The Associated Press attempted a hit piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantisover his promotion for monoclonal antibody treatment for early stage COVID recovery. The treatment from Regeneron was purchased by the federal government in January of 2021. However, the AP attempted to claim a small investor in Regeneron was also a supporter of Ron DeSantis…. the implication was a quid-pro-quo.
The attempt was so weak, so lacking of substance and silly, that few additional media attempted to join the AP in their narrative. Even the far-left politifact had to call out the Fake News. After the AP refused to clear the record and drop the nonsense, Governor Ron DeSantis and his spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, unleashed on the AP in a similar way they crushed a similar 60-Minutes effort earlier in the year.
Ms. Pushaw simply re-tweeted the AP story and said “drag them” to her followers and DeSantis supporters. The Associated Press is not used to having the MAGA army take action and start ridiculing them. New rules...
After the AP and their narrative engineer started to get push-back for their fake news narrative, the Associated Press executives clutched their pearls and started crying, documenting their complaint to the Governors office:
Biden’s bungling pull-out from Afghanistan has shadows of the Iranian revolution, the fall of Saigon and the same lack of accountability we saw after Benghazi.
Honestly, why are these people called “experts” again? Can someone remind me?
As the incomparable David Burge (AKA iowahawk) famously said on Twitter years ago:
Like I said yesterday, these faculty lounge academics have failed us time and time and time again.
And yet despite all their failures, they still skitter around the halls of the Pentagon and State Department like an infestation of cockroaches.
So should we be surprised that the people who brought us Benghazi are now giving us Benghazi redux?
In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden dismissed the horrifying footage of Afghans dropping to their deaths from US planes because, hey, it was “four days ago, five days ago.”
Yeah, it was two days before that interview. But you get his point. Who cares? What difference at this point does it make, says President Benghazi Redux.
I don’t know who the hell thought that having this volatile old man sit down for an interview over his failure in Afghanistan was a good idea, but whoever it was probably won’t be in a position to make any further decisions.
Biden was defensive, combative and clearly unprepared for anything remotely close to a challenging question.
There’s a reason that both times Biden spoke at the White House this week he scampered away like a frightened coward without taking a single question from reporters.
Like I mentioned yesterday, that’s what he did on Monday. And, guess what? We have a second image of him doing it again yesterday after he attacked Republican governors and people who don’t want their kids forced to wear masks in school.
You know what?
It’s better when you can hear the explosion of questions from reporters as the coward high-tails it out of there.
Yet despite Biden’s inability to make the case for the disastrous calamity he unleashed, someone in the White House gave a green light to that interview with Stephanopoulos.
At least when Hillary Clinton made her “What difference at this point does it make” remark to the Senate, she was required to testify there. Biden was under no obligation to do that interview. He didn’t have to set himself up for a Benghazi redux moment. But he did it anyway.
And as with Benghazi, the aftermath of Afghanistan is nearly as disgusting as the event itself.
The excuse-making, the dismissal of those who died, the admission that they have no plan to rescue all the Americans stuck in Afghanistan.
Holy moly. With each passing day this just keeps snowballing.
The only difference with Benghazi redux — other than they haven’t yet arrested some obscure YouTube videomaker — is unlike Obama, who at least stayed in the White House on September 11, 2012, Joe went into hiding at Camp David.
And guess what?
He plans to leave the White House again this week to hide in Delaware for another long weekend.
In addition to refusing to stand behind the President during his excuse-making address on Monday, note Kamala’s body language in this photo tweeted out by the White House yesterday:
How much you wanna bet she wishes she still had the authority to arrest that photographer and toss him in jail like a pot smoker? Ah well, too late, honey. Maybe you shouldn’t have bragged about your role in the Afghanistan decision because now you own it too.
Political ads showcasing the ineptitude of the current White House occupant and his ideological incompetents have begun. Joe Biden makes these ads easy, because every segment of the administration is failing miserably…. the most recent example is obviously Afghanistan.
While Afghanistan Fell, Military and CIA Focused on Diversity
Milley should have studied Muslim rage, instead of white rage.
"I want to understand white rage, and I’m white," Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whined at a congressional hearing.
He might have done better to understand Muslim rage.
