RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jim-webb-afghanistan-withdrawal-debacle-american-founding-constitution-accountability-11630357157?st=wcdqzs63qmahfv6&reflink=article_email_share

Former Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) writing for the National Interest, Aug. 29:

In a perverse way, perhaps we should look at the calamitous blunderings in Afghanistan as an opportunity to demand a true turning point. Americans know that a great deal of our governmental process is now either institutionally corrupt or calcified. . . .

Even the very best among those who come forward to serve often find that the good they came to do is stultified by distracting debates over the very premise of why the American system of government was created and whether the icons of our past were truly motivated by the words incorporated in our most revered documents. The military itself is increasingly being used by leftist activists as a social laboratory to advance extreme political agendas. Congressional oversight leans heavily toward social issues, with too many members struggling without success to focus on accountability at the very top when, for instance, good people at the bottom have to implement poorly conceived plans that might kill them.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/08/29/did-biden-fall-asleep-during-meeting-with-bennett/

Video posted on social media Saturday, which showed United States President Joe Biden seemingly falls asleep during a meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, had users speculate whether that was indeed the case.

Footage was posted on Twitter by Knesset member for Likud Galit Distal Atbaryan. “For some reason, the Israeli media itself fell asleep and did not notice this historical moment,” she wrote. “I thought that you should know about this. The man fell asleep and simply does not care.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/29/after-afghanistan-u-s-still-doesnt-know-shiite-from-shinola/

With the American media as master of ceremonies, our pundits and politicians—all partners in the neocon-neoliberal joint venture in Afghanistan—are barking mad over the images coming out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, and the reality these optics portend.

Naturally, media “reporting” from Afghanistan is nothing but an unremitting sentimental gush, aimed at creating a state of heightened emotions. 

The children, the children! The translators, the translators! Americans held hostage behind enemy lines! exclaimed every “macho” personality at Fox News. The same litany runs on a continuous loop. 

Forbes reporters dissolved into puddles of tears at the sight of U.S. Air Force pilots bringing in planeloads of young, strong, military-aged men, unfreighted by women and children. 

On August 20, about 5,700 people had been flown out of Kabul. Only 169 were American. “Make no mistake,” slobbered Forbes, “lifting six times more people than an aircraft is designed to seat is a heroic achievement of logistics, skill, and sheer grit.” 

I see a medal of commendation in the future of the Empire’s pilot, who commandeered a U.S. Air Force C-17 to airlift 800 Afghan passengers from Kabul to Qatar. 

War: The Health of the State—And the Statists 

So, who exactly are those “trapped” Americans living in Afghanistan? 

What are they doing in such inhospitable climes, in a country most of whose inhabitants hated the American presence? And what is their business in Afghanistan? The incurious moron media have never asked. 

My guess is that U.S. citizens in Afghanistan have hitherto lived within Army-erected green zones, paid for by American taxpayers. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/29/our-afghan-nightmare-tanks-for-nothing/

Joe Biden’s scripted or no-questions press conferences, and the clean-up afterward by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Jen Psaki, have been some of the most misleading episodes in modern presidential history—mostly in what was not said rather than was exaggerated, warped, and misrepresented. 

Biden as Commander-in-Chief

The more Joe Biden mutters “The buck stops here” or “I take full responsibility,” the more we know he will not—and not just because of his now reduced mental state, but because 1) he repeats the same opportunist messaging that he has for the last 50 years of his political career, and 2) the only true thing he could say was “I ordered a withdrawal in the most reckless manner in U.S. military history.”

When Biden then blames Donald Trump, it raises the immediate questions: 

1) If the Afghanistan deal was so flawed, why did Biden stick with it, given his other radical departures from what he inherited on the border, on fossil fuels, on the Middle East—on just about everything before January 20, 2021? 

2) So, was it good or bad to withdraw all U.S. troops? Was Trump wrong to have bequeathed him a policy of graduated withdrawal, but Biden was right to have continued it for a while—only to have accelerated it into surrender and flight?

3) Why did the violence erupt on Biden’s rather than on Trump’s watch? And was his order for a hasty flight in the dead of night from Bagram Air Base also the inherited Trump departure plan?

