RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/afghanistan-southern-us-border-show-biden-kevin-roberts/

The debacle in Afghanistan is still unfolding, but it is already one of the signal disasters of American history. It’s usually premature to assess contemporary events in history’s light, so it’s a sign of just how bad things are in Kabul that I — a historian — am ready to put it alongside the Bay of Pigs, the Fall of Saigon, the Black Hawk Down incident, and 9/11 itself in the list of era-defining American humiliations. It’s bad enough that it’s happening – what’s worse is that we chose it.

And it’s not an aberration for our unmoored American federal government regardless of who occupies the White House or controls Congress. Confronted with a whole summer of insurrectionary violence in American cities, it can’t seem to bring itself to guarantee public order. Confronted with angry citizens overrunning the very seat of its rule on Capitol Hill, it can’t seem to defend itself. Confronted with a metastasizing narco-state threat in Mexico, and a historic crisis of human trafficking overwhelming national borders, it can’t seem to do much but watch.

Yet when confronted with states organizing in blocs to execute tasks reserved to itself — the so-called “Western States Pact” comes to mind, as do the various states sending forces to the U.S.-Mexico border — the federal government seems strangely passive and inert. Perhaps that’s to the good.

It’s tempting to look at unforced errors like this in isolation, just one episode among many. We shouldn’t. The truth is that Afghanistan is part of a larger pattern. Pull the camera back a bit, and the picture becomes more disturbing than even the grim images from Kabul’s beleaguered airport. The incompetence on display in that country is just the latest episode of blundering from a federal government that increasingly cannot do anything it should.

The national government as envisioned and established by the American Founders has just one purpose, succinctly set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these rights.” Since then, Americans have come to expect federal governance in Washington, D.C., to fulfill an array of roles. For most of American history, it did a credible job of meeting those expectations. Americans of my parents’ generation, for example, reasonably expected the federal government to successfully defend them from enemies abroad and secure law and order at home. They expected it to meet the challenge of public health crises, and run an efficient immigration system. They expected it to assert a monopoly on national authority, and to promote and defend a common American civic narrative.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/fort-hood-kabul-lloyd-billingsley/

In his delayed response to the terrorist bombing that killed 13 Americans, Joe Biden mumbled something about his late son Beau but mentioned not a single American victim by name. That recalls the Delaware Democrat’s response to another deadly terrorist attack, on U.S. soil, that also claimed 13 American lives.

In 2009, U.S. Army major Nidal Hasan, a self-described “soldier of Allah,” was communicating with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki about killing Americans. As congressional hearings made clear, the FBI was on to Hasan but bureau bosses dropped the surveillance. On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Hasan murdered 13 American soldiers and wounded more than 40 others.

For the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, it was only “workplace violence,” not even gun violence. Vice president Joe Biden said, “Jill and I join the President and Michelle in expressing our sympathies to the families of the brave soldiers who fell today.  We are all praying for those who were wounded and hoping for their full and speedy recovery.  Our thoughts and prayers are also with the entire Fort Hood community as they deal with this senseless tragedy.”

These unarmed soldiers were gunned down by Nidal Hasan in a terrorist attack, but for Biden they only “fell,” as though it was some sort of accident. For the vice president, the mass murder was only a “senseless tragedy,” not a deliberate mass murder, carefully planned. As vice president, Biden would have access to the best information, but he mentioned not a single American victim by name. As it happened, those soldiers were shipping out to Afghanistan, and Joe Biden’s mentor has a history there.

A Biden loyalist since his first presidential run, Tom Donilon was an assistant secretary of state under Bill Clinton. Donilon’s troubles as a Fannie Mae lobbyist, and lack of experience in foreign affairs, did not prevent his rise to national security advisor, a choice that troubled even Robert Scheer of The Nation.

In Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of State at War, Robert Gates wrote that Donilon characterized the United States military as “in revolt” and “insubordinate.” Donilon, who had never been in the military, “bridled” when Gen. McChrystal announced a “counterinsurgency” strategy in Afghanistan. “Obama’s Gray Man,” as Donilon was known, did not want American troops to be seen defeating their enemies. The composite character president took that to another level.

In exchange for one American deserter, Bowe Bergdahl, Obama sprung five hard-core Taliban commanders from Guantanamo Bay. It was like trading Private Slovik for the German high command. Released with the others in 2014, Khairullah Khairkhwa proceeded to reunite the Taliban and help them capture power in Afghanistan.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-victory-lap-around-afghan-defeat/

President Biden walked to the White House podium on Tuesday and proclaimed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan an ‘extraordinary success’. He relied on the unanimous advice of military leaders and strategic advisers for these wise decisions. If there were any failures, they were due to Donald Trump. Never in history, he said, had there been such a successful airlift. Of the Americans who wanted to leave, we got out an amazing 90 percent. Surely that’s a success all around, despite the collapse of the Afghan army, which nobody expected. Of course, as a far-sighted leader, Biden said he had ordered plans for that, too. Best of all, he said, we accomplished our goal in Afghanistan, which was to prevent al-Qaeda from setting up a base there to strike the US or its allies. After that resounding success, we no longer needed to keep troops in the country to protect America. If any terrorists reassemble, we have great ‘over-the-horizon’ capabilities to discover them and take them out.

Every one of those claims is false.

