Category: Social Commentary
Ruining America: It’s By Design

Ruining America: It’s By Design

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If you think the image above is a scene of squalor from some Third World country, you’re right. The name of that country is the United States of America, and what you see is the ideal that many seek to turn the country into.

Recent events clearly dismiss any notion that what is being done to the country is in any way the result of incompetence or misjudgments. At this point, it is unmistakable that all this is being done by design, and is intended to ruin the country. Just take at face value the words of Homeland Security (sic) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in his Congressional testimony on Sept. 22: “We are following our plan.” And indeed, they are. That part was the truth. The phrase that preceded it, “The border is secure,” is such a demonstrably bold-faced lie it needs to be, but won’t be, prosecuted.

Unrestricted illegal immigration is perhaps the most obvious and visible manifestation of this administration’s push for the country’s ruination. But there are lots of other examples: Disgracefully abandoning Americans and our allies in a hostile and deadly Afghanistan. Allowing — even encouraging — terrorists to regain all the territory that American troops died, over two decades, to push them from, and arming them with more than $80 billion worth of the most sophisticated weapons. Encouraging crime to spiral upward across the land. Fostering racial divisions, setting back race relations a half century. Pursuing fiscal profligacy that feeds inflation and impoverishes future generations while feeding wealthy Democratic donors. Restoring the country to dependence on foreign sources for petroleum. And that is to name but the most prominent features of what this current crowd in Washington and across the land is pushing, full speed ahead.

No level of incompetence can explain or excuse such an across-the-board abandonment of American values, disregard for the rule of law, or the wholesale destruction of the country’s well-bring. No, dear reader, this is part of a grand plan, and what you think, if you don’t like what is happening, doesn’t matter one bit to the current administration or the elites who support it and helped put it in power. And Joe Biden is the perfect vehicle for them to accomplish their goals: A valueless, demented tool whose sole interest is, always was, his own power, aggrandizement, and greed, ripe for the true power brokers to use as they wish, the American public or his oath of office be damned.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, used by many in the administration, in the Democratic Party, and on the fringe left, “Profoundly transforming America.” A favorite word used by those same people is “dog whistle.” And that’s what that phrase is, a dog whistle for “Destroying America.” Whatever went before, what made America America, its values, its history, even its laws and Constitution, are detested by these people, and they now hold the reins of power to accomplish what has been their objective for a very long time. And things may already be past the point of no return for saving what is left of the country since their intent is to make it into a one-party state where opposition to their orthodoxy is meaningless. Unleashing unrestricted illegal immigration is a cornerstone of accomplishing that.

In this post I’m going to look at just two aspects of this plan — unrestricted illegal immigration and upwardly spiraling crime — and also the utter disregard in which those promoting these policies hold the American people.

Opening the flood gates

Take the situation at the southwestern border, for instance, though at this point it is a misnomer to refer to it as a border. The photos above tell the story of what is going on there. What you’re seeing in the first is an encampment of Haitians under the International Bridge at Del Rio, Texas — more than 15,000 at one point, and they just kept coming, 30,000 in the past three weeks, literally walking like a stream of ants across the Rio Grande, as in the second image. Not coming direct from Haiti, but Haitians that have been living all over South America, in many cases for years, some having been granted political asylum in those countries. And there are another 30,000 or many more following, coming up through Central America and Mexico. All coming at the personal invitation of Joe Biden. Like the other 2 million illegal border jumpers the country is on target to receive this year, a new all-time record. And those are just the ones that get apprehended, and then sent wherever in the country they want to go. It’s solely a matter of speculation how many “got aways” have, and will, make their way into the country.

With this wave of illegals come the drugs being trafficked across the border by the Mexican cartels, which have earned billions of dollars on the illegal trade. And the women and children being trafficked. And the terrorists mingled in with the others, coming from more than 100 countries all over the world. Add to the total tens of thousands of Afghans of all ilk and stripe — few are those who assisted the U.S. in Afghanistan, most of whom were left behind by Biden to be tortured and killed by the Taliban — flown in and released, and you begin to get an idea of the scope of what amounts to a staged invasion of the country. And while Biden dictates COVID vaccination mandates for law-abiding Americans, the border jumpers and others are let in without vaccinations or even much testing. If you think any of this is not by design, you’re deluded and misled. Biden inherited a secure border — perhaps the most secure in our history — from Donald Trump, and on Day 1 of his administration he blew the doors off it. And the flood of migrants quickly followed and has not abated since.

Why, you ask, would a president seek to inflict this on his own people? Simple. The left, which controls Biden, doesn’t believe in borders. They believe people should go wherever they want, and if millions of people from around the world want to come to America, they think that should be their right. They also are looking ahead for when they can finally push through an amnesty act — one is embedded in the monster $3.5 trillion spending bill Nancy Pelosi wants to get passed — that would lead to citizenship for all these millions of illegals. They’re counting on most of them then voting Democratic out of some sort of gratitude to the party that invited them in. And if they do that — the numbers, just this year alone, eclipse the populations of more than 14 states — that will finally realize their dream of a one-party state.