A week after his testimony, the Taliban had not only doubled their number of districts, but possessed hundreds of captured U.S. armored vehicles, along with artillery and drones.
The Pentagon's spokesman told reporters to ask the Afghan military about the gear.
In May, Milley had shrugged off questions about whether the Afghan military would survive. “We frankly don’t know yet. We have to wait and see how things develop over the summer.”
The Afghan military was beginning to fall apart while Milley was defending critical race theory.
A week earlier, the New York Times had described "demoralized" Afghan forces "abandoning checkpoints and bases en masse." Two days after Milley’s disgraceful performance, the media reported that even the Taliban were “surprised” at how fast they were advancing.
At the beginning of July, the Biden administration abandoned Bagram Air Force Base. A week later the Taliban reclaimed the Panjwayi District where the Jihadist movement had gotten its start, seized the largest border crossing with Iran and the millions in revenue that came with it.
The United States Army responded by announcing that it was putting "a renewed emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and equity" or DEI. Had the brass ordered it as diversity, inclusion, and equity, the resulting acronym would have been more reflective of the real world.
While the Taliban were conquering Afghanistan's rural provinces and then moving on to besieging its cities, the Army was wrestling with the "effective messaging that demonstrates why DEI efforts are critical to the success of the Army". The new messaging would explain how the "talents of a diverse workforce" that included "language, race, color, disability, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity" were vital to whatever its mission was.
The Taliban, who were mostly Sunni Islamist Pashtun tribesmen, would spend the next two months demonstrating that diversity was not a strength, but a serious weakness.
While the Afghan government and its military were divided between diverse tribal factions, some of whom would flee to Iran and others to Uzbekistan (depending on whether they were Hazaras or Uzbeks) while the Pashtuns would surrender to their fellow Taliban tribesmen, the Taliban showed that unity would stomp diversity in the face and then dance on its grave.
Meanwhile the military brass in this country, as discussed in my recent pamphlet, Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country, was busy dividing our own military from within in pursuit of diversity, pitting black and white service members against each other in “critical conversations” and urging them to accuse their country and services of “systemic racism”.
As the Army brass were striving to establish the “Army as a global leader in DEI”, America’s enemies were plotting to become global leaders in land, power, and military victories.
By late July, Milley admitted that, "Strategic momentum appears to be sort of with the Taliban."
By "sort of", Milley meant that the Taliban had more than doubled their territory again and were marching on half of the provincial capitals.
Few reporters asked follow-up questions about the "sort of" because the leading story in D.C. was an anti-Trump book which flatteringly portrayed Milley as preventing a Trump "coup".
No one, from the media to Milley, cared about the actual coup underway in Afghanistan.
"This department will be diverse. It will be inclusive," Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin insisted. "I’m committed to that. This department is committed to that. The chairman’s committed to that.”
While Biden’s brass were pledging allegiance to diversity, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar to the People’s Republic of China. Yi praised the Taliban as a "a pivotal military and political force" and mocked the United States.
The United States Army was busy “developing and implementing a strategic plan to advance DEI across the Total Force” as the Taliban seized the capitals of Helmand and Herat.
But the Navy faced its own crisis when Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. warned at a DEI panel at the Sea Air Space conference that removing photos from promotion boards, a diversity measure from last year, actually undermined diversity because the brass no longer knew exactly how many minorities they were artificially promoting to fit diversity quotas.
While the Navy was grappling with this dark night of the soul, Staff Sgt. Nicholas Jones with the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion received the Navy Cross for his heroism during a six-hour battle with ISIS last year during which he rescued a French ally and risked his life to try and rescue two wounded comrades.
Jones “continued fighting until forcibly evacuated”.
Sadly, Jones is a straight white man from Kansas, and doesn’t really fit the DEI template, but in happier diversity defense news, the new Navy Secretary is an immigrant, the first female sailor graduated from Naval Special Warfare training, and the Naval Institute published a confession by Lieutenant Commander David Elsenbeck that he was "unconsciously biased" and a "member of the dominant group in a society suffering from institutionalized and historically ingrained bias”.
Eisenbeck urged immediate “bias education”.
