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?