RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-agony-of-the-centrist-democrats-nancy-pelosi-infrastructure-house-spending-11629754803?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

With the House back in town, the debate for Democrats is which colossal plan they should pass first: President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package? Or Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget outline? The media is covering it as a real showdown but, if history holds, this will turn out to be Kabuki theater.

Nine Democrats, including several from swing districts, say the infrastructure bill should be passed before any budget vote is taken, and so far they have held their ground. “We are firmly opposed,” they wrote recently, “to holding the president’s infrastructure legislation hostage to reconciliation, risking its passage and the bipartisan support behind it.”

The left is demanding the opposite. Do the $3.5 trillion spending binge first, the argument goes, and then reward the Democratic centrists with the infrastructure goody bag. Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to lose either faction, and her narrow majority means she has only three votes to spare. She’s trying to accommodate both sides with a rule that lets her claim the two proposals are moving forward more or less simultaneously.

This is mainly about process, not substance. The nine Democratic holdouts want to vote on infrastructure now, but tomorrow they’re prepared to roll over for $3.5 trillion in spending and new entitlements, which is what really matters. “I’ve literally said to my colleagues, ‘Let’s vote on the infrastructure bill, and then, like, 15 minutes later we can start debate on the budget resolution and vote on it the next day,’” Rep. Josh Gottheimer told a reporter.

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/08/23/lets_stop_pretending_about_the_covid-19_vaccines_791050.html

As a family physician, I spend my days dispensing advice. I mean, there’s the occasional cast, skin biopsy, or shot, but most of my patients are seeing me for medical counsel. Never have I been asked about one subject so much as the Covid-19 vaccines, and never have I seen so much doubt and confusion among a group of smart, well-educated people. Interpreting the reality of the effectiveness of these vaccines is complicated: it is waning with time, weakened against delta, unknown when coupled with prior infection, and may not be improved with a booster – but there is new, often murky, data emerging every day. Speaking the truth about the vaccines, however, should not be that hard. We have to be willing to adapt to new data, even when it does not fit neatly into prior messaging.

That’s where our institutions went astray. I understand the desire of our public health officials, spearheaded by the CDC, to instill confidence in the Covid-19 vaccines; they remain the most expedient path to minimize the suffering inflicted by this pandemic. However, by taking on the role of no-nuance vaccine cheerleaders, they left everyone in a worse situation.

Patients and doctors looking to the CDC for guidance in decision-making receive low quality or dated information. The mainstream media is stuck between reporting public health dictates as valid, while being unable to resist doom-and-gloom reports of vaccine “failures” that sell ad space. The obvious gap between “what the CDC says” and “what we see, hear and read” has left a large space for grifters, self-styled experts, and conspiracy theorists to thrive, especially among the large group of vaccine-hesitant (often vaccine-terrified) Americans. The whole thing might have gone better had we stuck to telling the truth as we knew it.

What follows is the truth about the Covid-19 vaccines, as I see it, from the data in hand right now. It is often inconvenient, especially for someone like me, who preferred the easy days of being a vaccine cheerleader when the initial trial data emerged. Do I still recommend a Covid-19 vaccine for the vast majority of my patients? Yes. It just takes a couple extra minutes to discuss now. Most importantly, if I speak the truth now, my patients will be more inclined to trust me later. So let’s see where we really stand:

Let’s stop pretending the vaccines are 90% effective and breakthrough cases are “uncommon.”

The real world effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer (mRNA) vaccines appears to be sinking like a stone. We started at 94+% within 2 months of vaccination and against the original SARS-CoV-2 strain. The Israel Pfizer data roughly confirmed this degree of effectiveness in initial real world studies. But, then… waning happened, and delta happened.

 https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/after-the-fall?token=

When the Impossible War ended, I was in a cabin in the woods in Oregon. Towering pines, unpaved roads, canyons, creeks, a crystalline moonlight that stretched across the hamlets and orchards and interstates and the farm dogs roaming around outside low-lying barns.

It was called the Forever War, but that was misleading. The problem wasn’t just that it had dragged on for so long. It was that it had attempted to do something that could not be done. 

It was late. My wife was sleeping. So were our children, ages six and three. I was watching the already infamous video of the Afghans falling from the sky. They had chased a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane about to take off on the tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. They’d climbed aboard the wings and into the wheel wells. After the plane had taken off they tumbled to the Earth below.

The first thing I could think of — I wasn’t alone — was the image, nearly two decades old, of the couple jumping from the World Trade Center. Bookends of calamity.

In the beginning, on September 11, 2001, there was grief and rage and fear of what lay ahead. But we never doubted that a great deal lay ahead. We were still the indispensable country. We had been wronged, gravely, and we were armed with a gargantuan moral authority and an unstoppable killing machine. 

