RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/28/a-lesson-for-joe-biden/
On Thursday night, Joe Biden delivered himself of brief remarks about the slaughter perpetrated earlier that day by Islamic terrorists at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. At least 170 people were murdered, including 14 U.S. servicemen. Many more were injured. The commentator Scott Johnson spoke for most candid observers, I believe, when he wrote at Power Line that the president’s remarks were “pathetic and stupid. He gives human form to our humiliation. He embodies it. Anyone can see that.”

That is correct. And I think Fox News reporter Peter Doocy raised a question that was on many people’s minds when, near the end of Biden’s press conference, he said this: “there had not been a U.S. service member killed in combat in Afghanistan since February of 2020. You set the deadline, you pulled troops out, you sent troops back in, and now 12 Marines are dead. You said the buck stops with you. Do you bear any responsibility for the way that things have unfolded in the last two weeks?”

Biden’s answer? “Yes, but . . .” It giveth and it taketh away. The strophe: “I bear responsibility for fundamentally all that’s happened.” The antistrophe: “Donald Trump.” It was Trump who made a deal with the “tally-bahn,” you see, so, really, it’s not my fault, but his. 

Does anyone, even the most thoroughgoing NeverTrump enemy of the former president, think anything like this would have happened on Trump’s watch? 

There were so many horrible things about Biden’s cringe-making press conference, from the president’s body language—had he been supine, you sense that he would have curled up into the fetal position—to the gradually emerging realities that surrounded his talk. 

At the conclusion of his prepared remarks, it was time for questions. Biden then looked down at a piece of paper and said, aloud, “The first person I was instructed to call on . . . .” You would think his handlers would make some minimal effort to disguise their puppet’s subservience and incapacity. 

Did you know that when we stole away from Bagram Airfield at night we left behind hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grade-A military hardware, including 23 A-29 combat aircraft, three C-130 transport planes, 33 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, 170 armored Humvees, thousands upon thousands of rockets and grenades, nearly a million rounds of .50 caliber ammunition, and tens of thousands of rifles? In a stroke, we made the Taliban the best-armed radical Islamic organization in the world. 

Did you know that the United States is soon to be home to tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, many—if not most of them—Islamic fundamentalists? Did you know that, in its partnership with the Taliban (sounds odd doesn’t it?), the Biden Administration actually gave the Taliban the names of Americans and our Afghan allies. Yes, you read that right. “In a move no one can grasp,” Politico reported, “U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies, believing the Taliban would allow them to enter the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport. Lawmakers and military officials are outraged.” 

How about you? 

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-democratic-partys-icons-crack-and-crumble/

The Taliban takeover in Afghanistan was thought to be the worst-case scenario. As it turns out, the worst had yet to happen.

Horrific attacks on Thursday outside the crowded Kabul airport — already a chaotic scene amid the evacuation mission and, as such, a prime target for terrorists — killed at least 13 U.S. service members and dozens more Afghans. Countless decisions, from Trump’s Taliban deal (and a related prisoner release) to Biden’s Bagram bug-out and botched handling of the withdrawal itself, led to this moment of vulnerability. As NR’s editorial details, this entire bloody episode marks a devastating setback not just for Afghanistan but for America’s national security long-term. Yet underneath the chaos of the past several weeks, and concomitant with it, is another shift of considerable consequence — the realization that political figures long regarded as institutions, at least outwardly, have lost their grip.

At the top, there is President Joe Biden, and any deputies associated with the withdrawal who might have thought these posts were a springboard to higher office. When the BBC is skeptically fact-checking a Democratic president, when CNN is lamenting his “defensiveness, imprecision and apparent changes of position,” when the New York Times is reporting on the party rift over Biden’s leadership, when Politico exposes the unfathomable detail that the administration shared names of Afghan allies with the Taliban . . . Wilmington, we have a problem.

Rich Lowry writes:

The Afghanistan fiasco has created that most disorienting and discomfiting experience for a progressive administration — a serious bout of critical media coverage immune to White House spin and determined to tell the unvarnished story of an ongoing debacle.

Of course, it is not just normally friendly media outlets that have turned.

