Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule Reconstitutes The Weird Stuff Again

by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

Random and related stuff that might help make sense of the next few days, weeks and months as the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan.

(1) The Muslim Brotherhood.  Already reports from Qatar that MB leadership is heading back into Afghanistan.  This is predictable.  The Muslim Brotherhood is the political umbrella for authentic Islam (ie. extremists).  The Brotherhood supports the al-Qaeda regional affiliates including the Taliban, al-Nusra, and others.  Qatar is the financial center of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood is political Islam.

(2) China.  Most people don’t realize that China shares a common border with Afghanistan and has issues with Islamic extremists and sympathizers.  China has benefited from the U.S. in Afghanistan keeping the Taliban in check.  A U.S. retreat now means China needs to engage with the Taliban to bolster their national security interests.  China will establish diplomatic ties with the Taliban partly because Beijing uses duplicitous diplomacy as a strategy.  [It ain’t because China likes the Taliban]

(3) Turkey.  Unfortunately for Europe, Turkey is both a NATO member (stupid decision) and aligned in common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood.  Turkish President Recep Erdogan has previously given safe harbor to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood upon their exit from Qatar, when the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Bahrain) demanded Qatar stop supporting terrorists (the Brotherhood).

The EU will not want to recognize the Taliban, but Turkey most certainly will… regardless of what the EU wants, because Erdogan is aligned with extremist Islam.  Europe is weak and always ends up acquiescing to the threats of Turkey; so don’t look for much other than pearl clutching from NATO members about it.

(4) Europe.  As noted above, the EU doesn’t support Islamic extremism; however, the EU is now infiltrated with Islamic extremism, and the EU is too worried about cultural sensitivities to do anything about it.  They will likely try another round of multiculturalism advocacy, which will likely end just like the last time with fracture and cultural crisis because the Islamic extremists attack, murder and rape too many EU people.  It will be a mess again.

(5) Pakistan.  The Pakistani government is already aligned in common purpose with the Taliban, and have been supporting them under the table the entire time the U.S. was in Afghanistan (See UBL compound etc).  China has invested heavily in Pakistan and created reasonably strong ties.  China needs the assistance of Pakistan to help leverage their need for regional national security from the Taliban in Afghanistan.

(6) Russia.  Oddly Russia and the EU have the same outlook toward the Taliban in Afghanistan.  However, where the EU is twisted in pretzel knots of political correctness, Russia is not.  Look for Russian President Vladimir Putin to exploit his own interests in the EU via strength and a closer relationship. How? Because Russia can keep the Taliban and Turkey in check if the NATO members are blackmailed by Afghanistan and Erdogan.

*Note – NATO was formed to keep Russia in check…. and now we will likely watch Russia helping NATO keep their step-child, Turkey, in check. How’s that for some geopolitical irony?

Summary:  Qatar (Muslim Brotherhood) will help the Taliban (al-Qaeda).  China will form tenuous and conniving ties with the Taliban, likely relying on economics.  Turkey will support the Taliban and look for help, eventually, to assist Erdogan re-attain the Ottoman Empire he lusts. The EU is stuck between Russia and a hard place (Turkey), and will likely end up on team Putin.

Joe Biden will eat jello…. and the leftists in the U.S. State Department will run to their proverbial Alamo, The United Nations.

Wait for it…

 

X22, Stew Peters show, and more-August 16

 

Hope you've had a good day, folks! Here's tonight's lineup of news from the 'fighting off evil' side:

Video Replay: President Biden addressed (gaslighted) the nation on Afghanistan

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden will address the nation on Monday about the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, after the planned withdrawal of American forces turned deadly at Kabul’s airport as thousands tried to flee the country after the Taliban’s takeover.

The White House says Biden will travel back to Washington from the Camp David presidential retreat to speak at 3:45 p.m. from the East Room. It will be his first public remarks on the Afghanistan situation in nearly a week. Biden and other top U.S. officials had been stunned by the pace of the Taliban’s swift routing of the Afghan military.

Replay: 

Top Ten Ideas for Red States to Combat Blue Policies

What is the point of having political power if we don’t 

use it to advance policies that are both right and popular? 