And there was — just beneath the tears and disbelief, the plumes of dust, the candlelight vigils, the images of the missing — a strange anticipation. When George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, declared, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!,” I was in a newsroom in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the reporters and editors and the old ladies who laid out the pages and the old men who ran the press, with their faded Marine Corps tattoos and their packs of Marlboro Reds tucked into their shirt pockets, started to clap. One of them said, “Fuck yeah,” and I remember feeling a little fuck-yeah-ish, too.  We looked forward to tuning into the war we were about to launch. 

Then, we failed. We failed over and over and over. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. But also — and this was harder at first to see — at home. 

We kept electing commanders-in-chief who had never served, who had credentials but had never built anything, whose success resided atop the more substantive success of more serious people. The post-Cold-War president could make you feel all kinds of things, but he was always a little out of his depth because he had very little to begin with. He made promises he did not really understand. We won’t just pummel Afghanistan into glass. We’ll turn it into a Jeffersonian republic. We’ll make these people into a people they have never been, even though no one — the Brits, the Soviets, the Persians — has ever attempted as much, let alone achieved it. We will do it because we’re Americans. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/

“It is unconscionable that high-tech military equipment paid for by U.S. taxpayers has fallen into the hands of the Taliban and their terrorist allies,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “Securing U.S. assets should have been among the top priorities for the U.S. Department of Defense prior to announcing the withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

The U.S. provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001. This year, alone, the U.S. military aid to Afghan forces was $3 billion.

Putting price tags on American military equipment still in Afghanistan isn’t an easy task. In the fog of war – or withdrawal – Afghanistan has always been a black box with little sunshine.

Not helping transparency, the Biden Administration is now hiding key audits on Afghan military equipment. This week, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reposted two key reports on the U.S. war chest of military gear in Afghanistan that had disappeared from federal websites.

#1. Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of U.S. provided military gear in Afghanistan (August 2017): reposted report (dead link: report).

#2. Special Inspector General For Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) audit of $174 million in lost ScanEagle drones (July 2020): reposted report (dead link: report).

U.S. taxpayers paid for these audits and the U.S.-provided equipment and should be able to follow the money.

After publication, the GAO spokesman responded to our request for comment, “the State Department requested we temporarily remove and review reports on Afghanistan to protect recipients of US assistance that may be identified through our reports and thus subject to retribution.” However, these reports only have numbers and no recipient information. 

Furthermore, unless noted, when estimating “acquisition value,” our source is the Department Logistics Agency (DLA) and their comprehensive databases of military equipment.

Vehicles and airplanes

Between 2003 and 2016, the U.S. purchased and provided 75,898 vehicles and 208 aircraft, to the Afghan army and security forces, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Quantities and examples of key U.S.-funded Military Vehicles for Afghanistan.

Here is a breakdown of estimated vehicle costs:

Armored personnel carriers such as the M113A2 cost $170,000 each and recent purchases of the M577A2 post carrier cost $333,333 each. 
Mine resistant vehicles ranges from $412,000 to $767,000. The total cost could range between $382 million to $711 million.
Recovery vehicles such as the ‘truck, wrecker’ cost between for the base model $168,960 and $880,674 for super strength versions.
Medium range tactical vehicles include 5-ton cargo and general transport trucks were priced at $67,139. However, the family of MTV heavy vehicles had prices ranging from $235,500 to $724,820 each. Cargo trucks to transport airplanes cost $800,865.
Humvees – ambulance type (range from $37,943 to $142,918 with most at $96,466); cargo type, priced at $104,682. Utility Humvees were typically priced at $91,429. However, the 12,000 lb. troop transport version cost up to $329,000.
Light tactical vehicles: Fast attack combat vehicles ($69,400); and passenger motor vehicles ($65,500). All terrain 4-wheel vehicles go up to $42,273 in the military databases.

U.S.-Funded Aircraft For the Afghan Forces

https://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/the-only-way-back-to-deterrence-is-firing-bidens-entire-national-security-team/

America needs experts who can reverse the damage Biden is doing to our national security and will stand up to future unsound and dangerous decisions.

The Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan — emboldened by President Joe Biden’s senseless decision to rush U.S troops out of the country without a plan — blindsided the Afghan government, the Afghan military, and America’s allies. This reckless decision has led to bipartisan criticism in the United States and from our global allies, and ridicule by America’s adversaries.

Biden’s attempts to blame everyone but himself for this fiasco, his refusal to take press questions for nearly a week (except from sycophantic George Stephanopoulos), and his decision to hide at Camp David while these events unfolded have only intensified criticism.

As commander-in-chief, Biden is at fault for this disaster. But his senior national security advisers also bear responsibility for implementing his irresponsible Afghanistan policies instead of resigning and reporting them to Congress.

