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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Our Military Is A Woke Joke Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/08/16/our-military-is-a-woke-joke-n2594151

Ignore those pictures of the Afghan army that our military senior leader geniuses spent 20 years and zillions of dollars on disintegrating in the face of a pack of glorified mountain banditos from the Seventh Century – the real story is that, finally, America’s fighting men and women are fully aware of the urgency of accepting and validating the trans experience. And it’s even better if said trans people are BIPOC. Plus differently abled. 

Our broke, woke armed forces would be a hysterically funny punchline if the joke wasn’t, “The greatest military in human history walks into a bar, puts down trillions of dollars and buckets of American blood, and asks the bartender, ‘So, what would it look like if all the generals and admirals sucked-up to the garbage establishment that has totally failed the people of the USA?’”

Yes, it is a joke, a sick one. Fire all the generals. Invite a few back, maybe a dozen. Clean out the Pentagon. Can all the “Diversity Consultants,” “Equal Opportunity Officers,” “Climate Change Mitigation Specialists,” and every other strap-hanging oxygen thief who doesn’t contribute to the only thing the military should be focusing on right now – putting Chi Coms in graves.

Yeah, there’s been a strategic failure of epic proportions by our civilian establishment. We need to fix that at the ballot box by tossing out every Democrat and every Liz Cheney-esque combat tourist who delights in sending our young people overseas to get ground up in idiotic wars designed to enrich their cronies. Hardest hit at the end of Afghanistan: Haliburton, Raytheon, KBR, and a hundred other contractors you never heard of. Oh, and the Afghan people, but they never really figured into this calculus except in the abstract idea that we were going to convert a nation of savages into Lil’ Vermonters living the Norman Rockwell dream of community democracy.

Twenty years of failure. Twenty years. How far and fast we fell. I was there thirty years ago, in VII Corps main, contributing my car washing skills, when the greatest military force in human history annihilated a country’s entire army in 100 hours and barely broke a sweat doing it. Amazingly, we did it without giving a single thought to our alleged privilege – to the extent cracking over reeking half-barrels in wooden outhouses in the middle of the desert constituted privilege. 

Look at us now. Look at the generals, in their stupid throwback uniforms from the Forties that are supposed to make the gender studies seminar we call the US Army think it’s the same force that broke Hitler. It’s not. A serious organization does not alternate its designation of America’s most serious threat between the weather, “racism,” and other Americans who dissent from the generals’ bosses’ political priorities.

The Breonna Taylor story the left doesn’t want you to hear By John Mattingly

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

“Whether you’re a United States senator or a cop from Louisville, the Left doesn’t want your story to be told if you stand in their way. They want you to leave them alone as they divide America with their falsehoods.I, for one, won’t sit by idly and let that happen. I plan to tell the truth, no matter the cost.”

Since helping to execute a search warrant for evidence in a drug trafficking ring and being shot by Kenneth Walker — the boyfriend of Breonna Taylor — in the process, my life has never been the same.

Three days after the tragic death of George Floyd — which left the nation in an uproar — the 911 call in which Walker says that someone had broken in and shot his girlfriend was released to the public. Though I wanted to respond and set the record straight about what had transpired that night, I couldn’t say anything about the case, because my fellow Louisville Metro Police Department officers and I were under a gag order. The media and the social justice outrage mob were out to get us, we weren’t allowed to stand up for ourselves, and our mayor and chief refused to set the record straight with the facts leaving us involved to dangle in the wind.

My side of the story is completely different from what you’ve heard from the media. They want you to believe that I and my fellow officers are evil racists who barged into that apartment and killed Breonna while she slept. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and I learned pretty quickly that the media and our local government officials want to make sure you never learn the truth about what happened that night.

Earlier this year, my friends at Post Hill Press courageously agreed to publish my book giving an account of what really happened that night. But before we could even begin, their distributor, Simon & Schuster, publicly declared their refusal to distribute my book — without even reading the manuscript.

After spending the last year-and-a-half watching the media, celebrities, sports figures, attorneys, and politicians spread blatant lies about the situation without any accountability, I know I must do whatever I can to make sure the true story is told. I am grateful to my friends at Post Hill Press for all of their support and guidance, but after much consideration, I have decided it is best that I explore other publishing options for my book.

I cannot continue to sit by and watch the media twist the narrative of what happened that night into a work of fiction that serves to support their anti-police agenda.

