RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jimtreacher.substack.com/p/biden-sank-afghanistan-and-now-hes

As a wise man once said, you should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But when it comes to current events in Afghanistan, the Biden administration is spewing out plenty of both.

Biden gave yet another “press conference” Tuesday, although none of them have been actual press conferences. He just reads off a teleprompter for a few minutes, and then turns around and walks right out as the press yells at him.

We’re getting used to this image by now:

Literally turning his back on Americans in trouble is becoming a daily ritual for Biden. If he knew we’d be seeing so much of him from this angle, he would’ve gotten some more of those plugs on top.

Biden was five hours late to his own scheduled “press conference,” and there was no point in having any reporters there in the first place. The only time he’s answered any questions about this Afghanistan debacle was when he humiliated himself in front of George Stephanopoulos, of all people.

Jen Psaki did take questions from the press, for all the good it did anyone. Remember when she got all theatrically outraged at the very idea that Americans are stranded in Afghanistan? That was Monday. The very next day, she admitted that yes, there are Americans stranded in Afghanistan:

Is it just me, or does she seem very nervous and twitchy?1 If she keeps yanking at her hair like that, she’ll have a big bald spot like her boss. The way this Afghanistan debacle is going, it’ll take a lot more than Democrat operatives making #PsakiBomb trend on Twitter to fool people into thinking she’s popular.

https://www.nysun.com/national/the-biden-soros-paradox/91629/

Americans elected President Trump in 2016 and President Obama and Vice President Biden before that on, in part, promises to end “endless wars” and bring our troops home. Now that Mr. Biden is following through on that in Afghanistan, polls show his job-approval sinking.

How to explain the apparent paradox? Americans seem to want to end wars and bring the troops home, but when they see the actual consequences of doing that, they blame the politicians.

Part of the apparent contradiction is in the incompleteness of the rhetorical framing, whether from the politician or a pollster. No presidential candidate who wants to get elected runs around Iowa and New Hampshire saying, “I’m going to end the wars and bring the troops home, even if that means the countries the troops were in revert to their previous status as terrorist bases and even if that means women’s rights in those countries are set back to the dark ages.”

No pollster asks, “How many two-year-old children trampled to death on the chaotic outskirts of the Kabul airport are an acceptable tradeoff for bringing the troops home?”

The most conflicted is the billionaire George Soros. The Washington Free Beacon illustrated its editorial on the Afghanistan humiliation with a photo of Mr. Soros, noting that he had funded, in the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a group that aimed to “bring the forces against endless war on the Left and the Right together.”

Yet Mr. Soros himself tweeted August 17 that his Open Society Foundations had created “a $10 million Afghanistan emergency fund to support Afghans in grave danger — including champions of human rights, women’s rights, and journalists.”

The press release quoted the president of the Open Society Foundations, Mark Malloch-Brown, as insisting, “We remain deeply committed to Afghans and their efforts to help the country advance toward a more open society. We call on funders to join us in our response to this urgent humanitarian crisis. There is truly not a moment to waste.”

The “urgent humanitarian crisis” erupted after Mr. Biden followed the policy course that the Soros-funded Quincy Institute advocated. I’m not sure whether the right word for it is hypocrisy or tragedy.

The Open Society press release said the money would “support sponsorship for humanitarian parole programs in the United States that provide a pathway to temporary refuge for those in harm’s way… bolster international relief organizations in their efforts to support Afghan citizens fleeing the Taliban advance.” The money would also “aid other efforts to deliver humanitarian relief to internally displaced Afghans and those fleeing to other countries taking them in.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-ice-cream-afghan-meltdown/

You have to hand it to the Taliban (or, if you are Joe Biden, the ‘Tally-bahn’): they are both a persistent and an infernally clever lot.

As to their persistence, recall that George W. Bush assured us that, ‘thanks to our military, our allies, and the brave fighters of Afghanistan…the Taliban regime is coming to an end.’ That was in December 2001.

As of August 2021, they control the country and are as I write issuing ultimatums to the President of the United States: everybody out by September 11, no, make that August 31 — otherwise, there will be ‘consequences’.

Oh, and by ‘everybody out’, we don’t mean Afghans who may have worked for the US: they have to stay.

There does seem to be a communications breakdown about radical elements in Afghanistan.

A few days ago, President Ice Cream said that al-Qaeda was ‘gone’ from Afghanistan, ergo (he did not say ‘ergo’) we had no reasons to be there, getting al-Qaeda after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 having been the original rationale for going into that godforsaken country in the first place.