It’s important to stress that Biden had bad instincts on national security when he was a younger man. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Now that Biden appears to be suffering from mental decline, he is making national security decisions that are irrational and dangerous. This extends beyond Afghanistan, to nuclear talks with Iran and failing to secure our southern border.

If Biden Can’t Be Replaced Now, Replace His Yes-Men

In a perfect world, Biden would immediately resign, be impeached, or be removed from office under the 25th Amendment for this unprecedented incompetence and dereliction of duty.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/22/the-drossy-touch-of-joe-biden/

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

The Afghan Catastrophe

 Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans. 

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance. 

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

Was Biden’s idea simply to get the United States “officially” out of Afghanistan and let the abandoned 10,000-plus Americans manage as they can? 

Was Biden angry over our 20-year presence and thinking the Afghans would deserve what followed? Was he so delusional that he really believed the NATO forces could easily deter the Taliban with sanctimonious lectures from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman? The latter is a former head of EMILY’s List and an architect of the Iran Deal, so were she and others especially scarifying to naughty theocrats when they warned they might lose their slot in the “rules-based world order”? Or did Biden believe the Taliban would be deterred by Sherman’s exclamations, such as her ominous warning, “This is personal for me!” 

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/the_war_with_radical_islam_is_ongoing.html

In the wake of Biden’s unmitigated catastrophe in Afghanistan, he has been attempting to assuage his incompetence by providing the public with the false choice between leaving and committing America to an endless war.

Even after we leave Afghanistan, we will still be engaged in an ongoing war, for the war with radical Islam does not take two parties. Radical Islam has been at continual war with the West since the hordes of Muslims emerged from the Arabian Peninsula and fought their way into Western Europe to be stopped in France by Charles Martel and centuries later by the Polish cavalry at the gates of Vienna.

Osama bin Laden demanded that Spain (Andalusia) be returned to Islam, for whatever is once Islam’s is always Islam’s, according to the terrorist who brought down the twin towers on September 11.

Even among Muslims who seek refuge in the West, there is a faction that seeks not to assimilate into Western culture but to replace Western democracy with a fundamentalist version of Islam. “To hell with your democracy,” reads signs that are held high by fundamentalist demonstrators on the streets of London.

Obviously, these people do not represent Islam in the West, but it only takes two or three radicalized people to foment a terrorist operation and cast a stain on an entire community.

Muslim communities, like all immigrant communities, are divided. The majority seek to go about their business and make a decent place for their families, but there is a segment that feels alienated from life in the old world and unable to surmount the cultural barriers to life in the new.  There is a reason that Muslim would-be terrorists are disproportionately not foreign but homegrown, many are American citizens.

As long as there are Muslim societies extolling the virtues of terrorism as Islamic virtues, there will be alienated Muslim youth in Western society that will heed the call. Therefore, beyond the strategic consequences of the fall of Afghanistan to the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghanistan will present a signal to those who are susceptible to mobilization by fundamentalist ideology. The Biden administration has been oblivious to both the obvious strategic consequences of its debacle in Afghanistan and the impact a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will have on mobilizing terrorists in the West.

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

Fifty years ago, journalist Gary Allen set out to write a book to prove conservative anti-communists wrong.  But while researching, he realized he had not seen the “hidden picture.”  There indeed was a conspiracy, shielded by a narrative advanced by liberal academia and the mainstream media, both actually in the service of an elite cabal that included Rockefeller, Ford, Morgan, Rothschild, Loeb, Kennedy, and Carnegie.  No longer willing to dismiss “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” he titled his book, published in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy.  It was a surprising bestseller: more than four million copies were sold during the 1972 presidential elections.  Many received it as gifts through an informal grassroots distribution system.

What Allen claimed to have discovered was that a plutocracy of 3% of the population covertly controlled the lives of the rest.  They had wrested control of the constitutional republic, with its separation of powers, limited government, and competitive free enterprise, and turned it into a system of centralized control by a few.  How was this achieved?  According to Allen, the conspiratorial clique was hidden and protected by a complicit media establishment they own and control.  Also, they are accomplished liars and farseeing planners.  Their subversive tour de force has been to advance the lies that a) communism is inevitable and b) communism is a movement of the downtrodden.  The first lie aims to destroy the will to fight, the second to gain support of the poor masses and justify the destruction of a vigorous, innovative middle class.

Allen offers an alternative, realistic definition of communism: an international conspiratorial drive for power on part of men in high places, who are willing to use any means for global conquest.  In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said a proletarian revolution would necessitate a temporary socialist dictatorship, which would give way to full-on communism if three things were achieved: a) the elimination of private property rights, b) the dissolution of the family, and c) the replacement of religion with Marxist ideology.  These, in fact, are exactly what academia and left-wing groups in America are pushing for, today and when Allen wrote the book.