In the case of the states, red should mean “Go!”

by Dewitt Clinton for American Greatness

Federalism—our system of “50 laboratories of democracy”—is one of the great strengths of the American constitution. But we aren’t taking full advantage of it. Many states in the United States today have Republican majorities in their state legislatures, and even Republican governors, yet still have many left-wing policies on the books and people in their state governments enforcing them. What might be done in these red states to try to improve things? Herewith are ten suggestions.

The first few are under the heading of “anti-racism” and anti-discrimination. It is racist to take race into consideration in one’s daily life—in hiring, in deciding who to hire, who to admit to school, and which contractors to use, etc. All that should be prohibited in the name of ending racism.

End Affirmative Action in State Hiring and Admissions

Ironically, states like California and Washington have banned affirmative action, and have rejected efforts to restore it, even as they remain decidedly blue. Yet many red states have not taken that step. If this can be done in these left-wing blue states, one must assume that the people of red states are at least as opposed to affirmative action. It is, after all, racist to force schools, businesses, and governments to take race into account in hiring, admissions, and the like. 

Hence our first suggestion: ban the consideration of race in admissions in all state colleges and universities, and in all hiring by the state government, or in the selection of any contractors receiving state money. The red states can be laboratories of democracy. Let’s run the experiment. Will racism be more reduced when we stop government mandated race-counting and race-conscious hiring? It’s not a bad bet to think it might.

Fire All State Diversity and Affirmative Action Employees

Following from the first suggestion is a necessary second suggestion. Fire everyone paid by the state to enforce affirmative action or diversity in hiring. As the state’s anti-racist strategy is to stop counting by race, all these jobs are no longer needed. 

Prohibit the Counting by Race 

The Beast of critical race theory feeds on data. Rather than focusing on individual cases of discrimination (which still do occur), advocates instead focus on statistical disparities. Without the gathering of such data that would be impossible. Hence states could prohibit the collection of data on race by the state government, in all state colleges and universities, in all state offices, and, in states where they have such power, by all local governments. That might run into federal mandates requiring such data collection. A state might declare itself an “anti-racist sanctuary” and prohibit such data collection. 

Alternatively states might note on all forms that require such classification something like, “In this state we take it as a given that it is racist and wrong to count people by race. The federal government, however, mandates that we give you the opportunity to check the race box, or race boxes of your choice. Believing as we do that this is wrong, we encourage you to check ‘choose not to declare’ or ‘none of the above.’’ If enough people did that it might deprive the corrupt racist enforcers of the data they need to do their dirty job. 

Finally, if counting by race is federally mandated, the state might add categories for its official tally. Many elite schools fill their “diversity” goals by bringing in African and Afro-Caribbean students. But if the United States owes an historic debt to black students, it is to those who had ancestors who were slaves in the United States and/ or lived under Jim Crow and other racist programs here. Cornell’s black students protested the relatively low numbers of American black vs. African and Afro-Caribbean students. Hence it would be good, if data must be collected, to disaggregate such groups in the official counting.

Create Non-Racist Accrediting Agencies

Another important base of power rests with the groups that certify what schools are teaching. It is not only a problem in private schools. Allocate money to help create a group that does not enforce the Left’s preferred political bias as a necessary part of the curriculum in our schools. (The money saved by getting rid of diversity bean counters and enforcers might be allocated for this purpose).

Defund the Diversity Industry Scam

Another way to defund the Left would be to stop funding the host of consultants and other “professionals” who make a good living in the diversity industry. Many of them are very well paid. For starters, one might set a limit on speaking fees for consultants hired by governments or on state campuses, say, of $5,000. Why should a consultant get paid more for an hour than an adjunct gets for an entire semester? That might begin to make a dent in the business model of the race hucksters who make a good living by dividing us by race.

Mandate Transparent Reporting of Student Progress

Transparency is good, and our schools are not doing as good a job as they ought to be doing in being transparent. One way to make the quality (and, lamentably, frequent lack thereof) more transparent would be to have more honest reporting. Along with report cards at the end of the year, parents should be notified of how their children are doing compared with the official “grade-level” standards of the year they have just completed, in addition to noting how the entire class is doing relative to that standard. 