Alas, just a few hours later that day, the Pentagon spokesman John ‘no imminent threat’ Kirby acknowledged that ‘al-Qaeda is a presence as well as Isis’ throughout Afghanistan.

There is quite a lot of that Yes-No, Did-Didn’t, whiplashing these days. Jen Psaki, the President’s press secretary, told us that no Americans were ‘stranded’ in Afghanistan, adding for good moralistic measure that it was ‘irresponsible’ to suggest such a thing.

Many observers close to the situation have a different assessment of what will happen; said one, ‘it is unavoidable that Americans, Green Card holders and those who worked with us will be left behind’. Hard cheese on those folks, but, as always, the Babylon Bee distributes solace, explaining that ‘Americans Trapped By Taliban With No Rescue Plan Happy To Hear They Are Not Stranded’.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/enough-is-enough-antifa-attacks-reporter

Antifa’s influence may be exaggerated, but it’s not a mythical Snuffleupagus, either, as they showed in attacking reporter Maranie Staab from our partner News2Share this past weekend.

This past Sunday, while covering a protest in Portland, Oregon for our video partner News2Share, a reporter named Maranie Staab was attacked by members of an Antifa-affiliated group. After complaining about a report she’d done in Colombia in conjunction with TK News, they maced her, shot paint at her, and threw her to the ground.

The backdrop for this scene was explained to TK readers this past weekend in our latest episode of “Activism, Uncensored” called “The Great American Fistfight.” After a series of violent street clashes between left and right activists in Los Angeles, right-wing protesters planned a “United We Win” rally in Portland, Oregon for this past weekend. Antifa and left-wing groups pledged to “defend Portland from racist fascists.” News2Share’s Ford Fischer predicted violence, and he unfortunately turned out to be right.

The exact sequence of events will be detailed in a longer report Ford has coming — the whole day turned out to be a mess, replete with violent confrontations and ending with an exchange of gunfire, in which a right-wing protester fired first (a Black Bloc protester returned fire but was not apprehended). Staab, it should be noted, was also first sprayed with WD-40 by a right-wing protester. But the more serious incident took place later.

In the relevant sequence, an Antifa-affiliated protester called Staab a kutta (a Hindi word meaning, “dog,” apparently) and “slut.” Then the masked protester demanded that press “get the fuck out” and stop filming, pointing in Staab’s face and making the following bizarre comment about a story we ran in July called “Colombia in Chaos”:

You fucking endanger people by flying to fucking Colombia and endangering everyone by opening them up to Covid!

Beyond the total incoherence of that comment generally, calling a woman a name like “slut” obviously flies in the face of what antifascist protesters generally claim to be their beliefs about things like misogyny. In any case, Staab then approached the protesters without her cameras out to try to talk things through, at which point they tossed paint at her, maced her, and threw her to the ground. Eventually, they also smashed both her iPhone and the lens for her digital camera. “Out!” they screamed. “How many fucking times do we have to tell you?”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/24/hey-biden-voters/

Damn you all.

You’re American citizens, with the right to vote in presidential elections.

For four years, we had a president who, over the course of a single term, managed to undo a great deal of the mischief wrought, and a great many of the mistakes made, by his recent predecessors. Trump revived America’s economy, shored up Americans’ individual liberties, forged several remarkable peace agreements, and greatly strengthened our international position—thus firmly checking the ambitions of our powerful adversaries. 

But, Biden voters, he had a personality that rubbed you the wrong way. He wrote nasty tweets. In the language of TV production, he was too “hot.” You wanted “cool.” 

The Democrats put up a candidate who was plainly in mental decline. It was obvious every time he spoke. But you didn’t pay terribly close attention to his speeches. The sources from which you get your “news” carefully clipped out all of the bits of his appearances in which his befuddlement was manifest. If you heard someone speak out about his senility, you dismissed the charges out of hand.  

Biden also had a less-than-stellar professional history. He’d spent decades in the Senate as little more than a fixture, an empty suit, a vapid, smiling shill for the credit-card companies and other corporations based in his shabby little state. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, mountains of evidence were made public indicating that Biden was even more deeply corrupt than we already knew, taking massive bribes from nefarious foreign powers. 

Yes, that story was banned from social media. Still, you could have known about it if you’d had the slightest bit of curiosity—and the slightest sense of civic responsibility. 