American POWs used to be starved, beaten, and had bamboo shoots driven under their fingernails without repeating the Marxist dogma they were being indoctrinated with. But hardly a week goes by now without another litany of Marxist confessions at military struggle sessions.
The Taliban, who actually are a member of the dominant group, began swallowing up a series of provincial capitals and marrying off young girls to their Jihadists. Back home, the Virginia Military Institute’s first-ever Chief Diversity Officer, Jamica Love, announced that she intended to pursue "institutional change" to transform the VMI's culture. That’s what the Taliban were also up to.
While the Taliban advanced, CIA Director William Burns commented that increasing "diversity and inclusion" was among his top priorities. "We cannot be effective around the world if everybody looks like me," he complained. To that end the CIA had unrolled an ad campaign featuring a Latina cisgender intersectional worker wearing a pink gender power clenched fist t-shirt. But the widely hated woke ad was only the tip of the agency’s diversity iceberg.
"At CIA, we don’t just leverage diversity, equity, and inclusion; we embrace and celebrate it," an agency diversity report insisted. "This ethos must be woven in to our day-to-day tasks."
How were diversity and equity woven into the task of monitoring the Taliban's advance?
No one knows. But, like the military, the CIA went on holding "critical conversations" in which minority employees were encouraged to spout racism accusations.
Sonya Holt, Deputy Associate Director of CIA for Talent for Diversity and Inclusion, who had started out as a mere recruiter, assured that through DEI, "the Agency will be better prepared to address intelligence challenges and support its customers."
While CIA officers were learning “how diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to mission success”, the agency began belatedly considering how to extract its assets from Afghanistan.
Recent intelligence reports "warned that Kabul could fall to the Taliban within years".
But while the CIA tried to figure out how it would collect intelligence on the Taliban after the withdrawal, its employees did have the benefit of 15 affinity groups including ANGLE (Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Officers and Allies), DAC (Deaf Advisory Council) and SALAAM (South Asian Leadership and Advisory Membership.)
The CIA was also working to hire “neurodiverse” personnel, which it defined as people suffering from ADD, Dyslexia, or Tourette's Syndrome. Or as the CIA 'wokely' put it "differences labeled with" these syndromes.
Key Afghan figures had warned that there was a conspiracy underway to hand Afghanistan to the Taliban. The drumroll surrenders of cities and much of the Afghan military appeared to confirm that backroom deals had been made. The obvious players able to pull off such deals were Pakistan’s ISI spy agency, the original backers of the Taliban, along with Turkey and Qatar.
Biden’s CIA director had turned to Pakistan in the hopes of allowing the agency to run a spy base in the country that had harbored Osama bin Laden. The Biden administration’s military and diplomatic response to the Taliban was being run out of Qatar. And it had handed security at Kabul Airport over to Turkey before frantically taking it back when the Taliban took the city.
The CIA should have been on top of this, but it had better things to do with its time.
An unclassified intelligence community report did warn that the Taliban was “broadly consistent in its restrictive approach to women’s rights."
The Taliban have now taken over Afghanistan, but it’s not all bad news on the military front
."While Trump administration Pentagon nominees were overwhelmingly white and male, the Biden administration says 54% of its national security nominees ― to the Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development ― are women, 40% are people of color, and at least 7% identify as LGBTQ," the publication thrillingly reports.
Better yet, "recent weeks saw two LGBTQ women confirmed to top military positions. Air Force Undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones is the first out lesbian to serve as undersecretary of a military branch, while Shawn Skelly, the assistant secretary of defense for readiness, is the first out transgender person in the job and highest-ranking out transgender defense official in U.S. history."
The State Department is doing its part by asking the Taliban to form an “inclusive and representative government.” And if they refuse to have as many neurodiverse black transgender defense officials as us, Biden won’t give them any more humvees, artillery, choppers, or drones.
The Taliban may have won Afghanistan, but we’re winning the diversity race. And since diversity is more important than winning wars or being a military superpower, we’re beating the Taliban. Not to mention Russia, China, and Iran in the field of transgender defense officials.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, (sorry, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is at “the heart of everything” that Biden’s military does and our performance reflects the focus on DEI.
Afghanistan is a disaster, but we’ll have the most diverse military in the world or DEI trying.
