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The Afghanistan Failure Proves America’s Regime Isn’t Fit To Lead By J.D. Vance

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/16/the-afghanistan-failure-proves-americas-regime-isnt-fit-to-lead/

J.D. Vance is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022. He is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy.”

The Americans who died in Afghanistan won’t have done so in vain if we learn the long-term lesson here: the people who lead this country aren’t fit for the task.

For nearly 20 years, American men and women have gone to Afghanistan and performed heroically. But they were asked by our leaders to do an impossible task: to turn a mountain backwater into a thriving democracy. We lost our best and brightest in those mountains—men and women who would have started families, built businesses, and sustained communities.

My heart breaks that these dead may have died in vain. But they won’t if we learn the long-term lesson of Afghanistan: the people who lead this country aren’t fit for the task.

In this moment, it is tempting to focus on the short term. Undoubtedly, the Biden administration has failed miserably in the short term.

They telegraphed and delayed our departure date, maximizing the Taliban’s planning abilities, and they abandoned Afghanistan at the peak of Taliban fighting season. They allowed critical weapons technology to fall into the hands of the enemy.

Perhaps most inexplicably, they abandoned the most important airbase before they ensured safe passage for Americans leaving the country. This is why the world’s media is plastered with images of American planes taxiing down runways overrun with Afghans.

But this is not merely the consequence of seven months of disastrous Biden policy, it is the failure of the entire American regime. Every major institution in our country revealed itself as a farce.

Let’s start with U.S. generals. Over 20 years, we have spent $1 trillion and lost nearly 3,000 Americans. Our leaders told the American people that Afghanistan was slowly becoming a more peaceful, stable country. In June, Mark Milley, our nation’s highest-ranking military officer, warned of “white rage” in the U.S. military. In July, he assured our nation that Afghan security forces had the “capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.”

In reality, it turned out that the Afghan national army couldn’t withstand four weeks of Taliban assault. Why was Milley focused on fake problems like white rage as he failed to do the job we pay him for? And why won’t Milley face an ounce of consequence for so clearly failing at the job he was given?

PAUL SCHNEE: COMMENTARY

http://www.PaulSchnee.com

Blinken and General Milley should be dismissed from office, the 25th. Amendment should be invoked to rid ourselves of Biden. Cackling Kalamity Harris should resign.

We can not go on being led in this manner. The entire rotten edifice of the Biden administration should be pole-axed before it empties the future for us all.

            ********************

It took us 3 years and 8 months to defeat Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.

During that time we built two navies, developed the atomic bomb, built the Pentagon in 16 months, and increased our military from about 370,000 personnel in 1941 to around 15 million when hostilities ended in August 1945.

How is it possible for us to have been in Afghanistan for 20 years and after so much sacrifice in blood and treasure we are now facing defeat by an enemy that has neither a powerful air force nor a navy that can apply constant and devastating applications of force?!

It has been said that the quickest way to end a war is to lose it but this war was dragged on for two decades.

Like Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan has been lost in the Congress of the United States helped by successive administrations that lacked clarity and, worst of all, a fierce resolution to obtain the kind of absolute victory that allowed us to win WWII.

We have failed to do the one thing that was responsible for that historic victory. We have failed to ELIMINATE THE THREAT!

All the time we had the means, the men, and the money to prevail in Afghanistan. We simply did not have the political will to kill and crush the Taliban and hand them and their terrorist pals the sort of devastating defeat from which they would never be able to recover.

Now we are witnessing in real-time the truth of the old adage that the conventional army loses if it does not win whereas the guerrilla army wins if it does not lose.

We cannot go on being led in this manner by men who, reclining safely in their armchairs, still do not understand that there is no substitute for victory.

Watching America’s Crack-Up by Benjamin Kerstein

https://quillette.com/2021/08/09/watching-americas-crack-up/

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because from over here in Tel Aviv, it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.

January 6 as Distraction from Afghanistan, Other Crises How top officials traded the security and stability of Afghanistan, and by extension, America, to instead promote unfounded fears about white domestic terrorists. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/16/january-6-as-distraction-from-afghanistan-other-crises/

While Taliban forces rapidly overtook territories across Afghanistan earlier this month, Joe Biden held an overdramatic ceremony at the White House to once again perpetuate phony narratives about the events of January 6. Biden, falsely claiming officers died as a result of the Capitol protest, signed legislation passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate to bestow the Congressional Gold Medal to the United States Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police for their actions that day.