All too many of our schools are failing to help students reach grade-level learning. More data sent to parents would help make the problem more manifest, and might spur more creative work to improve the situation. At the moment we are failing in this regard. As one report notes, “More than 60 percent of twelfth-grade students scored below the proficient level in reading achievement, and 27 percent scored below the basic level in reading.” That is simply unacceptable, and yet it continues, partly because parents don’t realize how bad things are. Democracy dies in darkness, as the Washington Post notes. Let the sun shine in! 

Transform School Funding So Money Follows Students

The monopoly, or near monopoly, government-run schools have is probably part of the problem. In time, monopolistic power tends to be abused, and monopolists tend to get lazy. It is, therefore, wise to transform school funding. Pass a bill mandating that funding follows students, and that students are free to choose to use that money for charter or private schools. To work effectively, such a bill would also probably have to dig into school budgets, and find a way to manage the inevitable loss of jobs by many who currently work in government-run schools. Ending all diversity programs would be a start at that, of course. Including an account of what percent of students are attaining grade-level learning would help parents decide what school would be best for their child.

Enforce the Janus Decision With Informed Yearly Consent

Enforce the Janus decision. The Supreme Court has ruled that government employee unions must allow people to opt out of paying dues to their union. Not surprisingly, government employee unions have tried to minimize knowledge of this decision and they sometimes make it very difficult for an individual to stop paying dues. States can fix that with legislation. They can mandate that each employee must fill out a form every year explicitly affirming his or her desire to remain in the union. 

To make it easier for individuals to make that choice, the state might find it helpful to make sure that there are no laws on the books making it difficult for a non-union government employee to purchase professional liability insurance on the private market. If national labor law allows it, states might also require recertification votes for all unions in the states on a regular basis. Perpetual unions are more like medieval guilds, from the feudal world. If a union, once created, has the presumptive right to be the representative of a given set of workers it creates an unchecked, and largely uncheckable, right. Requiring the workers in the union to reassert their right to choose what union represents them, or even if a union represents, would be a good way to recalibrate the balance of power.

Encourage Fracking on State Land

When it comes to the environment and questions concerning climate change, the United States has done much better than Europe in reducing carbon emissions. Why? One word: fracking. Fracking has made natural gas much less expensive and much more available than it previously had been. And natural gas burns much cleaner than coal, which it often replaces. It’s also cleaner than oil. In the medium term it’s probably the best way to reduce greenhouse emissions. For that reason, state governments, where fracking is viable, should work to ensure that state lands are available for fracking under the “Cleaner, Greener, Energy Initiative.”

Encourage Gun Safety and Shooting Courses

Gun culture is part of American culture, particularly in red states. As such, learning about guns and encouraging familiarity with gun safety is an important part of educating citizens. For that reason, it would be good to ensure that all high schools have a (mandatory?) class in gun education. The class would have both a classroom aspect to instruct students on gun safety and purposes, and a practical side of shooting guns at ranges. All students who complete the class successfully will be pre-cleared for purchasing guns with no further background check. The certification can be taken away for good cause (felony convictions or other like reasons).

These ten ideas are just a starting place for states to begin making advances in defeating “blue” programs and interest groups. What is the point of having political power if we don’t use it to advance policies that are both right and popular? In the case of the states, red should mean “Go!” 

Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It?

We are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch 

and probably most don’t even know it.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them. 

The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. 

“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic. 

If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical. 

In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state? 

Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux. 

Liberals try to yank capitalism to the left; but true revolutionaries seek to dismantle the very tenets upon which it is based. No wonder that a recent poll showed most Democrats had a more favorable view (59 percent) of socialism than of capitalism (49 percent).  

So, the Right shouts “They are socialists!” And the Left fires back “smears and lies!” while quietly the Biden Administration has already begun systematically to warp the rules of free-market capitalism. In other words, we are apparently all to be socialists now. 

