RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/inside-the-underground-railroad-out?token=e

On Saturday night I had just sat down to have a drink with a friend when he got a call. He apologized for having to take it, but it was urgent: it was about the Afghan women’s orchestra. They were stuck in Kabul and desperate to get out. He was involved in the effort to extract them.

Twenty minutes later, we ordered another martini. 

I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks about luck. The luck of where we are born. The luck of the parents we are born to. And, right now, the luck of who we know.

Knowing — or having proximity to someone who knows my well-placed friend, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is a matter of life or death for untold numbers of Afghans. 

Listen to the plea of just one of them:

The question of who will live and who will die — part of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer that all Jews say on the high holy days, which are just around the corner — is supposed to be in the hands of God. But right now, for so many Afghans, the answer to that question is in the hands of the Taliban. The chance to live relies on Americans: those who have the luck to live in freedom and those who are determined to right what the Biden administration has gotten so horribly wrong.

Melissa Chen is one of those people.

Melissa co-founded an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders, which digitizes and translates English books and articles into Arabic. And not just any books: Books like Orwell’s ‘“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now,” and a graphic novel based on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Works that promote reason, pluralism and liberty. Suffice it to say the translators she works with in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq do so at great risk.

Because of her connections in the Middle East — and because she is the kind of person who lives by her principles — it did not surprise me that she found herself involved in the efforts to save Afghans from the horrors of the Taliban. She shares some of the details of those remarkable efforts in the essay below.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Nearly twenty years ago, on September 11, 2001 ago radical Islamist terrorists conducted the deadliest terror attacks ever carried out on American soil, in the history of our nation.

The administration of President George W. Bush, in response to the terror attacks, working with America’s allies sent the military to the Middle East to hunt down those responsible for the deadly attacks and to deprive al-Qaeda and other terror organization with sanctuaries from which they could launch terror attacks in the United States and other countries around the world.

Afghanistan was considered a key to our military operations.

President George W. Bush and then President Obama both justified the use of our military forces overseas by declaring that we were fighting the terrorists “over there” so that we would not have to fight them “over here.”

I took issue with that absurd statement in an article I wrote several years ago, Fighting The War On Terror Here, There And Everywhere.

We will delve into the issue of how the war on terror needed to be pursued domestically as well as overseas shortly.  (Think immigration law enforcement.)

But first, the disastrous strategic decisions of President Joe Biden to pull our troops out of Afghanistan have reverberated around the world.

Our allies fear that America can not be trusted and has no resolve to stand up and our nation’s enemies are greatly encouraged by Biden’s lack of resolve.  There is a fundamental principle that states that negotiations should never be conducted from a position of weakness but from a position of strength, however Joe and his policies could not be weaker.

The issue is not that Biden ordered our troops out of Afghanistan, there are many, including former President Trump, who believe that the time has come for American forces to be removed from Afghanistan.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/blinken-confirms-u-s-left-hundreds-of-americans-behind-in-afghanistan/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken vowed that the U.S. will continue to help Americans and Afghan allies leave Afghanistan following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, in a speech at the White House on Monday evening.

Blinken said the U.S. has suspended its diplomatic presence in Afghanistan and transferred that presence to Doha, Qatar. Diplomats stationed in Doha will “coordinate engagement and messaging to the Taliban” moving forward.

The last U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan flew out of Hamid Karzai International Airport on Monday, ending a two-decade war. U.S. Central Command head, General Frank McKenzie, admitted at a press conference that “we did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,” referring to Americans and Afghans stranded in the country.

“We will continue our relentless efforts to help Americans, foreign nationals, and Afghans, leave Afghanistan if they choose,” Blinken said, adding that the U.S. “made extraordinary efforts to give Americans every opportunity to depart the country.”

Around 6,000 “self-identified” Americans have left Afghanistan, Blinken said, with “under 200” Americans “who remain in Afghanistan and want to leave. We’re trying to determine exactly how many.” 

Blinken did not estimate how many U.S. green-card holders or Afghan allies remained in the country. 

“We’ve worked intensely to evacuate and relocate Afghans who worked alongside us and are in particular risk of reprisal,” Blinken said. “We’ve gotten many out, but many are still there. We will keep working to help them.”

Americans and Afghans faced significant hurdles reaching the airport, including Taliban checkpoints and the threat of terror attacks. An attack by ISIS-K, the ISIS affiliate in Central Asia, killed 13 American soldiers and close to 200 Afghans at the airport on Thursday.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/09/13/bidens-blunders/#slide-1

Four. That’s the number of crises Joe Biden said the nation faced when he accepted the 2020 Demo­cratic presidential nomination. His list included the coronavirus pandemic, the precarious economy, ensuring racial equity in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, and climate change. By the time Biden became president, he had added to his index of emergencies the fate of democracy, truth, and America’s role in the world. “Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways,” Biden said during his inaugural address. “But the fact is we face them all at once, presenting this nation with the gravest of responsibilities.”