Calling the evacuation mission an ‘extraordinary success’ is worse than false. It is shameful. Biden is taking credit for a humiliating defeat that leaves thousands of innocents behind. He should be shouldering the blame, as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower did when he drafted a statement to be read if the D-Day landings failed. Fortunately, Ike never had to read that statement. Joe Biden took the opposite approach. When the evacuation mission in Afghanistan ended in chaos, he simply decided to read the ‘victory statement’. Americans are likely to see it for what it is.

https://leonupsidedown.blogspot.com/2021/08/calling-all-trump-haters.html

You might recall my dire warnings after Biden became president. If you missed it, here it is. In summary, I said that the world will become a very dangerous place. I believe it has. Do you? If not, I’d love to hear from you.

To all my friends who might not have hated former President Trump but had issues with him:

What do you think now? Do you miss his brash arrogance? His annoying bragging of his successes? His red cap ‘Make America Great’?  I didn’t think so. But just maybe right about now, after the disaster in Afghanistan, you hopefully are getting my old point. I pleaded with you last year to look past his personality if you didn’t like what you saw or heard. I told you then that world leaders are by their very nature arrogant and therefore not usually liked. But if their policies are moral then they are to be admired and supported. 

I told you then that the mainstream media has aligned itself so closely with the Left that they have become an arm of the Democratic party. Their biased reporting is dangerous and needs to be called out as such. I urged you then and continue to urge you now to do your own research. If you continue to watch CNN to ‘get the facts’, you will be sorely misinformed. The disaster unfolding before us in Afghanistan presents us yet another dangerous blunder by the Biden administration. Any child could have figured out that if the US wanted to pull out of Afghanistan (whether they should have or not is another discussion entirely), then the order of actions should be first to remove all US citizens, then remove American weapons and finally to remove their armed forces. Biden did the opposite, putting Americans there in extreme danger. 13 American soldiers have already been killed recently and hundreds of sympathetic Afghans have been murdered as well. Thousands are injured and are suffering. Millions more lives are at stake. The rest will be hunted down, tortured and used as hostages. This despite Biden’s public promise that no American will be left behind. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-telling-refugee-groups-to-prep-for-50k-afghans-without-visas/

The Biden administration has reportedly told refugee resettlement organizations across the U.S. to prepare to assist as many as 50,000 Afghans who will be arriving to the U.S. in the coming weeks without visas.

The U.S. government has not provided exact figures on how many Afghans the organizations should expect to help or how quickly they will arrive, said leaders from some of the nine nonprofit organizations that are contracted with the U.S. State Department to assist refugees with finding homes, jobs and other social services, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The groups have not been told which of the impending arrivals will come with approved Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) that will allow them to receive a slew of services, including months of healthcare and food assistance. 

For Afghans who arrive without visas, resettlement will rely instead on private donations, the report says. These people will be allowed to enter the U.S. as part of an immigration program known as humanitarian parole that grants people temporary permission to enter the country. 

People who enter under humanitarian parole are not entitled to resettlement benefits set aside for formal refugees. 

“We’re going to make it work, no matter how difficult, but I’d be lying to you if I said we aren’t concerned,” Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, one of the contracted resettlement agencies, told the Journal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/author/joel-zinberg/

Progressives remain unconcerned with the eviction moratorium’s impact on small landlords.

Late last week the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a stay on a lower-court decision that struck down the Biden administration’s extension of the CDC’s nationwide eviction moratorium. Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the Court’s decision was “cruel” and that it “immorally ripped away” tenant protections. But who is really cruel here? Neither Pelosi nor her progressive colleagues seem at all concerned about the plight of small landlords whose pandemic losses have been exacerbated by the moratorium combined with government ineptitude and indifference.

Yet, as the Court observed, “many landlords have modest means,” and millions of them around the country are “at risk of irreparable harm by depriving them of rent payments with no guarantee of eventual recovery.” A CBS Evening News story described one of them.

Brandie LaCasse, a veteran and single mother, has effectively been rendered homeless by tenants who refuse to leave her upstate New York house or pay rent. Despite more than $23,000 in arrears, LaCasse couldn’t evict her tenant because of federal and state eviction moratoriums. She and her daughter have been forced to live out of her car or stay with friends. Meanwhile, the tenant’s complaints about her own family’s health and financial travails make it clear that LaCasse is unlikely ever to collect any of the back the rent due.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/31/bidens-presidency-is-already-a-total-disaster-and-its-all-his-own-fault/

President Biden is not being swept along by the currents of history, he is turning every challenge he faces into crisis and disaster.

The first seven months of Joe Biden’s presidency have been fraught with crises. First it was the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccine rollout. Then it was the border crisis. Then it was the economy.

And now Afghanistan, where the Taliban are now reportedly hanging people by the neck from U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopters, and the U.S. withdrawal has left behind hundreds of Americans and perhaps thousands of Green Card holders in what now amounts to the largest hostage crisis in American history.

The administration is stumbling from one disaster to the next, with no end in sight and public opinion plummeting on nearly every major issue. In each case, the disaster has been entirely of the Biden administration’s own making. Events are not overtaking Biden, his own rank incompetence is.

(Just about the only disaster facing Biden right now that’s not a result of his administration’s policies is the hurricane slamming into the Gulf Coast. But there’s a decent chance he might well botch that, too.)

The events now unfolding in Afghanistan, where the Taliban control about $83 billion worth of U.S. military equipment, are by far the most dramatic and disturbing display of incompetency and horrible policy from the Biden administration, which recent polling reflects. But the Afghanistan disaster follows a train of incompetence that left the station on day one of this presidency.

As soon as Biden came into office, he signed executive orders that guaranteed we would have a migrant crisis on our southwest border. By reversing a raft of Trump-era policies that had managed to control illegal immigration amid a worsening pandemic, Biden effectively opened the borders, sending the message to would-be asylum seekers that if they could manage to get across the Rio Grande with at least one child in tow, they could stay — and if they sent their child alone, he or she would definitely stay.