For years, your trusted news sources fed you lies about Trump and Russia. Those lies, which anyone with any sense recognized from the outset as preposterous, were finally disproved. But your sources never showed remorse or shame. Most of them never even corrected their stories—not really, not with any class or conviction. They just moved on—smoothly, slickly, smarmily—to other slanders, such as the ludicrous case of the Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine. 

If you’d really been paying attention, you’d have noticed at least some of this. But you were as caught up in the shell game as they were. It didn’t matter to you that Trump was exonerated. In fact, you really didn’t care what was true and what was false. You just wanted more reasons to hate him. 

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

The federal government has become so desperate to get Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 that it plans to hold Medicare and Medicaid payments hostage.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden, the virtual president, announced that nursing homes will receive federal money for Medicare and Medicaid expenses only if their employees are vaccinated.

The “Delta variant”, it appears, justified the step.

“I’m using the power of the federal government as a payer of healthcare costs to ensure we reduce those risks to our most vulnerable seniors,” Biden said. The Department of Human Services will issue the mandate, which will take effect in September, in conjunction with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Biden made his announcement less than two weeks after a left-wing think tank made a wider-ranging proposal along similar lines. On Aug. 6, three members of the Center for American Progress proposed linking Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for all health-care providers to staff vaccinations. The three made their argument on the center’s website.

“Making COVID-19 vaccination mandatory for providers participating in Medicare and Medicaid would protect vulnerable patients, set a positive example for other employers, and contribute to the national effort to contain the virus,” wrote Jill Rosenthal, Emily Gee and Maura Calsyn. Rosenthal is the center’s director of public health policy, Gee is its senior economist on the subject, and Calsyn is the center’s vice president and coordinator for health policy.

The think tank was created by John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff and the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

While the authors made no mention of making individual benefits dependent upon vaccination, their proposal raises that frightening possibility. Since the federal government adopted part of that recommendation, what would prevent those who need Medicare and Medicaid from eventually being targeted?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/the_good_newsa_covid19_update.html

Now that we have had 18 months to “slow the spread” it is time to take stock of the pandemic. We have learned many good things that the media and our pandemic managers rarely report. Most fundamentally, we do not need to be afraid of COVID-19 anymore. The media and some government health authorities are still pushing hysteria and fear, but that should not prevail. Let’s look at the good news that can calm our fears about COVID-19. There’ll be time at a later date to look at the bad and the ugly of the resolving pandemic.

1) Globally, the survival rate for COVID-19 is 99.8%. Under the age of 70, the survival rate for COVID-19 is 99.97%. This is on par with many influenza seasons. Americans younger than 70 do not have to fear COVID-19 any more than influenza and we know how to protect the elderly.

2) Herd immunity for the alpha strain is here. Sixty-seven percent of the American population have had at least one COVID-19 vaccination. The official number of cases is about 10% of the population, but several antibody studies show that the percentage of those with natural immunity is 4-6 times higher. Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins professor, estimates that 80-85% of the population is immune from natural immunity and vaccination. Those who deny this must explain how cases and deaths started to decline in January way before there was a significant vaccine effort. COVID-19 will not go away. Instead, we are transitioning now from a pandemic to endemic status and, indeed, some eminent virologists say vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic is making herd immunity more difficult to obtain through the creation of variants.

3) The average age of death from COVID is 78. The average life expectancy in America is 78. This is not to say, “Don’t worry, only old people are dying of COVID-19.” However, this fact should direct and inform our policies to protect the elderly especially. Children and those under age 70 are at much lower risk.

4)  Early outpatient treatment should be adopted immediately for COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine works. Ivermectin works. It has been estimated 85% of COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented were these medicines used early. America’s Frontline Doctors have an excellent compilation of research. The cost of these treatments is $1/day. A new IV treatment, REGEN-COV, has been approved for early use in COVID-19. Don’t wait to see if you will get sick. Treat early.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-rush-to-the-afghan-exits-taliban-kabul-august-31-11629842701?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Some readers were upset by our editorial last week: “Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead.” But that headline looks more sadly accurate than ever after President Biden’s decision Tuesday to stick to his arbitrary Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Unless you’re Nancy Pelosi or a media partisan, there’s no sugarcoating what this means. Mr. Biden is bowing to Taliban demands, reiterated on Tuesday, not to extend the deadline. He is rejecting the advice of such G-7 leaders as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron of France to stay longer to get more people out of the country safely. And he is abandoning thousands of Afghans who fought with the U.S. and NATO to the Taliban’s brand of retribution.