“A mob of extremists and terrorists launched a violent and deadly assault on the people’s house,” Biden said on August 5. “It wasn’t dissent. It wasn’t debate. It wasn’t democracy. It was insurrection. It was riot and mayhem. It was radical and chaotic.”

Ten days later, an actual mob of extremists and terrorists launched an assault to seize the Afghan capital in the most humiliating defeat of American political and military leadership in at least half a century. Biden, reportedly stunned by the success of an actual insurrection on his watch, remained in hiding at Camp David all weekend.

The war in Afghanistan, unlike January 6, has been deadly, costly, and largely futile. Lawmakers of both parties now are asking tough questions about how our exit went so wrong, so quickly. Finger-pointing is happening in all different directions.

The juxtaposition of the two events, however, shows how preposterous the framing of January 6 has been from the start. It also underscores the dangerous consequences of the ruling class’ nonstop fixation on the Capitol protest.

Political, intelligence, law enforcement, and defense leaders have shamefully redirected resources and time from real crises to perpetuate the falsehood that white supremacist domestic terrorists attempted to overthrow “democracy”—whatever that means—and that jihadi-like cells of Trump supporters, not foreign adversaries, pose the most significant threat to the homeland.

For more than seven months, official Washington has been in meltdown mode over the four-hour January 6 disturbance on Capitol Hill. A day doesn’t go by without some uniformed apparatchik—from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to an undercover narcotics cop—reminding the American people that their own countrymen are wannabe terrorists, ready to strike again. 

This unhinged obsession, bolstered on an hourly basis by the national news media, allows those in charge to ignore any number of real national emergencies including rising crime and escalating numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country, to name just a couple. Manufactured outrage about the imminent menace of “domestic terrorism” is fiddling while the country burns.

Democrats Finally Get Comfortable Saying Obama Is a Jerk By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democrats-finally-get-comfortable-saying-obama-is-a-jerk/

Last week, our Charlie Cooke spotlighted an MSNBC commentator insisting Florida governor Ron DeSantis is “more dangerous than Trump” and accurately dissected how Democrats talk about Republican officials in and out of office.

This is simply how Democrats begin to talk about Republican candidates whom they believe are capable of winning a national election. When such candidates reach office, they’re Hitler. When they’ve left office, they’re bad, but not as bad as the ones in office. And when they’re dead, they’re the sort of Republicans whom the living ones should be more like — yes, even if, when they were alive, they, too, were deemed to be Hitler.

There’s an inverse relationship with Democratic party lawmakers. The more time that passes since a particular Democrat was in elected office, the easier it gets for his fellow Democrats to acknowledge glaring flaws that they previously ignored or downplayed. Six years after Ted Kennedy died, it was safe to make a movie about Chappaquiddick – and lay out the facts that Kennedy left a young woman to drown. In 2017, nearly 17 years after Bill Clinton left office and when it was clear his wife would not become president someday, Matt Yglesias and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could safely acknowledge that Clinton’s affair with an intern should have forced his resignation.

And now this appears to be the moment when Democrats feel comfortable publicly ripping into Barack Obama. There were moments during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary where candidates and factions within the party grappled with their disappointment and recognized that if Obama was as terrific a president as they insisted, the American people would not have elected Donald Trump.

Different Democrats will give Obama different grades, but many would acknowledge that on some level they were disappointed by the outcome of his presidency — if for no other reason, the gradual decimation of the Democratic party at the local, state, and national levels from 2009 to 2016. George Soros called Barack Obama “my greatest disappointment.”

Matt Stoller contends Obama was far too cozy with big corporations and backed bailouts. The Affordable Care Act turned out to be a much more mixed bag than Democrats expected. As Michael Brendan Dougherty observed, last night ten Democrats discussed health care at length and never mentioned Obamacare.

But what we’re seeing with criticism of Obama’s big birthday bash – particularly in Maureen Dowd’s column – is different; the focus is not merely policy disappointments, but an acknowledgement that Obama is being a narcissistic, self-absorbed, tone-deaf jerk.

“I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,” said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. “We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.”

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.”