By continuing to suspend rental payments to landlords who have no redress to the courts for violations of their contractual leases, the government essentially has redefined private property as we know it. Who really owns an apartment or a room in a house if the occupant has not paid rent since last spring? Is the de facto owner the renter in physical control of the unit, or the increasingly impotent title holder who must still pay the insurance, taxes, and upkeep? 

Do we still recognize the principle that those who owe money must pay it back? Biden is talking about vastly expanding any prior idea of student loan debt cancellations by massive new amnesties. As capitalism transitions into socialism, what about the parents who saved to pay their children’s tuition, the students who worked part-time and took only the units they could pay for, or the working-class youths who decided loans were too risky and preferred instead at 18 to go straight to work? 

Are they hapless Kulaks? And what do we name the indebted students and the loan-sharking universities who finagled a collective $1.7 trillion in student debt? Revolutionaries? Who pays for what others have incurred? 

Supply and demand under capitalism adjudicate wages and thus the rate of unemployment. But have we ever seen an expanding economy seeking to meet pent-up consumer demands for goods and services without the labor to meet that need? The workers are everywhere and nowhere, but the government has deliberately persuaded millions not to return officially to work, given rising unemployment compensation is more remunerative than the wages of working. Have we now finally embraced the old Marxist canard, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”? 

Inflation and the devaluation of the currency are now seemingly a good thing; printing dollars erodes the savings of the thrifty and money spreads to those who allegedly need and deserve it. 

Note we owe nearly $30 trillion in national debt. Yet as the Biden Administration runs a $2 trillion annual deficit, it pushes an “infrastructure” bill that will mean additionally somewhere between $2 to $4 trillion of more printed cash. Ronald Reagan talked of “starving the beast”—cutting taxes to deprive the voracious bureaucratic state of its fiscal food. 

Now instead we are “gorging the beast”: exponentially expanding government with so much debt that higher taxes are inevitable. And with the red ink comes redistribution in the socialist sense of borrowing more to give to the deserving, and taking more from the undeserving—to borrow even more for the more deserving still. 

Socialism does not believe in the construct of “merit,” given it is predicated on free will that trends supposedly towards selfishness, and results in an absence of “equity”: that is why colleges have dropped standardized tests for applicants, and are jettisoning traditional ideas of “exclusionary” honors programs. 

Remember, under socialism, in T-ball style, we all win—or lose. Our shared purposes are not to help meet and surpass purportedly artificially constructed standards of excellence to ensure greater prosperity, security, and comfort, but to demolish such ossified constructs, and rebrand the formerly failed as the now successful. 

The revolution has already redefined crime as a construct in the eye of the bourgeois beholder. Our woke elite told us to cool it for 120 days of last summer’s riots, looting and arson, since in the words of the “1619 Project” architect and former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Torch a federal courthouse, a church, or police precinct and why worry over mere “brick and mortar”? Take over a few city blocks and, presto, we have a “summer of love.” 

“Defund the police” became a socialist slogan supposedly to remind us that “crime” is what the rich call going into Walgreens to grab something they never fret about needing. COVID-19 is not the real reason why prisoners are freed from jails and prison to commit new crimes at an alarming rate. Indeed, those people didn’t really commit crimes so much as reflect society’s bad karma of arbitrarily labeling what they did as “crimes” in the first place, which in truth were often simply cries from the heart.  

Two years ago, it would have been considered absurd that youth would ride bikes into drug stores and steal with impunity as security guards watched, or thieves could enter into Neiman-Marcus department stores and skip out with thousands of dollars of rich people’s favorites. Over $2 billion in “stuff” was destroyed in 2020. And almost none of the violence was ever properly investigated, the perpetrators arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, or incarcerated. 

In such revolutionary times, no one knows any more what is and is not a crime. Illegally storming the border when positive for COVID-19? Destroying a public statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Looting a corporate chain store? Knocking out an Asian-American septuagenarian? Or turning over the tables of Jewish-Americans as they eat? Taking over municipal blocks and declaring the confiscation an autonomous zone? Not crimes. “Illegal parading” inside the U.S. Capitol building? Crime.

Twenty years ago, on the eve of 9/11, there were earlier heated debates over cash reparations. The acrimony has now again resurfaced after the rioting that followed the death of George Floyd. 