The embarrassment that is Joe Biden By Andrea Widburg

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

Although the White House had intended to keep Biden under wraps for as long as possible, the demand that he say something – anything – about the unfolding debacle in Afghanistan forced him to leave Camp David for a 20-minute statement, after which he refused to take any questions. The important part of what he said boils down to one sentence: We had to leave and everything that went wrong was Trump’s or the Afghans’ fault. Biden is a craven coward, a feckless fool, a dismal dummy, and a man who will soon have more blood on his hands than a thousand Lady Macbeths.

Biden began by explaining that, after 20 years in Afghanistan, it was time to leave. Few people would argue with that. Whether they supported the war in the beginning or not, it had become clear to everyone that we had no clear mission there other than making money for the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. It was not in America’s interests to remain.

So, we can skip that part of the speech. It was a straw man because Biden was defending a point with which no one disagrees. You’re neither a brave nor principled man when you claim, “I stand with everyone else!”

What people wanted to hear was what Biden had to say about the abrupt American pullout from Afghanistan, one seemingly made without any forethought about the needs of the American civilians there or the Afghan troops who, although they fought bravely, needed to feel Americans were at their back. Instead, we just left. And that’s where Biden showed what a disgusting little weasel he is.

The first person at whom Biden pointed his finger was Trump saying, effectively, he set me up!

When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.  Under his agreement, U.S. forces would be out of Afghanistan by May 1, 2021 — just a little over three months after I took office.

Who Else Is Tired Of All This Winning Under Biden?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/16/whos-tired-of-all-this-winning-under-biden/

n early July, President Joe Biden said the sudden withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan wouldn’t cause a repeat of the Saigon disaster in Vietnam.

“None whatsoever. Zero,” Biden said in response to a reporter’s question about the chances of a repeat. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Five weeks later, that is exactly what happened, as the Taliban took over Kabul and, as the Washington Post reported it, the “U.S. scrambled to evacuate embassy staff and accelerate the rescue and relocation of Afghans who aided the U.S. military. Helicopters began landing at the U.S. Embassy early Sunday and armored diplomatic vehicles were seen leaving the area around the compound. … Smoke rose from the embassy’s roof as diplomats destroyed documents to keep them from falling into the Taliban’s hands.”

The White House was reportedly “stunned” by the Taliban’s rapid victory, and Biden had to interrupt his vacation to send thousands of troops back into Afghanistan to help evacuate U.S. personnel.

It is a colossal blunder, the repercussions of which we will be suffering for years.

But we’ve already grown accustomed to colossal blunders since Biden came into office. On every issue he has touched, Biden’s managed to quickly transform victory into failure.

At the southern border, which President Donald Trump had finally stabilized, Biden immediately started reversing every one of the previous administration’s policies, while announcing to the world that the U.S. would welcome illegal border crossers with open arms.

For all of 2020, the border patrol reported a total of 458,000 “encounters” at the southern border. In just six months since Biden took office, there’ve been more than 1 million, with the number increasing every single month since January.

The Pandemic Gave Americans A Taste Of Government ‘Help’ And They Didn’t Like It

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/17/the-pandemic-gave-americans-a-taste-of-government-help-and-they-didnt-like-it/

It’s fair to say Americans, especially the pre-revolution colonists, have always had a healthy skepticism of government. What’s frightening is some days we seem dangerously close to losing the unique quality that separates this country from every other.

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York posted last week in his Daily Memo some interesting data that tells us a lot about Americans’ attitudes about their government. He tracked a long-term Fox News survey in which respondents are asked which message they would send the government if they had the chance: “lend me a hand” or “leave me alone.”

Over the course of the last decade, only in August 2020 did a majority (57%) say it would ask for government help. In that same poll, 36% said “leave me alone.”

This year, however, the numbers were flipped – 47% said “leave me alone” while 44% still wanted aid.

In some years, the results showed a strong distrust of government. For instance, in 2014, 59% wanted to be free of the state while a mere 32% wished for help. In February 2016, the beginning of the last year of the Obama era, the numbers were 54-39 in favor of the “leave me alone” group.

But what is truly striking are the results from the last two surveys. After a large majority of Americans wanted the government to step in last year, no doubt due to the coronavirus pandemic, there was a fairly significant shift back this year to a yearning for independence.

Why? There can be no doubt Americans were lent a hand in 2020 and 2021, and they got it good and hard, to borrow a portion of one of American journalist Henry Louis Mencken’s more famous comments. Politicians panicked, petty tyrants exercised unearned authority, and this country suffered in ways few could have ever imagined.