Leon Panetta, Obama’s defense secretary, is dismayed. New Hampshire’s Democratic senators are pressing Biden to ignore the withdrawal deadline. Senator Bob Menendez called the Afghanistan collapse “astounding,” pinned blame on “flawed negotiations” under Trump and “flawed execution” under Biden, and vowed to seek a “full accounting.” Democratic congressman Jim Langevin called this a “catastrophe.” The president’s approval rating has slipped below 50 percent by some readings, even spending time underwater for the first time in his presidency.

To use the in-vogue term of economists, this could be transitory, though the rising casualty count challenges any such expectations. John Fund makes a fundamental observation — that what we’re seeing now is pent-up frustration from the Beltway establishment, loosed by the vivid affirmation of long-held doubts about Biden’s ability:

Make no mistake, there is a genuine collapse of confidence in Biden. They may kiss and make up because Democratic control of Congress is at stake in 2022, but the wounds felt by the establishment from Biden’s incompetence will remain. . . .

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/still-spinning-the-mission-after-all-these-years/
“President Biden will have his heedless withdrawal. But far from ending the war, he has galvanized our enemies. That’s how you extend a forever war.”

Biden has unwittingly prolonged our ‘forever war.’

F or our military, it was the bloodiest day in the last decade of war in Afghanistan. The 13 deaths suffered on Thursday — ten Marines, two soldiers, one Navy corpsman, all killed in a jihadist mass-murder attack that also claimed dozens of Afghan lives — marked the worst day of combat for our armed forces in the seven years since the Obama/Biden administration announced that combat was over.

Yes, as far as the United States was concerned, the Afghan war was said to be over years before President Trump and then President Biden scorned the remaining counterterrorism mission as a “forever war” that had to be “ended.” How galling that, with Biden supposedly “ending 20 years of war,” we now have more combat casualties than we had when the mission was supposed to be combat.

Of course, even then the government was not clear on what exactly the mission in Afghanistan was. It never has been.

In addressing the nation after Thursday’s atrocity, Biden tried to explain and defend one inexplicable, indefensible thing after another — the Bagram bug-out, the trusting of our Taliban enemies with the security of our people, the sharing of intelligence with the Taliban, the provision to the Taliban of lists identifying Americans and our Afghan collaborators. In his habitual way, Biden’s mien was somber, almost teary, as he claimed to take full responsibility for the derelictions that led inexorably to the calamity; then, of course, he proceeded to insist that there were no derelictions — or, if there were, to blame them on his predecessor, or on U.S. military commanders.

Biden’s blame-shifting to Trump is the same stale tale he has been peddling for weeks. The president, who has modeled himself as the anti-Trump, who has self-consciously reversed every Trump policy under the sun — including successful immigration and foreign policies whose benefits a savvier successor could have played to his advantage — would now have you believe the shameful 2020 pact with the Taliban is the one and only Trump policy he had no choice but to execute.

This is not just false in principle; it is a proven lie in practice. Biden did, in fact, change Trump’s policy, extending the pullout date by over four months. Even if unratified agreements with terrorist organizations that the U.S. doesn’t recognize as governments were enforceable, and even if the Taliban had not been in serial violation of the agreement, Biden’s own actions demonstrate that the U.S. withdrawal is Biden policy.

https://nypost.com/2021/08/28/kamala-harris-cackling-is-joe-bidens-job-security/

Vice President Kamala Harris’s team canceled press access to her remarks to US troops at Pearl Harbor on Thursday — surely because it feared yet another disaster for the veep at the site of a terrible attack on America, the same day as the horrors in Kabul.

Harris is just too prone to verbal fumbles that pour more fuel on the Biden administration’s fires.

Just the week before, Harris broke into a bizarre cackle when reporters asked about the early stages of the Afghan crisis. And that’s hardly her only nails-on-chalkboard moment.

For example, when NBC’s Lester Holt called her out for failing to go to the US-Mexico border when she’s supposed to be administration pointwoman on the border criss, Harris again weirdly laughed as she countered, “And I haven’t been to Europe!” as if that had a thing to do with it.

Earlier, during last year’s campaign, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell asked Harris if she brought a “socialist or progressive perspective” to the Democratic ticket and got her own burst of the Kamala cackle.