Yet the Left this time around did not envision reparations as just monetary gifting for the distant descendants of the enslaved and the generations who grew up under Jim Crow. Rather, it is already recalibrating the Great Society doctrine of “proportional representation” quotas, achieved through “disparate impact,” into new reparatory and disproportionate quotas and allotments. 

We are jettisoning the old idea under our Lebanese-like system of racial spoils that each group deserved representation in hiring and admission commensurate to its percentages of the population—trumping many traditional meritocratic criteria of examination scores, grades, or prior work experience. 

No more. If one examines current fall 2021 entering classes at many of our elite universities, many minority groups will enroll with numbers disproportionate to their current demographic percentages but proportionate to the idea of reparatory “overrepresentation.” 

The same holds true of the racial make-up of new television shows and commercials, pilot training programs, and corporate board room representation. Again, the idea is that blacks, for example, should be represented in percentages exceeding 12 percent in any coveted honors or awards—to make up for past underrepresentation, given prior mere proportionality offers no reparatory justice. 

In a strange way, for all the furor over reparation payments, the issue already is already beginning to be settled quietly by our major institutions. Note class consideration will have no role in such disproportionate and compensatory action. 

Another revolutionary crackpot idea was ending nuclear power and fossil fuels and replacing them with wind and solar generation that would power our homes and our new envisioned national fleet of electric cars. No one quite believed the revolutionary Left would be so suicidal as to spike the energy costs of the middle class, make the United States dependent again on imported oil from the autocratic Middle East and Russia, and strangle the oil and gas industry that had enriched America. 

But without much debate, Joe Biden has cancelled the huge ANWR oil and gas project in Alaska. He shut down the Keystone Pipeline and destroyed Alberta’s export of oil to the United States. He nixed all new fossil fuel leases on federal lands. He discouraged frackers from using their full inventory of rigs. As gasoline heads to $5 a gallon, Joe Biden, in the months before the next midterm elections, asks OPEC to send us its hated carbon fuel to help our addicted, but suddenly furious, commuter-voters.  

Here is a final reminder of why the revolution has already turned society upside down. The canniest elements of the aristocracy always cut deals with the revolution and indeed often remain the nomenklatura. What unites Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and the Silicon Valley billionaire crowd are the exemptions they purchased from revolutionary justice. 

In the old days they would have gotten dachas on the Black Sea coast and three dial phones on their desks. These days they keep their billions if they give a hundred million dollars in “civility” bounties here to Van Jones (ex-truther and expert on why white people are supposedly responsible for mass shootings) or there seed $500 million to key voting precincts to help ensure the good people defeat the bad. 

In 1961, Cubans were not quite aware that they were experiencing a Marxist takeover. Nor were Russians fully cognizant in 1917 of the plans that the Bolsheviks had for them over the next few decades. It is hard to see during anarchy, chaos, and collapsing institutions that leftists still have an agenda for what will emerge on the other side. 

In other words, we are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.

The Generals Can Blame Joe Biden for Today's Afghanistan Debacle, They Can't Blame the Last Twenty Years of Lies and Incompetence on Him

streiff reporting for RedState 

I’d like to say I was a little shocked when I read this story by my colleague Mike Miller: Biden Ordered Afghanistan Withdrawal Against Warnings From Top Generals: Report.

The gist of the story is that senior military leaders, including General Mark “Stand Back, I Have White Rage” Milley, told Biden they needed to modify the withdrawal plan Biden was already modified:

Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East; Gen. Austin Scott Miller, who led NATO forces in Afghanistan; and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Citing the risks of removing American forces to Afghan security and the U.S. Embassy, they recommended that the U.S. keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan while stepping up diplomacy to try to cement a peace agreement.

If you read that carefully, you could be excused for coming away with the illusion that Biden received advice that would have made a difference to where we are today. It wouldn’t have. And I’m not shocked because this kind of blame-shifting and failure to accept responsibility has become something of a hallmark of the nation’s senior military leadership.