Days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was initially sold as a necessary pre-emptive effort to secure deadly weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein planned to use against the American people, National Review ran an op-ed by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum attacking everyone on the Right who opposed the war as “unpatriotic conservatives.”
In the nearly two decades since it was published, the column has become something of a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the underlying motivations and mindset of the most ardent proponents of the idea that stable democracies can be imposed by military force from the top down. Like an insect captured in amber, Frum’s essay is a near-perfect specimen of the neoconservative id, equal parts delusion and sanctimony.
Frum attacked legendary conservative columnist Robert Novak for correctly predicting that America’s foray into Afghanistan would be a “futile slaughter”; he attacked Pat Buchanan for correctly predicting that America’s military might wouldn’t be enough to overcome its ignorance of Afghanistan’s culture and history; and he characterized the entire movement of conservatives who opposed the neoconservative plan to democratize the world through military conquest as Vichy apologists whose sole aim was to stand up for terrorist suicide bombers. And after tarring war opponents as Nazi collaborators, Frum transitioned to tarring anyone who opposed open borders and unchecked immigration as racist relics pining for the return of the KKK.
“They began by hating neoconservatives,” Frum wrote. “They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.”
“War is a great clarifier,” Frum concluded. “The paleoconservatives have chosen—and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”
Frum, who was sent packing from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute for his refusal to do much of anything in exchange for his six-figure sinecure there, was right about one thing: war is a great clarifier.
Take Afghanistan, for example. Although the post-9/11 invasion of the country was presented to the American public as necessary to take down al Qaeda and its then-leader Osama bin Laden for their roles in perpetrating the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the mission quickly shifted to nation-building and democracy-exporting. By December of 2001, the Taliban–which had harbored al Qaeda in Afghanistan—had been routed, and bin Laden had escaped through the mountains into Pakistan.
In his State of the Union address in 2002, then-president George W. Bush all but claimed total military victory in Afghanistan.
“In four short months, our nation has comforted the victims, begun to rebuild New York and the Pentagon, rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested, and rid the world of thousands of terrorists, destroyed Afghanistan’s terrorist training camps, saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression,” Bush stated.
At that point, the military mission in Afghanistan should have concluded. But by 2004, the mission to destroy the terrorists responsible for 9/11 had morphed into a mission to export and establish Western-style liberal democracy not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq, too.
“As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny, despair, and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. So America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East,” Bush told Congress in 2004. “We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government.”
The subtext of Bush’s address was no different than the overt charge leveled by Frum: if you opposed the bait-and-switch from defeating terrorists to nation-building all over the Middle East, either because you believed it be contrary to the purpose of the military or you believed it was futile and doomed to failure, you were racist and xenophobic.
Bush’s sentiments were echoed more eloquently by the late Charles Krauthammer in a speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute in February of 2004. Krauthammer’s remarks, entitled “Democratic Realism,” extolled the virtues of democracy promotion by force and scoffed at the idea that a liberal Western democracy in a tribal nation like Afghanistan with no history whatsoever of secular, representative government would do anything but flourish.
“Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom,” Krauthammer acknowledged. “And they may yet be right. But how do they know in advance?”
When he then asked during his speech where it is written that tribal Islamic societies with no sense of national identity akin to the American esprit de corps that unites all people within its borders regardless of color or creed, let alone a tradition of Western rule of law and civic order, are incapable of peaceful, secular democracy, an attendee at the dinner yelled out “the Koran!” Unfazed and apparently oblivious to the possibility that the vacuum created by forcibly deposing Saddam Hussein and other Middle Eastern leaders would lead to Islamists throughout the Middle East deposing their own governments, slaughtering Christians and apostate Muslims, over-running American diplomatic outposts and murdering American ambassadors, and eventually reestablishing the Islamic caliphate, Krauthammer soldiered on.
Spreading democracy around the globe, Krauthammer argued, was the only way to stop terrorism, and to argue otherwise was idiotic. To oppose the grandiose plans of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists was, in Krauthammer’s words, “intellectually obsolete” and “politically bankrupt.”