Meanwhile, Biden is in blatant violation of his oath of office, a key part of which is to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Article II, Section 3 of that Constitution says that, among his other duties, the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed . . .” One must wonder why this President has not been impeached for his utter failure to faithfully, or in any other way, execute the country’s immigration laws, among others.

Spiraling crime

Another key element of the drive to destroy America is spiraling crime. Beginning with the death of George Floyd in May 2020, crime began rising unabated in many of the country’s largest cities — almost all of which are Democrat ruled and have been for a very long time. As violence tore apart cities from coast to coast, the movement to defund the police took root, and despite many billions of dollars in damage done, and numerous innocent people killed, few people were charged with crimes and fewer prosecuted. Contributing to the problem, a number of jurisdictions across the country, including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, New Mexico, California, and Alaska, abolished or limited their cash bail systems. Add so-called “progressive” prosecutors, helped into office by massive campaign contributions by radical billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, and reduced charges and penalties for a number of crimes, even decisions not to prosecute certain offenses — leading to scenes such as in the photo above, as thieves walk out of an Apple store in California with thousands of dollars of merchandise — and you have a perfect storm of what seem to be unintended negative consequences. But are they unintended?

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that demoralizing and reducing the number of police, letting criminals walk free with no inducement not to re-offend, and letting people commit crimes with little or no threat of consequence, is going to lead to an increase in criminality. But like letting illegal immigrants enter the country at will, giving criminals freer and freer rein is going to have negative consequences, especially on the most vulnerable in the society. Thus, we have the latest FBI report that is expected to show a 29 percent increase in murders in 2020, eclipsing the next largest increase, 12.7%, in 1968. And that trend is continuing and accelerating in 2021. Meanwhile, while at least 25 cities have either cut funds, or are contemplating cutting funds, from their police forces, Forbes Magazine found that in 20 of the cities cutting police funding mayors and other city officials are protected, at taxpayer expense, by special police details. And all — I stress, all — of those 20 cities are run by Democratic mayors. So, those mayors and other officials consider their constituents expendable, but they get personal protection since, after all, they’re special, and you’re not.

As Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, clearly one of America’s most useless mayors, put it, “I think that residents of [Chicago], understanding the nature of the threats we are receiving on a daily basis, understand that I have a right to make sure my home is secure.” She, not you, have a right to a secure home. And in Minneapolis, where the 2020 violence originated, leading to a billion dollars in damage to that city alone, three of the city council members who voted to defund the police have private security details costing taxpayers $4,500 a day. And this is going on in at least 20 Democrat-run cities.

Hypocrisy no longer matters

You might remember a time when being accused of hypocrisy actually carried some weight. Well, those days are over. Now those who will dictate our morality to us while flaunting their own profligacy and privilege don’t think even once about being accused of hypocrisy. They know there are enough gullible sheeple, “informed” by a corrupt lackey media, out there that they can get away with just about anything, up to and including outright lying and corruption.

Take the unofficial leader of the so-called Squad of radical left activists in the Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That’s her up there in that dress, emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich.” Such a (to some) seemingly noble thought, something to wear to the $35,000 a plate Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala, where not many poor people likely would be in attendance. But AOC is right in her element, having graduated from the life of a barista to membership in the nation’s elite, lording it over those who can’t pony up $35,000 for a roast beef dinner. Hypocrisy? What’s that?

But it doesn’t end there. See the woman standing next to AOC? She’s Aurora James, an established tax deadbeat with dozens of state and federal tax and other warrants lodged against her in a number of states — mostly to do with not collecting or paying the payroll taxes due on her workers, or not carrying required worker comp insurance — and whose employees have accused of harassment and running “a sweat shop” full of unpaid interns. She’s also stiffed her company’s landlords while scoring a $1.6 million residence for herself in L.A. and collecting $41,666 in federal pandemic relief funds.

James — whom AOC terms a “working class” designer — lent her that hypocritical dress, likely worth thousands of dollars, and others contributed the bling AOC wore during the gala. Oh, and did we mention? AOC’s long-time boyfriend, web developer Riley Roberts, also got comped, bringing the total to $70,000 just to get in the door. If all this doesn’t make you want to vomit, what’s wrong with you?

Now one has to wonder, doesn’t all that — from comping the dinner tickets to the dress to the bling — constitute bribery of a public official? Why isn’t there an official corruption investigation being done of the congressperson, who would pick everyone else’s pocket to support her extravagant Socialist schemes while dancing the night away among the uber-wealthy? Can you spell “Democrat,” which seems to provide a pass to the most egregious acts of not just hypocrisy, but blatant corruption?