Meanwhile, government “experts” lied, obfuscated, and contradicted themselves. As early as January of this year, long before the Delta variant set off another round of mask mandates and spiteful threats of more lockdowns, the Edelman Trust Barometer found that 57% of the country believed “government leaders” were “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

Biden Photo at Camp David Raises Red Flags as Questions Swirl About President’s Whereabouts by Kyle Becker

https://beckernews.com/33-biden-photo-at-camp-david-raises-red-flags-as-questions-swirl-about-presidents-whereabouts-40867/

As Afghanistan crumbled on Sunday, the American people had one question on their minds: ‘Where is the president?’ Joe Biden had taken off on vacation days ago to his Camp David “retreat” (as CNN called it) and was nowhere to be found.

Kabul fell and the presidential palace was overrun. Afghanis were executed in the streets. Interpreters sought desperately to flee from Kabul International Airport. The Taliban declared the two-decades-long war “over.”

But the word came on Sunday afternoon that Biden would not be giving an address to the American people. A single photo was tweeted from the White House account with a picture of Biden being “briefed.”

“This morning, the President and Vice President met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul,” the account said.

One of the first things people noticed was the utter lack of Operational Security: It showed on the television that there were camera feeds from both the CIA and Doha Station.

“Heck of a job, White House communications shop. I figure you would want to crop out the teleconference screens labeled ‘CIA’ and ‘Doha Station’,” NRO’s Jim Geraghty tweeted. “You panicking amateur idiots.”

The image also looked somewhat similar to other recent photos of Biden at Camp David.

This is a White House photo of President Biden speaking with Vice President Kamala Harris and members of his national security team from Camp David in Maryland, on Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021.

Then it gets odd. The new White House photo issued on Sunday shows the clocks with twenty-six minutes advanced. It is depicted as being from Sunday morning at 11:29 EST. Joe Biden is in a different outfit.

There is an issue with the clocks showing London and Moscow are three hours apart. Those two cities are two hours apart, so either the photo is wrong or the clocks at Camp David are wrong.

It should be noted that while Tehran is shown as a half-hour difference from Moscow, it is actually an hour and a half difference. For whatever reason, that’s also wrong.

The time difference raised some major questions. One of the first to notice it was Scuba Mike on Twitter.

“The current time difference is 2 hours so this picture could not have been taken today,” Scuba Mike weighed in. “The whole TV is fake and this was not today.” (It should be noted that this claim has not been confirmed.)

Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead Biden is defiant in blaming others for his Afghan debacle.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-to-afghanistan-drop-dead-taliban-11629151994?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden told the world on Monday that he doesn’t regret his decision to withdraw rapidly from Afghanistan, or even the chaotic, incompetent way the withdrawal has been executed. He is determined in retreat, defiant in surrender, and confident in the rightness of consigning the country to jihadist rule. We doubt the world will see it the same way in the days, months and years ahead.

Mr. Biden refused to accept responsibility for the botched withdrawal while blaming others. He blamed Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban and falsely claimed again that he was trapped. He blamed his three predecessors for not getting out of Afghanistan. He blamed the Afghans for not fighting hard enough, their leaders for fleeing, and even Afghans who helped us for not leaving sooner. The one group he conspicuously did not blame was the Taliban, who once harbored Osama bin Laden and may protect his terrorist successor.

The President made glancing reference to the horrible scenes unfolding in Kabul and especially at the airport, though again without addressing the mistakes that led to them. Had the U.S. not given up the air base at Bagram, now controlled by the Taliban, the U.S. would not now have to fight to control Kabul’s commercial airfield.

The chaotic scenes at the airport, with Afghans hanging from a U.S. military plane and two falling from the sky to their deaths, will be the indelible images of this debacle. They are the echo of 9/11, with people falling from the sky, that Mr. Biden didn’t anticipate when he chose the 20th anniversary of 9/11 as his withdrawal deadline.

Instead of taking responsibility, Mr. Biden played to the sentiment of Americans who are tired of foreign military missions. It’s a powerful point to speak of sending a child to risk his life in a foreign country, and no doubt it will resonate with many Americans. It is a question that every President should ask.

How Bush Ruined Everything For all his faults, Al Gore couldn’t have been worse. By Adam Mill

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/15/how-bush-ruined-everything/

It’s impossible to forget those anxious December days when cherry-picked Florida counties continued to find handfuls of new Gore votes as recount after recount marched the 2000 election result towards a reversal of the apparent Bush victory a month earlier. Eventually the Supreme Court put a stop to the selective process which counted hanging chads in Democratic counties differently than in Republican counties. 

When Bush won, he brought with him a cabal of staffers broadly known as “neoconservatives” who distinguished themselves from traditional Republicans by ignoring deficit spending and strongly supporting interventionist foreign policy with a heavy emphasis on protecting and advancing America’s petro-allies in the Middle East. Months after September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration diverted America’s response to terrorism by seeking a revenge war in Iraq. 