The rot was already present in a very brittle Afghan Army that could fight well but often chose not to. The Afghan Army, rightfully, didn’t trust a deeply corrupt and unpopular government. Central Asian countries saw the writing on the wall and made it more difficult for the contractors needed to support or Afghan adventure to get there. Our allies were mostly gone. Everyone was looking for the exits. And our Defense brain trust recommended 2,500 more troops and mo’ better diplomacy.

What you see is our military leaders, the people who planned, directed, and managed the US military campaigns in Afghanistan over the past twenty years…pause and think about that for a moment, twenty years, there are numerous instances of fathers and sons fighting in the same war…now claiming that Biden is to blame and if he’d only listen to the same failed counsel that Bush and Obama and Trump had listened to, well things would’ve been different.

I predict that we will be hearing the same stuff from the intelligence community as they try to erase stories like this one from three days ago from the public’s memory: Taliban could take Afghan capital within 90 days after rapid gains -U.S. intelligence.

This is shameful. The fact that the commander-in-chief didn’t do what you requested doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for an unmitigated, world-class military disaster like that unfolding in Afghanistan. I’m not talking about the Afghan Army cutting and running for the Iranian border. I’m talking about the lack of strategic imagination that prevented the US military from allowing this to happen:

A couple of months ago, James Jay Carafano wrote a short essay on the subject of the failures of our military leadership for the Washington Times:

Perhaps, the armed forces busy with their day jobs of over a decade of heightened military operations and prolonged combat didn’t have the time or space to think deeply about the future or how America was changing around them.

Perhaps, in not robustly educating military leaders on economics, politics and culture, their intellectual arsenal is empty.

Maybe the military relied too much on advanced civilian education that was heavily weighted to leftist politics.

Or maybe we have become too lax about holding military and political leaders accountable when they start meddling too much in the operational side of the other’s affairs.

It is time to talk about why our military can’t deal with politicians who play politics with the military, or why some military officers have become partisan political actors while in uniform (a phenomenon of the Trump administration as well as Biden’s).

Most importantly, we need to start talking about how we fix this before it really gets out of hand.

One answer, of course, is to stop electing politicians who play politics with the military.

But we also need to educate military leaders on how to properly serve both elected civilian leaders and the oath they took when they put on a uniform — and to serve both equally well no matter how difficult that might be.

While people in uniform are always required to follow lawful orders, they are not there just to say “yes” to every politician. Nor should an officer remain silent, failing to stand for the right thing, because it might endanger their career or advancement.

Military leaders are there to provide for the common defense no matter how outrageous or out-of-kilter domestic politics gets. Sometimes that can be as challenging as fighting a war. It’s every bit as important. Because you can’t fight or deter a war with a military that can’t fight.

I can add another category. Perhaps our military is not led by steely-eyed warrior monks but by a spoiled, petulant class of divas skilled in evading responsibility and navigating a byzantine bureaucracy but grossly incompetent in what we hired them to do?

We were failed by 20 years worth of general officers. There needs to be an accounting. No matter what dumbf*** calls Joe Biden made, the military had an obligation to anticipate, do better, and not blame Biden for them screwing the pooch as they did in the past 72 hours.

Is This anything?

What we have in the Oval Office right now—after the brief shining moment 

of Donald J. Trump—is the closest thing possible to absolutely nothing. 

by Bruce Bawer for American Greatness

David Letterman, on his late-night CBS series, used to do a bit called “Is This Anything?” After he introduced the segment from his desk, the curtains on the auditorium stage would part, and there would be a guy in a bee costume playing a xylophone. Or a woman sitting on the floor juggling. Or another woman spinning several hula hoops around her body at once. After a few seconds, the curtains would close again, and Letterman and his bandleader, Paul Shaffer, would discuss the question: “Is this anything?” 

Instead of thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgments of entertainment value, then, acts were interrogated in relation to elemental ontological categories. Is this anything? 

I was reminded of this recurring bit the other day while contemplating the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. While hordes of illegal aliens pour into the country through the southern border, entirely unimpeded, and the last remnants of America’s presence in Afghanistan prepare to reenact the fall of Saigon in 1975, the man who is supposedly the leader of the free world is entering the White House through the wrong door. 

Is this anything? 