Then the candidate answered, “No, no!” followed by a nervous-laughter-filled ramble: “It is the perspective of — of a woman who grew up a black child in America, who was also a prosecutor, who also has a mother who arrived here at the age of 19 from India. Who also, you know, likes hip hop. Like, what do you wanna know?”

That followed her cringe-inducing interview with Charlamagne tha God during the Democratic primaries. The “Breakfast Club” host asked if the ex-prosecutor opposed legalizing pot; she replied, “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me? Hahahahahahah.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/08/25/kamala_harris_backed_afghan_exit_despite_intel_warning_taliban_would_abuse_women_again_791529.html

Just 12 days before President Biden ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community warned the White House that allowing the Taliban to control the country would put Afghan women at grave risk, according to a little-noticed intelligence assessment.

Biden nonetheless pressed ahead with the plan – with the support of his vice president, Kamala Harris, who boasted that she was the last person in the room with the president when he made the decision and felt comfortable with the plan.

Despite her pledge during the presidential campaign to “protect” women in Afghanistan, Harris has been widely criticized for her “deafening silence” in the wake of the Taliban takeover. 

The April 2 intelligence warning casts doubt on assertions by Harris that she is a fierce advocate for women’s rights, including her pledge to “protect” women in Afghanistan during the presidential campaign.

The rights of Afghan women and girls are central to criticism of America’s precipitous withdrawal, which has thrown Afghanistan into chaos and put women once again at the mercy of the same brutal Taliban regime. Gains made in women’s rights have been highlighted as a major achievement during the two decades that American forces have been deployed in the country.

Harris gave her blessing to the pullout of 2,500 remaining troops despite a two-page memo from the National Intelligence Council (NIC) warning that their removal would make it easier for the Taliban to return to power and systematically abuse women.

“Progress [for Afghan women] … would be at risk after coalition withdrawal,” cautioned the declassified memo, which was drafted by the NIC and coordinated with the CIA, Pentagon and the State Department. “The Taliban … would roll back much of the past two decades’ progress if the group regained national power.”

The document cited a number of recent red flags signaling that the Taliban, despite paying lip service to women’s rights in peace talks, had not changed their misogynistic ways. “Taliban officials have issued statements opposing ‘alien-culture clothes worn by women’ and have accused women’s rights advocates of promoting immorality, indecency and non-Islamic culture.”

Added the memo: “Thus far, the Taliban’s effect on girls’ education in areas under its control has ranged from total shutdown to negotiated agreements on which subjects are taught.”

https://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/569652-the-memo-horror-in-kabul-is-political-disaster-for-biden

President Biden promised the United States would not suffer a “Saigon moment” as it withdrew from Afghanistan.

The reality has proven even bleaker. 

The attacks committed around Kabul’s airport on Thursday are a human tragedy. They are also a political catastrophe for the president.

At least 13 U.S. personnel have been killed and 15 wounded. The death toll among Afghans climbed to at least 60 according to some reports on Thursday, with more than 140 wounded. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the bombings.

The American people broadly agreed with Biden’s decision to end the war in Afghanistan, which is nearing its 20-year anniversary and is the longest in the nation’s history. It had already cost more than 2,400 American lives and more than $2 trillion.

It is also true — as Biden noted once again in a White House news conference late Thursday afternoon — that it was then-President Trump who did the deal with the Taliban for a full American withdrawal, which had been scheduled to take place even earlier, in May.

But none of that absolves Biden of responsibility for a pullout that has been, by any reasonable measure, a debacle.

Events from the past few weeks will be seared into the public memory through a series of appalling images: Desperate Afghans clinging to a taxiing U.S. military plane on a runway, and some falling from it soon after takeoff; an infant being hoisted over razor wire toward a group of Marines; and the carnage of Thursday’s attacks.

The end, for America in Afghanistan, is in sight. Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline is just five days away and he has so far rebuffed allies who want him to extend it. But reaching the endpoint may involve navigating fresh horrors.

At a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, warned of “very, very real threats” of more attacks that “could occur at any moment.”

Biden sought to steady the ship with his remarks from the White House, where he called f