Tag: Biden
Russia and China: The Nightmare Scenario

Russia and China: The Nightmare Scenario

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Imagine this scene: A week or so after the closing ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Russia invades Ukraine, its forces quickly rolling across the country, taking its capital city. At the same time, China launches a full-scale attack against Taiwan, intent on taking back what it views as a renegade province. The U.S. is then faced with three unsatisfactory choices: Engage in a two-front war, on opposite sides of the world, to counter Russian and Chinese aggression; pick one theater or the other, Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from moving past Ukraine and threatening its NATO allies, or the South China Sea to honor its commitments to protect Taiwan; or do nothing except bluster without effect in the U.N. and other fora as China and Russia reveal an ineffectual America to the world.

It’s what I call the Nightmare Scenario, and it’s not entirely implausible. I envisaged it independently, but a cursory review of informed opinion reveals it’s far from a unique view of what might ensue in coming days or weeks. And there really is no waking up from this nightmare, should it unfold. Regardless which of those unsatisfactory choices the U.S. makes, the world becomes a much more dangerous place, the threat of wider war, including the threat of nuclear war, grows exponentially, and a new power axis combining two of the world nuclear super powers, China and Russia, possibly augmented by Iran, emerges as a monster threat to the rest of the world.

While the U.S. re-positions a small number of troops, 3,000 compared with the 100,000-plus Russia has put in place, virtually encircling Ukraine, and China brazenly flies hundreds of sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the real problem is that it has already lost, strategically. Beginning with the Biden administration’s catastrophic surrender and evacuation from Afghanistan, and continuing with its focus on such demoralizing distractions as vaccine mandates and gender and race training within the ranks of the military, the country’s enemies have methodically evaluated Washington’s weakness.

Checkers v. Chess

Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are masters at assessing and sizing up their opponents. Both know that Biden isn’t quite there, doesn’t have a clue of his own what to do when faced with a crisis, has a back field of losers carried over from the Obama days, who for eight years oversaw American power being inexorably pushed back, and is seriously compromised in both Kyiv and Beijing. While Biden plays a feckless game of checkers, Putin and Xi are playing a high-level game of chess.

It’s been said so many times by so many observers that a weak America spells a dangerous world, and seldom has this been more apparent than at present. Any realistic assessment of the former Trump administration showed a real and determined show of American power that no one, least of all Putin and Xi, could easily dismiss. That all changed with the change of administration, and any doubts that might have remained in the minds of America’s enemies evaporated with the fall of Kabul last August. The events currently unfolding in the snows of Eastern Europe and over the waters of the Taiwan Strait, while in both cases anchored in decades of history, can be traced in the instant directly to America’s massive fail in Afghanistan and its feckless leaderless wandering since.

A relevant question, not one that can easily be dismissed, is why Biden is more concerned about Ukraine’s border than America’s own border. While every ilk of border jumper, including known terrorists, drug runners, sex traffickers, and a range of other criminals, is allowed across a virtually undefended Southwest Border and then sent, at taxpayer expense, all over the country, Biden emptily trumpets his commitment to the sanctity of Ukraine’s border, even to the point of alarming the country’s president, raising fear that Biden’s rhetoric might in fact invite a Russian attack.

Not the First Time

With Russian tanks and troops virtually encircling Ukraine, not just in Russia itself on Ukraine’s eastern border, but also to the north in Belarus, the south in Russian-annexed Crimea, and the west, in Moldova, it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t Putin’s plan to invade and crush the country. I don’t adhere to the idea that history repeats itself, but there are some lessons that can be learned from history.

Many of us remember the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and how Soviet tanks (the Russian war vehicle of choice) and 200,000 Soviet troops crushed Hungary’s push for independence from the Soviet sphere. After encouraging Hungarians to seek their liberation through incessant broadcasts on America’s Radio Free Europe, then-President Dwight Eisenhower, no dithering fool like the current occupant of the White House, fresh off the Korean War, decided it was fruitless to do anything to help the Hungarians and risk a nuclear confrontation, leading the freedom-seeking Hungarians to feel betrayed by America. Lyndon Johnson, already on his way out of office after his Vietnam fiasco, made a similar calculation in 1968 when the Soviets again used tanks and 200,000 troops, including those from several other Warsaw Pact countries, to crush the Prague Spring uprising in then-Czechoslovakia. And here we are again.

The Bigger Threat

With so much attention directed at Ukraine, the much bigger strategic threat posed by China has largely flown under the radar. China has increasingly made it clear its intent to take back Taiwan. Along with ratcheting up its rhetoric, it has taken increasingly provocative overt actions, including holding naval war games not far from the island and flying hundreds of military sorties over the course of recent months, including by fighter jets, H-6 strategic bombers, intelligence-gathering aircraft, and air freighters, into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. And just last Friday, Jan. 28, China’s ambassador to the U.S. warned that Taiwan’s continued push for independence would “most likely” lead to military conflict between the U.S. and China.