You see, she’s AOC, and you’re not. And as she and her party go about ruining the country as best they can, you, me, all of us, get to pay for it, in so many ways. If you voted for any of this, if you voted for Joe Biden, AOC, and the rest of their ilk, this is what you voted for. Maybe this isn’t what you were signing up for, but this is what you’re getting, and it shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. But the rest of us, those of us who didn’t vote for this, or had our vote stolen through the fraud of the last election, are paying and suffering for it, too. And when the ship goes down, we all go down with it.

Featured image, Haitians at Del Rio, Texas, by John Moore, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Haitians Cross Rio Grande, Agence France-Presse, via BBC.com. Used under Fair Use.

Thieves Robbing Apple Store, Yahoo News. Used under Fair Use.

Aurora James and AOC at Met Gala, New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also is posted on my Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there. And if you like the piece, please share it. Links below.
Review: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

Review: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

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It’s back to world war again. Last month I reviewed 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Now I’ll review Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. What’s that, you ask? Both books have the same subtitle? Yup. Apparently world wars sell books. Since Ghost Fleet came first, it would be the 2034 authors and publisher poaching the subtitle. Originality, anyone?

Anyway, the same Foreign Service buddy who suggested I read 2034 suggested that I read Ghost Fleet, too. It’s one more of those books that is reputedly all the buzz inside the Beltway. This is because, as mentioned in my other review, every war-game simulation run shows the ChiComs winning and handing us our ass. This is basically the premise of Ghost Fleet, that we’re at a disadvantage in a confrontation with China, and the book takes us through the ensuing conflict.

Foreign Policy had this to say about the place the book held in the Pentagon in 2016:

“It’s on the desks of four-star generals and junior naval officers, and it has found its way on to the recommended reading lists for every branch of the American military . . . At a time when commanders and intelligence officials are worried about retaining America’s technological edge against resurgent great power rivals — crystallized in Friday’s of the Defense Department’s annual report on China — the book has captured imaginations and sparked debate inside the Pentagon. Ghost Fleet has landed at an auspicious time: After 15 years of grinding ground wars against elusive insurgents armed with homemade bombs, the U.S. military is both yearning to get back to its roots in high-end conflict and wondering how to counter old adversaries with new hi-tech tools.”

I guess that was a time when our military — for lack of a better word — leadership was more concerned with defending the U.S. against real threats than superfluous things like promoting Critical Race Theory, gender equity, climate change, and combating alleged white supremacy. It’s pretty startling the changes that have taken place just in the past nine months in that regard, though I think the seeds of those changes were planted long ago. And now, with the debacle of our shameful Afghanistan surrender and withdrawal, the threat to this country has never been greater in many decades, and yet it is more clear, to friend and foe alike, that we are less psychologically prepared to counter any threats than perhaps at any time in our history. So whether one accepts the premise of the book or not, it is clear that through our exhibited fecklessness and weakness the temptation to our enemies has been magnified exponentially and entirely through our own unforced errors.

The Future as Seen from 2014

Ghost Fleet was written in 2014 and came out in 2015, so there are some clear anachronisms in it. One thing that jumped out was the widespread use in the book of smart glasses that are based on Google Glass, and we all know what happened to that idea. Technology plays a big part in the book and in the war, as one might expect. But one has to question some of that technology. For instance, a Chinese teenage girl is depicted just flicking her fingers to manipulate smart rings on her digital joints and create dire situations half way around the world. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t see where finger flicks could be deployed with sufficient precision to accomplish their goals. I mean, I have a hard enough time getting my tablet to do anything with my fingers on the screen. These things might make for colorful visuals, but I don’t see them working in real life.

Some things, like our dependence on computer chips used in sophisticated military aircraft and machines that are made in China, enabling the planting of spyware and tracking capability in them, is plausible, though others more knowledgeable of such things than I am have pointed out how shielding and other safeguards would largely make such things ineffectual. Peoples’ movements are tracked in great detail by a network of surveillance cameras, to the point where one can hardly take a dump without being observed, and then deadly drones, called quadcopters, come in to take out perceived enemies. Not totally inconceivable, but stretched to a point that challenges credulity. These scenes frequently reminded me of the 2016 – 2018 TV series Colony, which featured an alien invasion of Los Angeles.

As in 2034, technological advantages held by our adversaries help tip the balance toward them. But the question has to be raised whether the answer is simply more technology, more dependence on technology, or whether being smarter about how that technology is developed, built, deployed, and hardened against infiltration is the better approach. Ghost Fleet is almost like a clarion call for those at the top to pour more trillions into high-end technology while it’s also a dire warning against such an approach. The money game is at the heart of Washington politics, but how much does it further expose us to our enemies? And what role should more low-tech approaches play, undercutting our adversaries’ dependence on technology?