As we all now know, having witnessed the post-invasion debacle in Iraq, the disastrous Arab Spring, the pre-meditated murder of four Americans in Libya, the rise and spread of ISIS, and the ignominious fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, the utopian vision of Frum, Bush, and Krauthammer was a lie. It was a lie that cost two decades, trillions of dollars, and tens of thousands of American lives and limbs, and it was an incalculably destructive lie that was sold by smearing its realist opponents as condescending, racist know-nothings who lacked both the brain and the heart to understand how the new world truly worked.
The fall of Afghanistan should have shocked the architects of its failure back into reality. Instead, they’ve moved on as if nothing much happened at all and are now arguing that America should, nay must, allow tens or even hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees into America immediately. Being wrong means never having to say you’re sorry and being wrong about every failed foreign policy endeavor of this century apparently means you get to blather your way past America’s worst defeat since Vietnam so you can instead talk about the need for open borders. The solution for failing to export American democracy to Afghanistan, you see, is to import Afghanistan into America. And wouldn’t you know it, the same arguments and epithets deployed against opponents of America’s failed wars are now being deployed against opponents of unchecked immigration. Moral blackmail is the stock-in-trade of the failed internationalist.
Are you concerned that people posing as refugees might be terrorists intent on killing Americans on U.S. soil? You’re a racist. Are you worried that the same government and immigration system that allowed the 19 9/11 hijackers entry to the U.S. might not be competent to judge who is and who is not a security threat? You’re a xenophobe. Do you think maybe it is time for the U.S. government to focus on what is best for American citizens rather than what is best for Afghans, or Syrians, or Libyans, or Iraqis? You’re probably a Jim Crow fanatic who wants segregated water fountains. Do you think the family of the current president, via their shady business deals with corrupt oligarchs beholden to America’s enemies across the globe, might be getting rich by manipulating the president’s foreign policy to enrich themselves? Well, you’re obviously a Russian stooge.
The same people who tried to morally blackmail you into supporting a failed Forever War in Afghanistan—the ones who declared that you were either on board with the new international interventionist imperative or you were with the terrorists—are now trying to morally blackmail you into supporting open borders with Afghanistan and every other country that America’s incompetent elites thought they could turn into Stepford if only they invaded it hard enough. In truth, the entire foundation of the Washington establishment’s failed foreign policy is its members’ own feelings of guilt.
They felt guilty that Afghanistan looked like an awful place to live, so they set about rebuilding the country in their own image, complete with gender equity courses and lectures on how the predominantly Muslim citizens of the country need to be more like their secular Western counterparts. They felt guilty about what they spent 20 years doing in Afghanistan—falsely offering hope of an eternal American safety net, constructed and maintained not with their own blood, sweat, and tears, but with those of enlisted American military men and women scoffed at and mocked by the smart set—so you must accept the risk posed by a terrorist who pretended to be a refugee to get across the nation’s increasingly non-existent southern border. They feel guilty about their wealth and privilege (not guilty enough to give that wealth or privilege to anyone else, of course), so you must accept the lower wages that are the obvious result of inflating the labor supply while depressing demand through job-crushing progressive economic policy.
These concerns about the runaway costs of interventionism, however, are based firmly in reality. Take the story of an Afghan interpreter told in Outlaw Platoon, the spectacular war memoir by Sean Parnell, who served as a combat platoon leader in one of the most violent parts of Afghanistan. In his book, Parnell details how one of the Afghan interpreters in his platoon, a man who had been thoroughly “vetted” and given access to some of the Army’s closest held secrets, helped engineer an improvised explosive attack that killed one of Parnell’s troops, Cpl. Jeremiah S. Cole, and seriously injured four others. That interpreter, who went by the name Yusef, had also arranged for the murder of his counterpart Abdul so that Yusef would have total access to all sensitive information, such as troop movements and attack plans, which he would then pass along to America’s enemies.
“Knowing where Abdul had been going and the road he had used to get there, Yusef’s tip had allowed the insurgents to establish an ambush in time to catch Abdul on his way back to Bermel from his family’s house,” Parnell writes. “With Abdul dead, Yusef knew he would be promoted to head interpreter.”
“We’d gone through our year in country, judging these Afghans through the prism of our own value systems, never fully grasping what we were up against,” Parnell concluded.
