RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.dw.com/en/us-kamala-harris-visits-asia-amid-afghan-crisis/a-58949210

Kamala Harris will become the first US vice president to Vietnam. Her visit, however, comes at a time of a humiliating withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

US Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Singapore on Sunday, kicking off her trip to Southeast Asia where she is expected to offer reassurances of Washington’s commitment to the region.

The vice-president’s visit come just days after the chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan and the subsequent takeover of the country by the Taliban.

The return to power of the hardline Islamists in the conflict-ridden country has dented the United States’ credibility and cast a shadow over its resolve to defend its values.

During her visit, which began on Friday and includes stops in Singapore and Vietnam, Harris will likely seek to allay concerns about US dependability.

A foreign policy novice?

The trip will also provide Harris, an Asian-American whose mother was of Indian-origin, a forum to assert herself directly in foreign affairs.

The longtime district attorney and former senator is largely untested in diplomacy and foreign policy.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/08/22/david_brooks_reproaches_elites_recycles_cliches_about_the_people_146288.html 

“The left still has a long way to go to understand the right and what ails America.”

To grasp the left’s rage and the right’s embitterment, it is useful to keep in mind a major asymmetry that marks the nation’s long-standing culture wars: The right tends to know the left better than the left knows the right.

Notwithstanding the occasional risible protestation, progressives dominate the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, Silicon Valley, the K-12 education establishment, and the universities. This means that progressive ideas, progressive sentiments, and progressive tastes pervade the culture. Denizens of red America need only turn on the TV, watch Hollywood movies, listen to popular music, follow major league sports, or send their kids to public schools and most any college or university in the country to encounter progressives’ flattering self-portraits and their airbrushed depictions of the progressive spirit in action. In contrast, residents of blue America generally only know of red America through the condescending lens of progressive reporting, opining, and imagining.

In the absence of unusual exertions, blue America operates based on a caricature of red America. A dramatic expression of progressives’ unfamiliarity with the interests and outlook of roughly half of their fellow citizens was the failure of the elite news media — whose job, it was long thought, was to inform the nation—to anticipate even the possibility of a Donald Trump victory in the 2016 Republican primaries and his subsequent defeat of Hillary Clinton in the general election. Another prominent example was their inability to explain how, despite a global pandemic and his manifest shortcomings, President Trump was able to increase his total number of votes in 2020, attract more African American and Latino votes than he had four years before, and come within 44,000 votes in three states of winning the Electoral College a second time.

Early in 2016, as Trump emerged as the favorite to win the Republican nomination, New York Times columnist David Brooks honorably recognized the limitations of his understanding of the nation he had covered for more than three decades. In March of that year, in a column headlined “No, Not Trump, Not Ever,” Brooks offered a mea culpa. Along with most of the experts, he had “expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough.” Although Brooks conveyed the obligatory contempt for Trump in that column, he also pledged to listen more carefully and learn more about America: “For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/08/22/taliban-sets-woman-on-fire-for-bad-cooking-n1471797

There’s more at stake in Afghanistan than U.S. prestige or the future of Joe Biden’s presidency. Millions of women in Afghanistan who were just starting to assert their rights as females are now condemned to being sent back to the Middle Ages under the Taliban’s notion of “women’s rights.”

Admittedly, the Afghanistan version of women’s liberation, even with the presence of thousands of American troops, was unrecognizable to most western women. Strictures placed on female behavior as well as opportunities for employment had been dictated by the Islamic religion. And there are other Muslim countries with almost as severe rules and regulations women must abide by as they will be forced to in Taliban Afghanistan.

But freedom of any kind must be nurtured and encouraged. The Taliban would destroy any hope of a future for Afghan women and girls.

As an illustration of what Afghan women are in for, one activist tells what happened to a woman forced to cook for the Taliban.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/08/22/biden-addresses-afghanistan-and-tropical-storm-henri-says-the-august-31-deadline-may-be-extended-n1471872

Joe Biden emerged at the White House Sunday afternoon, about 20 minutes after the 4 PM Eastern time he slated, to address the crisis in Afghanistan and the Tropical Storm Henri as it batters the U.S. east coast.

Biden opened his remarks discussing Henri, and stumbled badly over the name of the current head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and said he has spoken with each of the governors in the storm zone. He read off a list of things the federal government is doing to deal with the storm.