One disturbing element of the book is how virtually everyone, on both sides, has become essentially drug addicts. They rely on “stims” and implanted “pumps” to enhance their performance, do their jobs, even stay awake. This seemed superfluous to the overall story line, but it’s far from the only superfluous element.

The Ghost Fleet

The book’s title, and much of its action, centers on the mothballed fleet of ships — the Ghost Fleet — that have been taken out of service and are moldering at various places around the country. Once the war has started, China (actually, an updated version of China, something called “the Directorate,” made up of a mix of business moguls and military brass who overthrew the former Chinese Communist Party following the collapse of Indonesia) and Russia have disabled U.S. communications and surveillance capabilities. The Directorate also invaded, in a sneak blitz attack, and holds the state of Hawaii, where much of the action goes on.

With most of the U.S. Navy destroyed, the Pentagon resorts to putting the Ghost Fleet into action. Especially a high-tech, but mothballed, destroyer known as the U.S.S. Zumwalt — an actual vessel, seen in the image above in its sea trials. Mounted with a new and powerful weapon called a rail gun, this is going to be our answer to the mighty Chinese fleet. And like the lead characters in a TV crime drama running between the bullets but never getting hit, somehow the Chinese don’t see what is going on with its refurbishment and refitting, and then the Zumwalt manages to survive every attack launched against it once sent out on the prowl.

While serving up much of the dramatic and personal action in the book, these two elements — that we’d ever tolerate occupation of a U.S. state without massive retaliation, and how so much reliance was put on a single obsolete naval vessel — further stretched credulity. Throw in an eccentric billionaire who manages to take over a previously impermeable Chinese space station, after the Russians had taken over the International Space Station by locking out the sole U.S. astronaut aboard, and a sexy serial killer whose cleverly murderous ways are directed at the Chinese occupiers in Hawaii while feeding her own homicidal desires, and you have a mix more colorful than plausible.

Additionally, as a former intel analyst, I have to question how the Chinese and Russians could gear up for their attacks without us seeing what they were up to. We can identify specific cargoes being loaded on ships from our satellite surveillance and humint capabilities (assuming someone was watching, which they would be, before our satellites were incapacitated), and that just didn’t compute to me. Or how the Chinese wouldn’t see what we were up to refitting the Zumwalt at Mare Island.

The book has been criticized on literary terms, and I have to say I frequently found the book annoying. There are so many locations, subplots, and characters to keep track of — switching between them every one, two, or three pages throughout the book — there were times I was tempted to throw the book down. Rather than building my suspense, that got to be too much and just irritated me. I wound up spending an inordinate amount of time flipping back in the book to see who a specific character was or what was going on in a given subplot. Also, the book comes to a screeching halt in the middle of the most critical action, implying somehow we had prevailed without filling in the details how we did, and that also annoyed me.

While the book is a novel — at 404 pages, a rather long one — it also has 374 end notes meant to document every detail in the book and intended to lend credibility to it.

I won’t argue that Ghost Fleet doesn’t raise some questions worth evaluating, or that it isn’t entertaining enough in numerous places. But I wouldn’t get my ideas on how a future war might start, be fought, won, or lost, from the book. Or any work of fiction. I’d suggest that our military and political leadership get their heads out of their reading lists and get back to looking in a hard-headed way at world realities. Not that I have much faith that they will.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War is by P.W. Singer and August Cole, an Eamon Dolan Book, published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright © 2015 by P.W. Singer and August Cole.

P.W. Singer is a strategist at New America, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and Principal at Useful Fiction LLC. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators by Defense News, as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List, and as an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Singer is the author of multiple best-selling, award winning books in both fiction and nonfiction, ranging from Wired for War to Ghost Fleet. Described in the Wall Street Journal as “the premier futurist in the national-security environment,” Singer is considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st Century warfare, with more books on the military professional reading lists than any other author, living or dead.

August Cole is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. He is the director of the Art of Future War project, which explores narrative fiction and visual media for insight into the future of conflict. His fiction writing tackles themes at the core of American foreign policy and national security in the twenty-first century, including the privatization of military and intelligence operations and the future of American power in the Pacific. He is also writer-in-residence at Avascent, an independent strategy and management-consulting firm focused on the defense and aerospace sectors. From 2007 to 2010, Cole reported on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal.

Photo of U.S.S. Zumwalt by U.S. Navy and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also is posted on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry, and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there. And if you like the piece, please share it. Links below.
Disgrace

Disgrace

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In a normal country in normal times, those responsible for such an enormous debacle as what those at the top in our country caused to happen in Afghanistan in recent weeks would resign in disgrace. And if they didn’t, steps would be taken by those charged with oversight to remove them from office, even try and punish them. But this is not a normal country and these are not normal times, and there seems to no longer exist any sense of shame, disgrace, or even admission of failure. Instead, as the alleged president just did, again, they take a victory lap and spew lies and distortions touting how brilliant and insightful they are, and hope everyone is as imbecilic and full of guile as they are.