“If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road to independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict,” Ambassador Qin Gang told National Public Radio.

Keep in mind, as I’ve discussed in this space before in my reviews of the novels 2034 and Ghost Fleet, every simulation of conflict between those two “big countries” run in recent years shows China handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. This is not encouraging, even less so if the U.S. is pulled into a global two-front war, for which it is not prepared.

Especially given the controversy swirling around the Olympics, now under way, with Putin and XI shoulder to shoulder in Beijing, I tend to believe that any conflict, either in Ukraine or Taiwan, is unlikely to begin until after the Olympics. Of course the Olympics didn’t stop Putin from invading Georgia on the very eve of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics or taking Crimea from Ukraine shortly after the 2014 winter games, held in Sochi, Russia, or planning cyber attacks to disrupt the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics. China has denied U.S. claims that Xi asked Putin in December not to invade Ukraine during the current Beijing Olympics, and given the growing affinity between the former rivals Putin may not wish to take any glory away from Xi. But that doesn’t preclude action immediately after the games.

A Dangerous New Reality

Regardless whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated plays out or not, it is clear we’ve entered into a new and dangerous reality. We can expect to see growing coordination between China and Russia, and especially expanding Chinese economic and political influence and presence on a global scale. We’re already seeing its stifling influence on American corporations, universities, sports leagues, and other institutions, the culmination of a process more than three decades in the making.

Meanwhile, Biden’s green lighting of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea, makes Germany dependent on Russia for a major source of energy, enabling Putin’s threat in Eastern Europe to drive a wedge between NATO allies. And, if all that is not worrisome enough, we have a world-class grifter in the White House thoroughly bought off and compromised to China.

It is hard to imagine a more dangerous and precarious time than the one into which we’ve entered.

Featured image: A Chinese H-6K bomber is seen from a Russian aircraft during a joint patrol over the Western Pacific, Dec. 22, 2020. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Russian tanks on the move in Belarus. Copyright Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via Associated Press. Photo taken from video and released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022. Used under Fair Use.

Chinese Navy conducts live-fire exercises in waters near Zhoushan Islands north of Taiwan, August 2020. Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Ruining America: It’s By Design

Ruining America: It’s By Design

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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.
Disgrace

Disgrace

By | | Comments 0 Comment

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.

 
Ignorance With Impudence

Ignorance With Impudence

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Remember Baghdad Bob? You know, the Iraqi Information Minister who, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, told reporters to believe him, not their lying eyes. As American troops advanced on the capital, Baghdad Bob made one pronouncement after another about how they were being repelled, poisoned, American troops were committing suicide, and the glorious Iraqi Army would crush the infidels. Even as American tanks rolled within view of the podium, Baghdad Bob continued to insist that the Americans would never be permitted to enter Baghdad and Iraqi forces would prevail.

Well, guess what? Baghdad Bob is back. Actually, lots of Baghdad Bobs. An entire phalanx of them, filling the podiums not in Baghdad, but in Washington. Now Baghdad Bob masquerades as a range of surrogate characters, all babbling nonsense as ridiculous and unbelievable as old Bob:

Jen Psaki, White House spokesbabbler. Rear Admiral (!) John Kirby, Pentagon spokesbabbler. Ned Price, State Department spokesbabbler. Jake Sullivan, allegedly National Security Adviser since someone left a door open and allowed him to escape from daycare. And their babbling bosses, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the Babbler-in-Chief, Joe “Jell-O Joe” Biden.

It was at least entertaining to hear the babbles of the original Baghdad Bob. It’s a lot less entertaining hearing the strings of lies and political spin uttered daily, even hourly, seemingly without a shred of shame, by this crewe of Washington Baghdad Bobs. It is the kind of high audacity for which I reserve one of my strongest insults and expressions of disgust: Ignorance with impudence. You cannot find better examples of what that means than simply listening to this pack of incompetent and unscrupulous liars and scoundrels.

My view, from personal experience

By way of disclosure, part of my response to what is going on in Afghanistan right now derives from my personal experience. I didn’t get into this in my last post on the subject, but I think it would be helpful to readers’ understanding of the current situation for me to do so. It will help explain why I can see that virtually everything we have done, and are doing, in Afghanistan in recent weeks is absolutely ass-backwards and thoroughly incompetent. And how, ultimately almost certainly, it will lead to significant loss of life to American citizens and citizens of our allies, as well as to a wide range of Afghan civilians, including those who helped us and those who simply believed the lie that they might have a different way of life. Despite the insensitive and ill-informed lies of the Babbler-in-Chief, people already are dying, often in the most awful and gruesome ways.