Every so often during the last few years, I’ve gone on to YouTube and watched some network’s coverage of the 2016 presidential election. I’ve now watched several of them, hours at a time. At first, while Trump was still in office, I found it endlessly entertaining watching a different set of know-it-all blowhards on CBS or NBC or CNN, or for that matter on some channel in the UK or France or Australia, gradually realize that something is happening that they hadn’t expected and couldn’t explain and certainly didn’t like at all. But when I watched the BBC’s coverage the other day, I experienced it as terribly sad and found myself getting extremely angry. 

Because on November 8, 2016, American voters shocked the world. In a stunning historic rebuke, they rejected rule by their country’s condescending, self-serving, jet-setting Davos elite, who had turned America’s great industrial cities into rust heaps and exported countless good jobs to China and Mexico. They took back their country, voting in a Hercules to clean the Augean stables. 

But in the end, the legacy media with the entrenched Beltway bureaucrats at the FBI, CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and elsewhere castrated the voters’ revolution. 

Yes, Trump managed to accomplish a great deal. He revived American manufacturing. He took the U.S. economy to new heights. He reduced joblessness—including joblessness among blacks, Latinos, and other groups—to new lows. He crushed ISIS. He strengthened NATO by pressuring allies to pay their fair share. He created the Space Force. He reversed Obama’s reprehensible Cuba policy and Iran deal. Even as he withdrew from the Paris Accords, he made the U.S. energy-independent and reduced U.S. carbon emissions. He moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and brokered peace between Israel and several of its Mideast neighbors. He appointed scores of principled federal judges. And he stemmed the flow of illegal immigrants at the southern border, signing sweeping new deals with Mexico and other Latin American countries while building hundreds of miles of a state-of-the-art border wall. 

It was something. 

And yet he had to spend all too much of his all too brief time in the White House fighting treasonous efforts by his predecessor, and by his predecessor’s allies in the Deep State and mainstream media, to unseat him. 

Month after month after month, the media repeated the lie of Russia collusion. And when it unraveled, they moved on, never apologizing. Meanwhile the extremely substantial case against Hillary Clinton came to nothing. Obama never paid for his immense perfidy. The staggeringly shameless Biden grift in China and Ukraine not only went unpunished—it went almost entirely unreported in the legacy media. Hunter, that poor mess—whose terrible addiction problems and overall incapacity to carry off any semblance of adult responsibility were unforgivably exploited by a cynical father who cruelly put him to work as a sleazy bagman—got a book deal. (Even the publishing business is complicit in the corrupt new order.) And thanks to the MSM’s refusal to tell even a bit of the truth about all these matters—along with a comprehensive, perfidious effort on multiple fronts to prevent Trump from gaining a second term—a senile, doddering old fossil was installed in the White House. 

The election of 2020 may well have been the single most remarkable example of audacious, large-scale fraud in human history. But state officials and judges closed off inquiry into the fact. The legacy media erected a cordon sanitaire around the whole thing. To inquire, to investigate, even to wonder, was tantamount to treason. What had happened on November 3? The answer was wreathed in layers and layers of lies. And a pathetic, quixotic effort by a handful of Trump supporters to stand up to those lies on January 6 in the only way they could think to do ended up being described as an attempt at an insurrection. 

Yes, the Trump presidency was something. Before it became entirely clear that the fix was in, it looked like hope, a new birth, morning in America. It was about the Constitution, the pursuit of happiness, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It was everything those of us who are of a certain age had been taught about in school: in America, the government’s primary obligation was to guarantee the freedom of citizens and protect them from enemies foreign and domestic—and otherwise to leave them the hell alone.

In any event, Trump was given the bum’s rush, and this sad old thing—the pitiable, shambling remains of a despicable third-rate political hack and all-around dim bulb—was put through a joke of an inauguration and propelled into a parody of a presidency—a pantomime, a farce, a travesty. And every day the White House correspondents sit there facing Jen Psaki and go through the motions of acting as if this is something. 

In fact, what we have in the Oval Office right now—after the brief shining moment of Donald J. Trump—is the closest thing possible to absolutely nothing.