American taxpayers poured trillions of dollars into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The wars represented a new golden age for the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, as Americans developed a neo-colonial relationship with the client states in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush and his allies easily brushed aside the few complaints and warnings from traditional liberals about abuses of civil liberties and the prospect of a never-ending Vietnam-like war. I can still hear the sound of Vice President Dick Cheney chuckling dismissively on the Sunday morning talk shows as he scoffed at these fears. Sure, the wars would be expensive. But “deficits don’t matter” according to the then-vice president.

Oh, what a bitter harvest we have reaped.

History acquitted those chicken-little voices that warned of never-ending wars, ballooning deficits, and the dangers of bloated and politicized intelligence agencies. I admit it. I was wrong about Bush. He was a disaster. 

We’re reminded of this point as we watch the humiliating withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Bush’s critics, who seemed so wrong at the time, have been proven right in the sweep of history. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars turned into the very quagmires that the liberals predicted. The Intelligence Agencies were allowed to pursue and harass Muslims in the United States—even setting some up in “Truman Show”-style prosecutions in which the FBI planned and financed almost every detail of terrorism plots to ensnare lonely, mentally disabled Muslim men. The civil liberties of these “terrorists” didn’t seem very important at the time. The liberals warned that these tactics set dangerous precedents that might later be applied to larger and larger swaths of the public.

So would any of this have been different had Al Gore been elected president? 

Are We in a Revolution and Don’t Even Know It? We are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/15/are-we-in-a-revolution-and-dont-even-know-it/

Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them. 

The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable. 

“Workers of the world unite!” was the old Marxist internationalist war cry. The perceived enemies of coerced socialism were nationalism— and the idea of singular countries defined by borders containing unique citizens legally distinct from mere migratory residents, and sharing ties and traditions that transcended race and class. All that is now problematic. 

If it is true that two million illegal aliens will cross the southern border with impunity in the current fiscal year, then the Biden agenda is apparently to help erode the idea of citizenship and anybody defined as an American. Under the socialist ethos, the indigent in Yucatan and the impoverished migrant from Nigeria have as much right to enter and live in the United States as U.S. citizens. And their respective rights under the living Constitution are now nearly identical. 

In just seven months, our southern border has vanished. Apparently, it was an artificial construct that obstructed the migrations of the global community. We are back to a natural, pre-civilizational and Rousseauian idea of freeing migrating tribes from the chains of civilization. And what better way to start than dispensing with unique borders, citizenship, and the idea of a nation state? 

Socialism aligns foreign policy with the interests of the global oppressed rather than the citizens of a particular nation. In reductionist terms, what do lifting sanctions on Iran and appeasing its theocracy, reaching out to Hamas and snubbing Israel, and allowing the Taliban to overrun Afghanistan have in common? Just as the United States is trying to rebrand itself as a sort of new, non-Western nation, so it clumsily seeks to recalibrate its foreign policy to cease support for the overdog, the American client, and the more Westernized. We are to believe that an empowered Persian Shiite crescent offers equity to the silenced of the Middle East. The Taliban, perhaps regrettably, better represents indigenous Afghan culture than does the Westernized bourgeois elite in Kabul. Hezbollah and Hamas are the more authentic Middle Easterners than the Western Zionist interlopers of Israel. In other words, our foreign policy is in a revolutionary flux. 

A Brief History of the Assault on Conservatives as ‘Violent Extremists’ By Janet Levy

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

The assault on conservative Americans began several decades ago with attacks on traditional principles and values. Belief in individual liberty and responsibility, free enterprise, and the rule of law was willfully conflated with “right-wing extremism.” Pride in America, a desire to protect our borders, and opposition to illegal immigration was branded as xenophobic. Championing the constitutional right to bear arms was decried as gun-crazed zealotry. Belief in religion, natural law, and the sanctity of human life was maligned as backward and anachronistic.

This vilification of conservatives has coincided with a deliberate shift from the real threats: radical Islamic and leftist groups. Islamic terrorist attacks have been declared as having “nothing to do with Islam” or excused by spurious claims that the perpetrators were mentally ill or misunderstood religious doctrine. When a military psychiatrist massacred 13 people in Fort Hood yelling ‘Allahu akbar’, it was dismissed as “workplace violence.” And the violence, arson, destruction of public property, and killing of citizens and police officers unleashed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) during the ‘Summer of Love’ are described as “mostly peaceful protests.”

Top Democrats haven’t shied away from embellishing the false narrative of a serious domestic terrorism threat from “right-wing extremists.” On his campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama demeaned working-class voters hit hard by job losses, saying, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” His statement aptly served the purpose of pillorying conservatives.