When Joe Biden now threatens al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, and others with revenge, he sounds, unfortunately, more like the ridiculous Joe of “Corn Pop” braggadocio with his weaponized chain, or Joe taking Trump behind the gym to womp on him, or young Joe Biden slamming the mouthy kid’s head on the lunch counter. Speaking softly with a club is preferable to being loud with a twig.

We have all heard, ad nauseam, too many of Biden’s He-Man stories. The latest rhetoric does not hide the fact that Biden had opposed the Osama bin Laden raid, criticized the termination of Qasem Soleimani, left Afghanistan in the most shameful retreat in U.S. history, and is now begging the Saudis to pump more oil after cutting back on our ample supplies and trashing Riyadh as part of his return to the Obama pivot to Iran. 

Biden loves appeasement lists. He provided the Taliban with a list of whom we wished to evacuate. (When the Taliban soon knock on the door of an American in Kabul who thinks their message will be, “We’re here to escort you to your flight”?) In the same manner, Biden provided Putin with a helpful list of institutions he wanted Putin’s satellite cyber-criminals to exempt from hacking. 

https://www.theepochtimes.com/what-we-left-behind-in-afghanistan_3970655.html

Many of the reports coming out of Afghanistan this past week mention something that is simultaneously deplored and swept under the rug.

I mean the fact that when the United States raised the white flag to the Taliban it left behind an enormous amount of American-made military hardware.

Just a couple of weeks ago, all of that war-making matériel had been the property of two entities.

Some belonged to U.S. forces themselves.

A lot of it belonged to the U.S.-supplied Afghan government that was—the mighty 300,000 man-strong force that, on July 8, President Joe Biden said would prevail over the Taliban if push came to shove.

Push did come to shove, as we all know, and now those vast stores of military hardware are under sole control of the Taliban.

There have been several differing inventories of these stockpiles. One just published in the London Times provides perhaps the most authoritative accounting published to date.

Scattered in seven Afghan army garrisons across the country, from Kabul and Kandahar to Herat, Mazar-Sharif, Kunduz, these arms depots include an impressive amount of U.S. military hardware: 22,174 armored Humvees, for example, 42 pickup trucks and SUVS, 64,363 machine guns, 162,043 radios. 16,035 night vision goggles, 358,530 assault rifles (the real ones, not the “assault rifles” that Joe Biden warns about at home), 126,295 pistols, and 176 artillery pieces.

And that’s just for starters. The U.S. also generously left behind more than 100 helicopters, including 33 Blackhawks, 4 C-130 transport planes, and some 60 other fixed-wing aircraft.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/30/biden-makes-islamic-terrorism-great-again/

For the past several years, global terrorism was in retreat and had dropped off the list of Americans’ fears entirely. Now, after the debacle in Afghanistan, it’s suddenly front-page news again. Will a revival of terrorism be President Joe Biden’s legacy?

Rewind the tape to 2015. ISIS – which emerged as a powerhouse after President Barack Obama’s decision to evacuate Iraq – was claiming huge swaths of land, to the surprise of Obama (who had dismissed ISIS as the “JV team”). And, not coincidentally, the number of terrorist attacks spiked. In 2013, there were four Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide. By 2015, the number had exploded to 106, three of them in the U.S.

In 2015, ISIS struck in Paris in a coordinated assault, killing more than 130 people, and the attack in San Bernardino, California, claimed 14 lives and injured 22. Earlier that same year, terrorists killed five people at a recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, two in Garland, Texas. In the next year came the ISIS-inspired mass shooting at a Florida nightclub that claimed 49 lives, bombs in New York and New Jersey, an attack in Ohio.

In December 2015, terrorism was at the top of the list of problems facing the United States, according to an ongoing Gallup poll, beating out the economy, government, and guns as chief concerns. Obama, meanwhile, kept telling the nation that defeating ISIS would be a long and arduous process, which was true only because Obama was micromanaging the effort.

Proof of that came when ISIS was routed just seven months after President Donald Trump took office. As we noted at Investor’s Business Daily, “Rather than talk endlessly about how long and hard the fight would be, Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his ‘top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.’” Turns out he meant it.