Earlier this week, Parnell shared that story on Tucker Carlson’s primetime show on Fox News.
Media Matters immediately responded to Parnell’s story by slicing and dicing the transcript of Parnell’s appearance to smear him as a racist for believing, based on his own personal experience with a vetted Afghan who murdered one of his brothers in arms, that America could not properly vet the thousands of Afghans wishing to immigrate to America.
Like one of those old magic eye posters that contained images hidden among visual white noise, once you see the American ruling elite’s reflex to resort to moral blackmail to win an argument, you can never unsee it. Every policy, every argument, every talking point asserts that you are a racist and a bad person if you believe America’s government should first and foremost protect American citizens. This is a fun game for the failed foreign policy establishment, because they reap all the benefits of using Americans’ blood and money to pump up their own self-esteem while bearing precisely none of the costs.
One of the primary reasons this cadre of credentialed incompetents loathed former president Donald Trump is because, as a secular, thrice-married New York billionaire, he was impervious to the moral blackmail that had worked like a charm on everyone else for over a decade. He didn’t much care if they called him racist for wanting to secure the border and put an end to open borders. He didn’t care if they called him heartless for wanting to shut down immigration from “shithole countries” to preserve the wages of American workers. And he didn’t care if they called him stupid for refusing to go along with their plans for forever wars all around the globe. For a time, America had a president who wouldn’t be bullied into doing things that weren’t in America’s national security interests. They hated him for it, and it’s why they spent every waking moment for four years, including two impeachments, desperately trying to throw him out of office.
Moral blackmail only works when the target cares what the blackmailer thinks about him. America’s interventionist elites have publicly failed in the most spectacular way possible, with the evidence of their failures playing on repeat on television for all the world to see. Breaking their hold on power from here on out is simple: stop caring what they think and stop caring what they say about you. Their ideas are disastrous and their rhetoric—that anyone who disagrees with them is a racist traitor—is toxic in a society built on free expression. The architects of the nation-building policies from Afghanistan to Iraq are failures and should be treated with the same disdain reserved for flat earthers or bloodletters.
Do you want to prevent the next Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Syria from being foisted on the American public at the cost of who knows how many decades, lives, or trillions of dollars? Stop giving them an inch. Stop kowtowing to their moral blackmail. Start telling them no.
If Government Is Good at One Thing, It's Making a Crisis Worse
The same institution that's unable to run the Postal Service or Amtrak orchestrated our invasion and withdrawal of Afghanistan.
By Veronique de Rugy Published August 19, 2021
Another government failure, another outrage. This time the scandal is brought on by the less-than-orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and the realization that 20 years of military presence in the country achieved nothing but death and chaos. Observing another instance of large-scale mismanagement, I can't help being surprised that anyone is still surprised.
One needn't be a foreign policy expert to recognize that something in Afghanistan went terribly wrong. While many will blame the Biden administration for a fiasco that will have horrifying humanitarian consequences for the Afghan people, the failure also belongs to those who made the decision to go and remain there for two decades. These American officials argued that a continuing U.S. military presence there was important for achieving several goals, like training the Afghan army to resist the Taliban. Yet, today, the almost-immediate collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government makes it clear that whatever our strategy was, it failed.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that those who believed in nation building in the first place will realize from this dreadful episode that it never works as well as planned, even though the tragic scenario now unfolding before our eyes isn't the first U.S. government foreign policy disaster. And it won't be the last. People never seem to learn. Making matters worse is the fact that this sad state of affairs isn't limited to foreign policy. It exists everywhere and throughout all levels of federal, state, and local government.
During the pandemic, for instance, I was baffled to see Congress put the Small Business Administration (SBA) in charge of dispensing unprecedented disaster relief. This agency has a disastrous record of extending the suffering of small business owners after disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Having written extensively on that issue, I knew that this time around would be no different. It wasn't.
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative piece about the performance of the SBA's COVID-19 disaster loan program. The conclusion is that it was terrible. The report is packed full of examples of the ordeal that small business owners went through, many of which were carbon copies of stories that I reported about during other disasters. One of the recipients of the loans described dealing with the SBA: The agency "puts you in a state of confusion and doesn't allow you to focus on what you should be doing, and that is to continue to rebuild your business after a pandemic."
