history from Russia and the Soviet Union.

“The US and Europe have neglected the region. Some French and German companies have invested in Uzbekistan’s mining resources, but their investments pale compared to the massive scope of China’s in recent years. The US and Europe have simply not built an enhanced military presence, nor have they created economic incentives sufficient to build a lasting relationship with the region. In his recent summit with Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin made it clear that he would not tolerate new US bases in Central Asia.”

One need not agree with a neo-con/globalist agenda in order to recognize that the West, including the U.S., cannot afford to ignore developments in Central Asia, in particular those that point to the region’s potential contributions to the gathering strength of Russia, China and Iran.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST BRITISH LABOR: Just the News reports that former Prime Minister Tony Blair is calling His Fraudulency’s bungled Afghan withdrawal “imbecilic.” Said the former leader of Britain’s Labor Party: “The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours.”

EARTH AND THE GOLDILOCKS PRINCIPLE: Dr. Jeff Miller looks at five examples that illustrate one thing notables on both sides of the Existence of God issue agree about – the Earth appears to be designed specifically for human habitation and development. Not too this, not too that, but just right. Otherwise, none of us would be here to debate about it.