After spending several minutes on the storm and urging Americans to get vaccinated, Biden turned to the situation in Afghanistan. He claimed the U.S. has evacuated 11,000 individuals out of the country he abandoned, and which then fell to the Taliban a week ago, triggering the massive crisis there.

He promised that “Any American who wants to get home will get home.” He also promised to remove Afghans who worked with the U.S. and NATO, and then said a total of over 30,000 have been evacuated since August 14.

He said the evacuation would have been “hard and painful” no matter when it began, “It’s just a fact.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/21/remember-what-they-did-to-daniel-pearl/

On January 28, 2021, the Pakistan Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Omar Sheikh, the man previously convicted of playing a role in the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Domestic politics obscured the story for most Americans. But now that thousands of Americans remain in Afghanistan—some on the wrong side of the tiny bubble of protection offered by our retreating troops—it’s worth remembering what happened to this unarmed civilian reporter.

Pearl risked his life to give the Islamists the opportunity to put their best face forward to the world. The radicals used the opportunity to show us who they really  are. 

The description of the video I’m about to provide is from memory as I am unable to locate the original on the internet. Pearl’s captors recorded a video of Daniel Pearl begging for his life. The journalist readily confessed to his Jewish ancestry and offered no resistance nor demonstrated any hostility to his captors. The captors then stabbed Pearl to death. They then used a knife to slowly sever his head from his shoulders with a sawing motion. When they finished they held the head by the hair as a trophy while shouting for joy. A few stills from the video remain available here.

Before disappearing, Pearl was last known to be in Karachi, Pakistan. On January 23, 2002 he let the Wall Street Journal know that he was on his way to interview a prominent figure in the Islamic movement—likely a Taliban leader or a related movement. Four days later, the group sent an email with pictures of Pearl in chains. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/21/the-rotten-edifice-revealed/

Doubtless you have read or heard comments like those of the TV journalist Jen Griffen about Joe Biden’s brief remarks on Friday regarding Afghanistan. “I’m having a hard time digesting what we heard,” she said, “because I couldn’t fact-check it fast enough in real-time because there were so many misrepresentations of what is happening on the ground.” Bottom line: “This was just an alternate reality that was presented to us from the White House.” 

I presume what she had in mind were statements by Biden like this: “We know of no instance where the Taliban are not letting our citizens through the checkpoints freely.”

Or, in response to a question from the Associated Press, that he has seen “no question of our credibility from our allies around the world.” 

The problem is, of course, the wondrous world of instant communications. We have all seen these videos of the Taliban manhandling the crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden Administration by the British Parliament. And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. 

For the last week, chaos has ruled, notwithstanding Biden’s assurance on July 8 that the (supposedly) 300,000-man-strong Afghan army was among the best equipped and trained in the world and would be able to handle the 75,000-man-strong Taliban (which, for some reason, he pronounces “tally-bahn”). Pentagon spokesman John Kirby echoed his sentiment a few days later: “Kabul does not face an imminent threat from the Taliban,” he said on August 14.  

“Imminent” is such a relative concept. 

A Crisis of Legitimacy 

One word has been repeated again and again, all along the ideological spectrum, in the reporting on the disaster in Afghanistan: “incompetence.” 

Incompetence there has been aplenty, and its display is both depressing and ubiquitous. It turns out that the technocratic elite to which we have entrusted our lives, not to mention the lives of the Afghans, is technically maladroit and incapable of effective governance. Our preposterous and “woke” Secretary of Defense epitomized the incapacity a few days ago when he admitted that the United States does not have the “capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” Hello? 

But incompetence is only a surface presentation of a much deeper malady, which revolves around the question of legitimacy. 

I mean this in the deepest sense.  It’s not just a matter of whether certain rules have been followed in putting various people in office or securing their government sinecures. 

That’s one sort, perhaps an essential but ultimately superficial sort, of legitimacy.  

What is happening here is something much deeper, more existential, if you will.

What just happened—what is happening still—in Afghanistan is an unfolding horror for the Afghan people.  

For the United States, it is a rude snatching away of the curtain of legitimacy. 

That curtain concealed a rotting edifice. 

Many people have known this for some time. Some are only now, suddenly, aware or half aware of it.