The article also includes an admission by a former SBA regional administrator who helped with the agency's response. "On the disaster side," he admitted, "we did a terrible job." However, it doesn't quite matter, as there will be no consequences for the agency. And the next time around, whether for a pandemic or a hurricane, the SBA will be called to the front lines yet again. And when it fails again, people will be outraged and wonder how this could have happened again.
I'm picking on the SBA, but the same criticism applies to other agencies and many other government efforts. Remember the flaw-filled rollout of the Obama-era Healthcare.gov? Remember the invasion of Iraq and discovering that there weren't weapons of mass destruction there after all? Remember former President Donald Trump's trade war, which was supposed to bring jobs back to the United States?
Books will be written for years to come about the utter failure of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to perform the most basic of responsibilities—preparing for a COVID-19-like pandemic. Authors will comment on all the CDC's well-documented fiascoes, like the unwillingness to use existing COVID-19 tests and the failure to recommend that schools be opened like they are, successfully, in many other countries. Similar books will be written about the Food and Drug Administration's poor handling of the crisis. The best of these books will even examine the agencies' pasts and note that the recent mismanagements are just more of the same.
Unfortunately, the incentives within government are such that this pattern won't change. After all, the same institution that's unable to run the Postal Service or Amtrak without being in the red orchestrated the withdrawal from Afghanistan and our previous stay there for 20 years. The only thing that will make a difference is if we, the American people, start demanding accountability and reform. That may include the termination of a few—or perhaps many—agencies and programs.
There is need to beat a dead horse regarding our humiliation in Afghanistan—the hasty retreat, the desperate refugees clinging to the last planes out of Kabul, the billions of dollars of weapons that were left behind for no reason (other than to provide a new slush fund for D.C.’s military-industrial campaign contributors). Think of the $1 trillion borrowed and spent and the trillions that will be owed in interest for a war that took 20 years to lose (and the one-third of your work-life the government confiscates, in taxes, to obtain those trillions). Consider the tens of thousands of Americans killed and maimed after it was already clear that both Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had decamped from Afghanistan and that there was no reason for us to be there.
As a rule, the press pins failures of this magnitude either on a Republican president, during Republican administrations, or on faceless, nameless low-level bureaucrats, during Democratic administrations.
But this week, we’re seeing something very strange: The leftist media is blaming Joe Biden for the Afghan calamity. That’s actually what CNN’s homepage was calling it, as of Tuesday afternoon (August 12)—”Biden’s Afghan Calamity.” Another headline reports that Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked and for Biden to be removed from office. Another says “Biden owns the mess he created”; another, “Afghanistan’s collapse was not pre-ordained.” On MSNBC’s homepage, the top headline says “Biden’s hope for Afghanistan isn’t a strategy.”
Leftist anchormen across the broadcast and cable networks are blaming Biden. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked “How did President Biden get this so wrong?” NBC’s Savannah Guthrie called the Afghan withdrawal a fiasco and a debacle, and then played clips of Biden saying Kabul wouldn’t turn into Saigon. Biden says, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States in Afghanistan”; Guthrie follows up, “and yet that’s precisely what we have seen over these last few days.”
So what’s going on? Has the leftist press finally grown a spine, or a sense of right and wrong? On the contrary: The sudden and complete reversal of the press’s attitude towards Biden looks a lot like the media have received new marching orders, and permission to criticize the president.
Kamala Harris has been entirely offstage during the humiliation in Afghanistan, and the subsequent humiliation of Joe Biden. Biden himself may have been utterly surprised at what happened in Afghanistan, but the people who are actually running the country and calling the shots—whoever they may be—knew exactly what they were doing.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re running the Democratic party. Biden obviously is too senile to continue as figurehead much longer. Kamala is the least popular vice president in a generation. You want Biden gone, and you want an alternative to Kamala for 2024.
You’d start by allowing an incredible catastrophe to happen. And then, when Biden most needs the support from the press that he’s so used to getting, you’d yank that support out from under him. Bring out calls for a full investigation (the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by a Democrat and controlled by Democrats, yesterday announced a full bipartisan inquiry). The object is forcing Biden to resign.