Since then, the number of Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide has plunged. In the U.S., there have been only two acts of terrorism in the past four-plus years that were fueled by Islamic extremism. And in Gallup’s poll of top problems, terrorism stopped even registering. No one mentioned it in the July 2021 survey.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/27/israeli-study-natural-immunity-is-13x-stronger-than-pfizer-covid-shots/

A new pre-print Israeli study has found that people with natural immunity to COVID-19 could be 13 times less likely to contract the respiratory virus than those who were solely vaccinated against the disease.

Conducted by researchers at Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University, the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study found that when comparing individuals previously infected with the virus and those that received two jabs of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, those with natural infection saw greater protection against the delta variant and breakthrough infection.

“SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected, when the first event (infection or vaccination) occurred during January and February of 2021,” the study read. “The increased risk was significant for symptomatic disease as well. When allowing the infection to occur at any time before vaccination (from March 2020 to February 2021), evidence of waning natural immunity was demonstrated, though SARS-CoV-2 naïve vaccinees had a 5.96-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection and a 7.13-fold increased risk for symptomatic disease.”

The analysis also found that solely vaccinated individuals “were also at a greater risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations compared to those that were previously infected.”

The study ultimately concluded that “natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity” and that “individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/patriotism-kabul-bombing-deaths-isis-afghanistan-withdrawal-gee-schmitz-lopez-mccollum-11630274580?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden and his wife paid their respects Sunday at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to the 13 Americans who died at Kabul airport last week, and well they should. We are learning more about these young men and woman, and their deaths are all the more painful because they were sent on a selfless rescue mission.

They range in age from 20 to 31, represent a mix of ethnic groups, and hail from the middle-class, patriotic families who always bear the worst burden of war. Their family members say most of them joined the military out of individual purpose and national pride. They are the volunteers who follow orders and man the ramparts no matter the risk or ill-advised war plan.

Nicole Gee, recently promoted to Marine Sergeant, was from Sacramento and married to a fellow Marine, Jarod Gee. Only days before her death she posted on Instagram a now famous photo of herself cradling a young Afghan baby. “I love my job,” she wrote. She was 23 years old.

Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, 20, always wanted to be Marine. His “entire world was the US Marine Corps,” his father Mark Schmitz wrote, according to CNN. “Ever since he committed himself to the Marines in high school, he wanted to join. He showed a level of dedication that I haven’t seen.” Schmitz, of Wentzville, Mo., had been posted to Jordan and was among those sent to Kabul as Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal turned to chaos.

Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, of Jackson, Wyo., was “bound and determined” to join the Marines, said Cheyenne McCollum, one of his three older sisters, according to the Journal. “He knew it from the time he was 4.”

McCollum signed his enlistment papers on his 18th birthday at Summit Innovations School, in Jackson, where he had been on the wrestling team. He deployed to Jordan in April after getting married, and his wife Gigi is expecting a baby in weeks.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/idiocy-stupidity-afghanistan-covid-vaccine-maga-trump-civility-privacy-common-sense-11630271666?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

‘Stupidity,” Jean Cocteau remarked, “is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.”

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

The slow-motion zombies’ assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered dueling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.

Cable news provided the Greek chorus. American government and politics became cartoons. The Democrats, all unknowing, played Wile E. Coyote to Mr. Trump’s Road Runner. Twice, the Democrats’ Acme Impeachment Committee rigged up the big bomb (heh heh), lit the fuse and held its ears. Both times, the Road Runner sped away. Beep beep!

“Trump is crazy!” “Trump is Hitler!” “Trump is a Russian agent!” “ Bob Mueller has the goods!” Beep beep!

Stupidity has been in the air for quite some time. And alas, Mr. Trump isn’t going away soon; neither are Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff or Mazie Hirono —each a paragon of the phenomenon.

Stupidity is one of life’s big mysteries, like evil, like love, an ineffable thing. You cannot exactly define it, but you know it when you see it, as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography. It takes many forms. Stupidity is entitled to no moral standing whatever, and yet it sits in a place of honor at the tables of the mighty; it blows in their ears and whispers promises.