***

There was an alternative. Mr. Biden could have sent in enough military force to provide safe zones and retrieve stranded Americans and Afghan allies. He could have done so with a NATO coalition of the willing. The U.S. Army has 31 active duty combat brigades of several thousand soldiers each.

He could have told the Taliban that the U.S. is not negotiating over the deadline and that U.S. forces will remain for as long as it takes to complete the mission of rescuing our people. This would have salvaged some honor and credibility from the botched withdrawal.

Instead Mr. Biden has negotiated with the Taliban from a position of weakness. He has sent too few troops to protect the Kabul airport and retrieve our allies. He sent his CIA director to negotiate with the Taliban, who adopted Mr. Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline as their own and rejected William Burns’s entreaties.

On Tuesday the Taliban escalated by barring Afghans from even going to the airport. “We are not in favor of allowing Afghans to leave,” said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. Yet in his remarks Tuesday at the White House, Mr. Biden raised no objection to this command that could strand thousands of Afghan allies.

The White House and Pentagon say they don’t even know how many Americans are still in Afghanistan. As for the Afghans, James Miervaldis of the nonprofit No One Left Behind tells us via email that “we’ve got a list of 1,200 families (approx 6,000 people) who have their visas in hand. Really curious how the President is going to get them inside the airport and fly out before 8/31.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/25/americans-await-evacuation-as-biden-takes-a-knee-to-taliban/

When President Joe Biden met with this year’s WNBA champions Seattle Storm in the White House on Monday, he took a symbolic knee, apparently to show he’s Woke. No surprise. He just took a knee before the Taliban, too, after the terrorist group’s humiliating rejection of his request for an “extension” on his Aug. 31 deadline for evacuating Afghanistan.

Biden’s plans, if you can call them that, to get Americans out of Afghanistan have been an epic disaster. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the incompetence and duplicity of Biden and his administration.

Biden rejected extending the deadline, citing the “increased risk” of terrorism as a reason for doing so. The fact is, he really had no choice, after the Taliban rejected the U.S. plea, calling the Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal a “red line.” The U.S. president did what the Taliban told him to do.

That rejection, by the way, came after Biden sent CIA Director William Burns to Kabul for emergency talks with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar sent Burns packing with nothing for his efforts, another humiliation.

“If the U.S. or U.K. were to seek additional time to continue evacuations, the answer is no,” said Taliban official Suhail Shaheen. “Or there would be consequences.”

Adding insult to injury, Biden told our allies that the U.S. “won’t be able to get everyone out of Afghanistan,” according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, twisting the knife, the Taliban demanded that the U.S. take only Americans, not Afghans, with them.

Late in the day, facing a barrage of criticism from all quarters, Biden appeared to abruptly change tack, calling for “contingency plans” for lengthening the withdrawal, whatever that means.

It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the incompetence and duplicity of the Biden administration, which in a brief two-week period has managed to alienate and weaken our major allies while emboldening and empowering our foes, in particular Russia, China, Iran and the myriad Islamist terrorist groups across the Mideast and South Asia.

And things are about to get even uglier in Afghanistan, if that’s possible.

The good news is that, as of Monday, the U.S. had already helped evacuate 37,000 people from Afghanistan, according to a leaked ambassadorial communication. The bad news: Only 4,000 Americans were among those evacuated.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/biden-has-shown-us-that-his-promises-are-worthless/

Democrats who continue to hitch their wagon to the president going forward cannot say that they were not warned.

A few weeks from now, Joe Biden will stand before the American people and make his case for adding another $3.5 trillion in spending to the $1.9 trillion the federal government spent in March and the $550 billion more it hopes to spend by the end of the summer. As is now customary, the president’s presentation will be chock-full of performatively dropped g’s, of sigh-laden appeals to the “folks,” of labored, down-home clichés, of emphatically whispered entreaties, of absurd straw men, and — if he encounters even the slightest resistance — of brash assurances that none of the objections that have been raised could possibly come to fruition.

Those of us who have lived through the last two weeks should refuse to be fooled again.

Joe Biden ran for president promising, “I’ll always tell you the truth.” But the debacle in Afghanistan has put an end to all that. In July, Biden broke out his usual “Are you stupid?” mien to insist that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable”; he swore that there was “zero” chance that Americans would “see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan”; and he assured the nation that the Taliban was “not even close in terms of their capacity” to “the training and capacity of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the training of the [Afghan] federal police.” Given what we now know, there are only two possible explanations for why Biden said all of this. The first is that he was lying. The second is that he’s a fool.