Listening to Biden’s words a short while ago made me more angry than I can ever remember any political figure, in my entire life, make me. And that is saying something. I shouted out my anger, and I struck my head wondering how a single human being — as despicable and useless as this rotten excuse for a human being is — can be so profoundly stupid. And arrogant. Surely it has to be a team effort. And the ulterior motive a powerful one.

The insult I used as the title of my last piece on this subject — Ignorance With Impudence — barely touches the level of ignorance nor that of impudence put on full display today.

You see those hands in that photo above, showing a collapsing Biden last Thursday when he was challenged by Fox News’s Peter Doocy on his attempt to blame his Afghanistan catastrophe on his predecessor? Look carefully and you’ll see that they’re drenched in blood. The blood of 13 of our service people killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport last week. The blood of hundreds of needlessly dead Afghans in the same attack. The blood of the Americans, the blood of the Afghans who risked their lives to support us, deliberately left behind while surrounded by rabid terrorists intent on rooting them out and killing them. Also there is the blood of the hundreds, thousands, who will die in Afghanistan, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as a result of the incredibly bone-headed and callous decisions made by this incompetent and those who allowed and facilitated him to make and carry them out.

If ever there was a time to say there is plenty of blame to go around, this is it. But since Biden is at the top of this heap of excrement and claims the buck stops with him — as if he actually means it, as Harry Truman did — he bears ultimate blame and responsibility for what happened, what will happen. To paraphrase the immortal 1988 words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, back when Democrats still had some honor and a tad of sense, to vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, Mr. President, I served with Harry Truman. I knew Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Harry Truman.

Stalemate

Once more I find my post taking a different direction than I initially intended. The news continues to come in so fast, and it’s so awful, it’s impossible to keep up with it. I’m not a news service and this is not intended to be either daily reporting or a book. Any one with a fair mind and open eyes can see the reality, the actual events and people creating them, the results of those events and those people, and they don’t need me to continually point them out. My job, as I’ve executed it for more than four years now, is to put the pieces together, to analyze them, and to do what I can to bring people a clear view of the reality. To the extent many of my readers already have a clear view, they read my pieces and nod their heads and occasionally let me know they agree. And I try to give clear views to those readers who don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality, and I hope I can bring some around to at least consider views other than those they are fed by what I’ve come to call the State Media, the corrupt and biased mainstream media and Big Tech whose lies and coverups in large part brought us to the terrible place we’re now at.

Initially I was going to call this piece Stalemate — the point in a chess match where a player has no legal moves left that won’t land his king in checkmate. It’s a draw, and the game is over. As a nation, we’re now in stalemate, and there are no legal moves left that will get us out of it. As a nation, we’re forced to live in this stasis, which was engineered by the Dem strategists and whoever is calling the shots behind the scenes of the party, and one has to hand them kudos for that achievement, as despicable and dangerous as it is. We have a clearly mentally incompetent president who, by almost any measure, the 25th Amendment was written for. But then, even if he could be removed from office either through that amendment or impeachment, we have a poison pill, the repulsive and dangerous Kamala Harris, as vice president. We get rid of the top guy, and we’re left with what might be an even worse substitute. And below her is the power hungry and vicious Nancy Pelosi. So, three layers deep, we’re left with no good legal moves, and that was the plan all along.

Those same Dem power brokers counted on what they see as the stupidity of the American people, for whom they have no respect other than to use them for their own purposes, and then along came the gift that keeps on giving — the COVID pandemic — which allowed them to flaunt and just plain throw out constitutional protections of our vote. That fraud allowed them to engineer a victory for a doddering old fool you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, let alone head the most powerful country on earth. And they knew that, even in his dementia, given the chance to grab the top accolade of his long and feckless political career — the presidency — Jello-O Joe would put the interest of the country aside and go for it. For this he won my top Profile in Cowardice award.

As I point out in that piece, it wasn’t always this way in American politics, even among the Democratic Party. Read the piece and see, if you forgot or weren’t around at that time, how Thomas Eagleton — a far more capable figure then Joe Biden — stepped down from being George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 when details of some issues with depression Eagleton had dealt with came out. At that time, the good of the country took precedence. That now seems like a prosaic concept.

An Unmitigated Disaster of a Presidency

For anyone who voted for Joe Biden — and, to be perfectly frank, you have to bear some responsibility for this debacle — I defy you to name one single thing Biden has done, one decision he’s made, that has made life better for ordinary Americans. I’ll go one further, and defy you to name one single thing, one single decision, he’s made, that hasn’t made things much worse for this country and its residents. We are so far beyond fucked at this point, it’s hard to even find a suitable word to describe it.