Then Kamala would be elevated to the presidency—and the VP spot would be vacant, giving the Democrats a chance to pick a new, less-hated leader to become VP. The new VP would be perfectly positioned to run for president in 2024, replacing Kamala at the top of the ticket.
Per the 25th Amendment, when the VP spot is vacant, “the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority of both Houses of Congress.” Right now, the Democrats could get essentially anyone they want confirmed by both houses. Without Kamala as Senate president, the Senate would be a true 50-50 split, but the Romney-Murkowski wing of the GOP can be counted on to confirm whomever Kamala might appoint.
Republicans, by echoing the calls for investigation and resignation originating from the Left, have yet another chance to play right into Democrats’ hands, helping make room for Biden and Kamala’s successor.
After 2022—no matter how hard they cheat—the Democrats are very unlikely to keep control of the House. So if they want to keep the 2024 presidential election within reach—if they want to keep Trump from returning to the White House, and more than anything in the world, they do—they have to move fast. The first step will be getting rid of Biden.
And it looks like the ejection of Biden may already have begun.
Congressman Launches Investigation Into Biden Administration's Plan to Spy on American Citizens
By Dillon Burroughs August 19, 2021
Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday demanding records and a briefing on the agency’s proposal to use third-party companies to spy on Americans.
“The Obama-Biden FBI spied on President Trump’s campaign in 2016,” Jordan claimed in a tweet.
“And now the Biden-Harris DHS is looking to use third-party contractors to circumvent the Constitution and spy on American citizens.”
The Obama-Biden FBI spied on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.
And now the Biden-Harris DHS is looking to use third-party contractors to circumvent the Constitution and spy on American citizens. https://t.co/9VrSHaQR1o
“According to recent reports, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intends to use third-party contractors to spy on the social media communications of American citizens for signs of ‘extremist’ threats,” Jordan’s letter stated.
“DHS’s use of non-governmental entities to engage in this warrantless surveillance is reportedly designed to circumvent legal restrictions that prohibit law enforcement and intelligence agencies from spying on Americans. DHS’s use of private companies — including social media platforms — to spy on online communications would have serious consequences for the civil liberties of all Americans.”
ordan chronicled the recent admission of the White House’s collusion with Facebook as a clear example of recent concerns.
“Last month, the Biden White House acknowledged that the Administration has been colluding with tech giant Facebook to target and remove disfavored speech online,” the congressman wrote.
“Now it appears that the Biden Administration wants to expand its collaboration with Big Tech to, in the words of DHS Assistant Secretary John Cohen, ‘dramatically expand [the] focus’ of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis to monitor social media and other communications platforms.”
Jordan noted the issue is important because the Biden administration has often redefined extremism within America.
“[T]he Department has a history of targeting Americans for holding ‘suspicious views,’ such as being pro-Second Amendment, favoring lower levels of immigration, or opposing the use of force by police,” he said.
In response to his concerns, Jordan made a number of requests. First, he asked for a “staff-level briefing on the DHS’s initiative to expand its domestic surveillance of social media platforms and other online communications networks.”
Second, he demanded all “documents and communications referring or relating to any effort to expand or enhance the Office of Intelligence and Analysis’s capabilities to monitor Americans’
activity online.”
Jordan also requested all “document and communications referring or relating to DHS’s analyses of the legality for the Department” and all “documents and communications referring or relating to DHS encouraging or directing social media platforms or online communications networks to monitor user content and report certain content to DHS.”
Jordan included a deadline of Sept. 1 for delivery of his requests.
“Calls to ramp up U.S. intelligence monitoring of Americans online escalated in the Jan. 6 aftermath as the left-wing activists who dominate the nation’s digital public square rapidly implemented a purge of conservative accounts,” The Federalist noted on Thursday.
“In April, even the U.S. Postal Service reportedly began to conduct surveillance of citizen social media activity under the Internet Covert Operations Program.”
The Associated Press attempted a hit piece on Florida Governor Ron DeSantisover his promotion for monoclonal antibody treatment for early stage COVID recovery. The treatment from Regeneron was purchased by the federal government in January of 2021. However, the AP attempted to claim a small investor in Regeneron was also a supporter of Ron DeSantis…. the implication was a quid-pro-quo.