They are responsibilities that Biden cannot handle. Not only has he failed to solve the problems he identified during the campaign; he’s created a whole new set of challenges that run from America’s southern border to the Hindu Kush. As a result, the public has re-evaluated his conduct and capability. The buzzwords that filled coverage of Biden’s early days — “hypercompetent,” “normalcy,” “unity,” “transformative” — now seem inappropriate and silly. The comparisons that some pundits made last spring between Biden and LBJ, FDR, and Ronald Reagan were premature at the time. Now they just look ridiculous.

Every presidency has bad moments. What makes Biden’s rough patch notable is its suddenness and contingency. Only a few months ago, it might have seemed as if he was making progress on issues such as the pandemic and the economy. Unexpected developments, as well as unforced errors on the border and in Afghanistan, have now undermined confidence in his leadership and eroded his public standing. The Delta variant of the coronavirus, inflation, crime, illegal immigration, and national humiliation at the hands of the Taliban have done more than complicate Biden’s efforts to sign into law the largest expansion of government since the Great Society. They have put Democratic control of Congress at risk — and the country in jeopardy.

Biden is president because his priorities tracked closely with those of the 2020 electorate. Take the coronavirus pandemic. The plurality of voters who rated it the most important issue in a postelection poll by Fox News supported Biden two to one. While the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research had a slightly more complicated and confusing issue breakdown, it also showed that the voters who had rated either the pandemic or health-care policy as the most important issue went for Biden by lopsided margins.

Americans gave Biden’s coronavirus response high marks during the first half of the year. He took the pandemic seriously. His team ramped up production and distribution of the vaccines authorized for emergency use under his predecessor. In a March speech, Biden predicted that the summer of 2021 would “begin to mark our independence from this virus.” In May, the Centers for Disease Control announced that vaccinated individuals no longer needed to wear masks indoors. Case numbers and deaths plunged from January through July.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/569973-kamala-harris-the-absentee-vp-by-design

She was supposed to be a major player in the Biden administration after being lauded as an historic, consequential figure in her role as America’s first female vice president. 

“Harris Has the Potential To Change the Face of U.S. Politics,” read a November 2020 Politico headline that echoed many others at the time. And not long after Joe Biden was sworn in as the nation’s 46th president, the administration insisted she should be known as her boss’s equal. 

“Please be sure to reference the current administration as the ‘Biden-Harris Administration’ in official public communications,” a March directive read, emphasizing Biden-Harris in boldface.

Kamala Harris may have crashed and burned as a 2020 presidential candidate, dropping out well before the first votes were cast in Iowa. But Biden chose her as his running mate anyway. It’s not clear exactly what Harris brought to the ticket outside of checking off a few demographic boxes. 

Foreign policy credentials? Nope. Business experience? None. A track record of working with Republicans to pass important legislation? Not even close. In fact, an analysis by the non-partisan GovTrack showed that she was the most liberal member of the Senate, even further to the left than democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But she had been California’s attorney general, so perhaps Team Biden felt her record on crime could help her lead the way in reducing the violent crime that has engulfed American cities since the summer of 2020, resulting in mass resignations and retirements among the police.

Not at all. In fact, during the presidential primaries, Harris’s Twitter account publicly promoted a bail fund for rioters in Minneapolis, a city that’s seen violent crime spike under the current administration. 

“If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota,” it tweeted in June 2020 as Minneapolis was under siege to the tune of more than $500 million in damage. 

https://jimtreacher.substack.com/p/whos-telling-biden-not-to-answer

Kanye just dropped an album, war rages in the Middle East, a hurricane is hitting Louisiana, and everybody hates the president.

Welcome to 2005.

Again and again, Joe Biden keeps telling us he’s not supposed to answer questions. “They told me not to answer questions.” “I’m gonna get in trouble if I answer questions.” Over and over, the most powerful man in the free world insists he’s not the one in charge.

He did it again over the weekend:

“I’m not supposed to take any questions, but go ahead… I’m not gonna answer Afghanistan now.”

Why isn’t Joe Biden supposed to take any questions? Who’s telling him not to take questions, and what’s the rationale? (We all know the real reason: He’s an idiot. But his own aides can’t say that.) What happens to him when he disobeys? Is this sort of thing normal for a POTUS to say? Shouldn’t he be the one to decide whether or not he takes questions?

And why don’t any of these reporters want to know? Their whole purpose for being there is to ask the president questions. Shouldn’t they wonder why he’s expressly telling them he’s not “supposed to”?

If my job was to follow the president around and write down what he says, and he told me he’s not supposed to take questions, I would ask why not. Wouldn’t you?

Just kidding. Biden is a Democrat. That sort of self-righteously aggrieved hectoring is reserved for Republicans in power.

In Joe’s defense, he’s a busy guy with a lot going on right now. Just look at how he was able to multitask as he paid his respects to the 13 Marines who died because of his incompetence:

Nicholas Fondacaro @NickFondacaro
It’s true. Joe Biden checked his watch during the dignified transfer of the servicemembers killing in Afghanistan at the airport. You can see him jerk his left hand to pull the watch out from under his sleeve, then look down at it.