Whether it is throwing open our southwestern border to every ilk of criminal, drug runner, COVID-carrier, and terrorist who cares to cross it, in thorough disregard for our laws and well being — now being augmented by thousands of unvetted Afghans arriving and being sent willy-nilly around the country — taking our focus from competence and merit to attempting to inculcate divisions and distrust in our military, in our corporations and other institutions, and in society at large, to flaunting the Supreme Court and the rule of law to undermine the ability of property owners to pay their bills and stay afloat, to creating what can only be described as confusion on the coronavirus front, this president and his puppet masters have done what they can to sew discord and disorder in the nation. Crime is allowed to spiral out of control, unbridled federal spending is driving inflation, and he took us from energy independence to once more being dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

On the international stage, he has now shown this country to be weak and untrustworthy, and as we’ve learned, weakness breeds instability and tempts bad actors to take chances they would not otherwise. Despite the lies Biden told today — and there is no other word to describe his ridiculous and readily disprovable assertions — we have now created a terrorist nation in Afghanistan, and given a safe haven to not just the Taliban, but their close allies, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and ISIS, among others. Even more mind-boggling, by leaving behind $83 billion in military hardware, we’ve made this terrorist state the fifth best equipped military in the world. The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters, as just one example, than Australia.

Make no mistake. The same bunch of misguided idiots — Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, child-moron Jake Sullivan who purports to be National Security Adviser, throw in Joint Chiefs Chairman and blowhard Mark Milley, and other members of the Obama foreign policy (sic) team — that brought us the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian nuclear deal have now undone 20 years of progress, as difficult as it was, in Afghanistan, and created a mess and a threat that will be our nemesis for decades to come.

Perhaps most poignantly telling are the comments of the parents and spouses and siblings of the 13 slain service people, who spoke of Biden’s insensitivity, his self-absorption, his incessant talking about the death of his son Beau — who did not die in combat — his checking his watch each time, 13 times, a coffin came off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. I’ll end this piece with the words of Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Marine Rylee James McCollum, killed in the attack on HKIA, who says it better than I ever could.

Calling in to a talk show Friday, McCollum said this:

“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday. Twenty years and six months old — getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife and witness the birth of his son. And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die. I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to [have White House Press Babbler Jen Psaki on] right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin’ Taliban terrorists who just freakin’ blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about, oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

McCollum’s son is gone. And as tragically, so is our national honor, and very possibly our security and our future with it.

Featured image, Biden’s Collapse, Al Drago, Bloomberg News via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Stalemate, from rutrackerpulse.weebly.com. Used under Fair Use.

The Three Heads of the Poisonous Serpent, Jim Watson, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please subscribe here, and there.

 
It All Falls Apart

It All Falls Apart

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Do you remember the last time we saw helicopters evacuating embassy personnel and civilians following a U.S. overseas collapse? If you said April 29-30, 1975, upon the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army, you’d show you have a sense of history. Something that seems to not be in the portfolio of this country’s current shadow government or its top figurehead leadership in the form of Joe Biden.

Watching the events of the past few days, on top of the seven months that preceded them, we — even the skeptics and rationalizers — can have no doubt but that things are totally out of control and falling apart at an accelerating and alarming rate. On every key front we are seeing the abdication of responsible and competent leadership, and in every area where the country expects its government to keep it safe and secure — its primary duty — it has been failed.

I outlined specifics of these failures in an earlier piece where I explained why we are so fucked. I posted that piece less than three weeks ago, and its dire account now seems almost optimistic in comparison to what we’ve witnessed in recent days. One hopes these events might serve as a wake-up call to the country — even the corrupt mass media, who were complicit in putting us into the jeopardy we’re now in, have been critical of the so-called Administration’s catastrophic handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal — but it seems those holding the power are loathe to surrender even a millimeter of that power and are intent on blustering and lying their way through the mess — messes — they created. Worse, who is supposed to answer the wake-up call when one party, holding a deaf ear to the phone, controls the White House and both houses of Congress? The fox is guarding the hen house, and the rest of us are the hens.

On Monday we finally heard from Jell-O Joe, after days of silence while he went on “vacation,” and despite his empty claim that “the buck stops with me,” he preceded to blame everyone except himself for the Afghan disaster. If you haven’t already heard it, and you have a strong stomach, you can read the text of his blame game here.

“So what’s happened?” Biden blathered, as he went through his litany of blame. “Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”

Never mind that all of what went down was 100 percent predictable, and predicted, and Biden and his feckless advisers and the Pentagon and the State Department took absolutely no precautions to put in place a contingency plan that would have allowed a withdrawal that didn’t turn into a total rout and disgrace for our country. There is equally little argument that can be made that most of the last 20 years in Afghanistan wasn’t something of a circle jerk of errors, with one bogus and misleading statement of success after another coming out of the Pentagon and from four administrations of both parties, once more bringing back memories of Vietnam.