But all that, as Allen claims, is an elaborate ruse.  Behind it are the super-rich.  We are blinded to this because we believe they stand to lose the most in a socialistic set-up.  Allen backs his counterintuitive conclusion with the fact that communist countries are in fact always ruled by an oligarchical group — the nomenklatura — that controls wealth, production, and the lives of the rest of the population.  Thus, socialism is a movement to consolidate wealth in the hands of a few, creating not a classless society, but one with just two classes: an elite and a proletariat, with no middle class.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/bidens-long-history-betrayals-afghanistan-daniel-greenfield/

During the 2007 Dem primaries, Biden attacked Obama for adopting his position on Afghanistan.

The flailing Biden campaign put out a press release accusing Obama of being a “johnny-come-lately” who had belatedly adopted Biden’s push for “significantly increasing reconstruction assistance” and sending more American soldiers to Afghanistan.

While running for president, Biden had based his entire foreign policy around sending more troops to Afghanistan. He had memorized one line, “if we’re surging troops anywhere, it should be in Afghanistan”, and repeated it in the Senate, in interviews, and on the campaign trail.

Sending more troops to Afghanistan, he argued would give America “the moral high ground”.

“The next president of the United States will have to rally the American people and the world to fight them over there, unless we want to fight them over here. But the over there is not, as President Bush has falsely and repeatedly claimed, in Iraq, but it’s rather in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he insisted at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Biden attacked not only Democrat rivals like Obama, but also President Bush, for not wanting to send more troops to Afghanistan. “I asked the commander of British forces how long his people would allow him to stay in Afghanistan. And he said, ‘Senator, we Brits have an expression. As long as the big dog is in the pen, the small dogs will stay. When the big dog leaves, the small dogs leave as well.’ Well, guess what? The big dog left in 2002.”

He was only off by 19 years. Biden was preemptively accusing Bush of his own sins.

By the 2020 primaries, Biden had completely reinvented his entire history with Afghanistan.

“I’m the guy from the beginning who argued that it was a big, big mistake to surge forces to Afghanistan. Period. We should not have done it. And I argued against it constantly,” he falsely claimed.

Biden had gone from attacking Obama for ripping off his idea of surging forces to Afghanistan to being the guy who “from the beginning” had opposed the idea.

The idea that Biden opposed “from the beginning” was the one he originally claimed credit for.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/america-has-been-in-denial-about-the-taliban-from-the-start/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first

For 20 years, some of us have been countering that you can’t defeat the enemy without understanding that they are the enemy, and what they believe.

U nless your name happens to be Andrew Cuomo, you can’t be happy about the headline-grabbing attention the Taliban have gotten over the last ten days.

Since they emerged a quarter-century ago, the Taliban have commanded the attention of Americans incessantly. They’ve probably never had it quite like they have it now, though. Even after the essential role they played in the 9/11 atrocities, our sights were mainly fixed on al-Qaeda — fixed on the hands-on terrorists, not the knowing and willing terrorist hosts.

And that’s the main problem: Our government and the commentariat, even now, continue to speak as if there were a difference.

No matter how much they’ve told us who they are over the years, we see the Taliban of our hopeful imagination rather than the Taliban who, through remorseless word and deed, have always proved exactly who they are.

Oh, we’ve condemned the Taliban’s “extremism” — though it is verboten to say just what it is they are so extreme about. The cruel hudud penalties that they so enthusiastically execute have been undeniably established in sharia law for a millennium . . . which is why the Taliban are far from alone in enforcing and justifying them.

Still, in our well-meaning way, we’ve been as dogmatic as the Taliban.

President Obama insisted that violent jihadism is not reflective of any authentic construction of Islam. President Bush insisted that freedom is the longing of every human heart. Neither of these things is true in principle, and the Taliban are demonstrative proof of their falsity.

The Taliban are scholars and students of sharia (Islam’s ancient law and societal framework). They know much more about the subject than Obama. And while it is obvious that many people long for things other than freedom, it is even more obvious that the Taliban know what is in what passes for their own hearts, and those of other fundamentalist Muslims, better than Bush ever could. As it happens, the Taliban abominate the Western ideal of freedom. It contradicts their basic conceit that the good life calls for perfect submission to sharia — the opposite of freedom.

Now, being wrong about basic things would not be such a problem if Obama and Bush had been expressing mere opinions. Alas, for them and the governments they superintended, their delusions were articles of faith, on which they were as implacable as the Taliban are about their own articles of faith. The bigger problem is that Obama and Bush — and, indeed, every American administration from Clinton through Biden — based U.S. government policy on their delusions, in essence saying, “Never mind what the Taliban tell us about themselves. We know better.”