Former UN Envoy to Afghanistan Peter Galbraith over the weekend laid much of the blame for the rapid collapse of the Afghan military and government on the toleration of widespread corruption in the country over two decades by the U.S. and its allies. Much of the trillion dollars the U.S. poured into Afghanistan went into politicians’ and war lords’ pockets, with loose or absent controls on the part of our DoD and State Department.

Back to where we started on Sept. 11, 2001

A country is great only to the extent its leaders are great. We are a country in disgrace, and don’t for a moment think that hasn’t been noted by the Chinese and the Russians, not to mention the plotters of terror around the globe. Which highlights yet another lie, a most dangerous one, Biden uttered Monday.

“We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago,” he said, “with clear goals: Get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again. We did that. We severely degraded al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

One after another, knowledgeable intel analysts and operatives, all with on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan, filled the airwaves today with their assessment that al Qaeda is already taking root in Afghanistan, that it never went away. And now with their brothers in arms and spirit once more in control of the country, they will have a clear way forward to reestablish their jumping-off point for launching attacks against the U.S. and other Western countries. Even the leading apologist for the left, the New York Times, has a piece called “Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home.” You don’t have to be a genius or intel analyst to figure that out. You just have to not be Joe Biden.

Two quotes from former top officials in Democratic administrations really have it right. Bob Gates, former Defense Secretary in the Obama Administration, said — and has since stood by his statement — that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” And Leon Panetta, another Defense Secretary and CIA chief under Obama and Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton, said, ““He is president of the United States. He is going to have to take responsibility.” Going on to compare the loss of Afghanistan to the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1961, Panetta said that JFK, unlike Biden, “took responsibility for what took place.”

Or, if you prefer, Jell-O Joe’s old boss, Barack Obama, perhaps put it most succinctly: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

When Biden says “And here’s what I believe to my core . . . ” you know that is just blather because Biden has no core. Over the 40-umpteen years of his undistinguished career, he has shown time and time again how he’ll blow with whatever wind is blowing, say anything he thinks will advance him, lie when that’s convenient, and just make things up as he goes along, all the while with his hand in the till. And now that he mostly dwells in La-La Land, the existence of a core to him is an even more preposterous concept. Jell-O Joe has as much of a core as the bowl of flavored gelatin “Dr.” Jill and his other handlers feed him when he’s not sucking on an ice cream cone.

And when the toadies in the Pentagon and State Department — more focused on things like “white rage” and Critical Race Theory than the nation’s security — spout nonsense, they are no better and also have to bear responsibility for this calamity. Just as one pathetic example, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Kabul wouldn’t fall from Friday to Monday, he was right — it fell from Friday to Sunday. If these incompetents, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, not to mention Biden himself and those pulling his strings, are not immediately fired, there is no hope to look forward to, and the only light at the end of the tunnel is that of an oncoming locomotive. Of course, for your answer, just look at the poison pill that was put into the vice presidency, the useless and frightening Kamala Harris, to make any move to apply the 25th Amendment to Biden an unattractive option.

To those who didn’t like Donald Trump’s tweets so voted against him: Are you happy now?

One wishes for the grownups to come back and put an end to this clown show.

A return to the 1970s. Only worse.

It seems no matter how far a country gets from its dismal past, it is always in danger of sliding back into it. Many of us who lived through the 1970s and all its dismal aspects — Vietnam, gas lines and dependence on OPEC, loss of faith in our political leaders, the Mariel Boatlift, raging inflation, raging crime, the Iranian takeover of our embassy, the degradation of our military, and our loss of prestige on the world stage — recognize how every element of the 1970s is back, in one form or another, most on steroids.

The country has become a dumpster fire of crises. We cited in our post of July 29 the range of crises — all induced by this Administration — the country is facing:

+ The catastrophe on the Southwest Border

+ Spiraling crime in big cities across the country, most Democratic ruled for decades

+ Our feckless foreign policy, Afghanistan being the most acute and visible example of that

+ Deliberate undoing of our long-sought energy independence

+ Rapidly rising inflation

+ Confusing and troubling mixed-messaging on COVID.

Now we have our latest version of the fall of Saigon. What is going on on our no longer existent Southwest Border makes the Mariel Boatlift look like absolutely nothing. Our military is chasing political correctness and a “woke” agenda while our adversaries gloat and plot. Our students fall further and further behind in their educational prowess, some not even being able to read and write in cursive or otherwise, and with entire states removing academic requirements for graduation (they’re “racist,” the benighted morons of Oregon say). And now, after the past week, what ally or client state or individual who assists us would have any faith in our word or commitments to protect them?

In an act almost as shocking as what has happened in Kabul, on August 11 Biden asked OPEC — the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which include Iran and Venezuela — to increase its production to help control rising fuel costs. This is the same Biden who, by a stroke of the pen, canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, while greenlighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline, and reinstated controls that took America from energy independence, which President Trump helped usher in for the first time in 62 years, back to being dependent on oil from sworn adversaries and some of the most volatile areas on earth.

You may recall how we railed against OPEC in the 1970s for the deleterious effect it had on the country. Now Biden bows at its feet.

If you were like me, you might have fallen out of your chair when you heard this. It’s like our enemies have taken over power in the country — which really they have, since these people are intent on what they say is “fundamentally changing the country,” which are code words for destroying our way of life — and up has become down and down has become up.

Jimmy Carter might have been arguably the worst president of our lifetime. Until this president. Now, it’s no contest, and things truly are falling part. It is not a notional question: Can we survive this Administration? I’m not confident, and less so by the day.

U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan, August 15, 2021, photo by AP/Rahmat Gul. Used under Fair Use.

Dumpster Fire, photo by Ben Watts, Free Stock Photos. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on Substack. Please subscribe here, and there.
Why I’ve Moved From Medium to Substack

Why I’ve Moved From Medium to Substack

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That’s the long and the short of it: I’ve moved to Substack with my writing and have given up on Medium. I’ll tell you why.

From the time I started my blogs more than four years ago, I co-published most of my posts on Medium. I was attracted by the possibility of a large, pre-existing audience, and the reach offered by Medium. What I didn’t anticipate, and perhaps should have, is the inherent bias that exists within Medium and most of its readers and writers.

It seems that unless one is a raving leftist spouting utter nonsense, one gets few readers, few followers, still fewer comments or claps, and Medium doesn’t promote your work. I tried to convince myself, repeatedly, that good writing and well researched pieces that spoke truth to power would overcome the prejudice. I have a journalistic background where accurate and ethical reporting earned people’s respect. I anticipated the same at Medium. And was repeatedly disappointed. While I value the readers who appreciated my work over the years, they were few and far between.

The one piece I put up that got a huge readership, more than 44,000 views so far— mostly from China, as it turned out — has a title, The Melon-Breasted Girl, that makes it seem like a sex piece (it isn’t, really, but is a reality-based short story). If anyone doubts that sex sells, sex pieces, along with the leftist jive, are some of the most widely read and promoted pieces on the site.

I was recruited by one publication, which encouraged me. And then when I’d post things that didn’t fit their narrative, even though the allegations of fact I made in the pieces were thoroughly documented, they’d turn them down. I’m not about to change or sugar-coat my views nor rewrite history simply to please an editor, so I stopped sending my posts to them. At that point I pretty much gave up on Medium and posted fewer and fewer things there. And finally, more recently, I made up my mind and moved to Substack.

In one day, I received more views on Substack than I would get in a month or more on Medium. I’ve just begun at Substack, but I feel more of an openness there than I felt at Medium, which in large part drew me to it. I see people more closely aligned with my own views, which I rarely saw at Medium. I don’t expect everyone there will be of like mind, and that’s fine. That’s the whole idea of a free exchange of ideas, and having at least a level playing field. It’s what I expected at Medium, but never saw.

I’ve read that Medium is concerned about losing audience. Maybe if those who run the site realize that at least half, if not more, of the population doesn’t agree with the arcane ideas it promotes, or which most of its writers and readers hold, it might be able to turn that trend around. Reality, and not just ideology, has a way of making its presence known. I don’t claim to know all the reasons why Medium might be on a descending course and Substack ascending, but I have to believe that is part of it.

I’m not in this for the money, which has been paltry (to put it kindly) on Medium, and which (at least for now) I am not seeking on Substack. I feel strongly about things like journalistic ethics, freedom of expression, equal justice, rational economics, and domestic and foreign affairs policies that strengthen and work in my country’s interests and don’t kowtow to negative interests, no matter how virulent, internal or international. I sense that is a contrarian view on Medium, and not one that is ever going to obtain the respect it’s due. I am hopeful it will on Substack.

Anyway, before I kvetch any more and this turns into a rant, I’ll end it here. I welcome anyone who would like to visit my community on Substack, which is called Issues That Matter, to do so. They’re also welcome to visit my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. I’d be even happier to receive comments to my posts, and for you to subscribe to any or all of these venues. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, and that’s fine, too. I always welcome respectful and reasoned dissents.

In parting, I’m not going to quote Richard Nixon, and I don’t really care if anyone on Medium has me to kick around any more, or not. I wish all there well, and will offer the hope, as futile as it might be, that Medium eventually comes to its senses. We can hope, anyway, can’t we?

Photo by Jonathan Kemper, Unsplash. Used with permission.