I am not a military strategist, and make no claim to be one. Most of my knowledge of military principles comes from Sun Tzu, and a childhood fascination with the strategies that helped the Allies defeat the Axis. But I am a good observer of what is going on around me, watching as social and other trends grow from mere seedlings into towering and inexorable movements, cultivating good sources, and keeping my ear to the ground to listen for vibrations of approaching storms. And I have enough knowledge and sense of history to apply, compare, and contrast current events to past events. I believe these are reasons why my ambassador looked to me to help explain what was going on in Algeria as terrorism began to swell up and rack the country in the early 1990s — even though my job had absolutely nothing to do with any of that — and why the political section chief ran all his cables by me before dispatching them to Washington.

It is the same sensibility that allowed me to be the sole member of the U.S. intelligence community (I say that in all honestly and humility) to correctly, and definitively, call the outcome of the 1994 Jordanian parliamentary elections. It was one of the rare times during my 11-year diplomatic career to be concretely recognized with a promotion, as incompetents all around me were routinely promoted.

Perhaps most salient to my understanding of the Afghanistan debacle was my time in Albania, during the 1995-1997 period. As Economic and Commercial Officer I predicted, soon after my arrival in the country, that the massive pyramid schemes spreading throughout Albania would, in time, collapse, and bring the government and the country down with them. At first I was scoffed at and few people paid my reports any attention. Pyramid schemes? Who cares? When most of a country’s population has invested their life savings in them, someone should. And then, as the end approached, almost to the week I had predicted more than a year before, suddenly my reports became must-read material back in Washington and elsewhere.

When the country did finally collapse and anarchy sprang up in the hinterlands, our military intelligence people saw things in terms they were used to, as if this was a conventional war with a front approaching the capital, a little closer each day. I and only one other person in our country team, the Public Affairs Officer, spoke out, saying this was a crazy view, and the anarchy was going to burst out all around us without warning. We were scoffed at, but that is exactly what happened, within days.

It happened with the suddenness we had predicted, and it was too late to do anything about it, to get non-essential personnel and family members, as well an many endangered civilians and personnel at other embassies, out of harm’s way. We were under a 24/7 hail of gunfire from all sides — something that went on for many weeks — and as Aviation Liaison I was the one who conveyed the news that the airport was under attack and all flights canceled. The person whose responsibility it was to handle an evacuation was curled up in a corner on the floor, in tears. When she finally pulled herself together and called the country team into a meeting, her solution was to mount a motorcade and drive for hours across uncontrolled territory to reach the border and leave the country.

I had spent many hours over as many beers with a Welsh friend of mine over the past year-plus discussing what we’d do — not if, but when — the end came. We knew such an approach as had been proposed would probably wind up getting everyone killed. The only solution, we decided, was to bring military helicopters directly into the compound and fly people out of the country. So I spoke up and proposed that as the most effective solution, acknowledging how the plan was devised, and in the end, after hours of consultation between the front office and Washington, that is precisely what we wound up doing. Over the subsequent weeks, as I stayed on as one of the essential personnel to not be evacuated, the U.S. Navy flew out hundreds of people of 30-some nationalities, including personnel from the Russian and Chinese embassies, without the loss of a single person or aircraft, though all the choppers, it later was found, had taken fire. Marines were brought in to protect us on the ground, and I have to say, I was never so happy and relieved to see Marines as I was seeing them come down onto our compound in the growing darkness.

As it turned out, the Brits tried something similar to what our GSO had proposed, but just to drive to the port city about an hour away and get on a ferry to Italy, and they were lucky to escape with their lives. All their vehicles were taken at gunpoint, and they wound up aboard a ferry with many of the very people they were running from. This, of course, is a danger we’re already seeing, as Taliban and other terrorists infiltrate escaping Afghans in their plans to bring attacks to the U.S. and other Western countries.

And now there is Afghanistan

If you look at the details of what we’ve done in Afghanistan, it makes our escapade in Albania look like a picnic in the park. Not only are the numbers enormously larger, the territory vastly bigger and more isolated, but the threat massively more dangerous and coordinated. And yet our so-called leadership approached our exit from the country apparently with less care, planning, or sense than we handled our evacuation from Albania.

Tell me, if you are one of those I’ve heard from who think this exit couldn’t have been handled any better, what kind of military strategy calls for surrendering your most secure base and means of ingress and egress — the Bagram Airfield, otherwise known as the Bagram Air Base, just 30 miles outside Kabul — before you have gotten all your interests out of the country? What kind of political or military calculation leads you to surrender hundreds of billions of dollars worth of valuable, useful, and lethal military hardware to the enemy? What kind of genius does it take not to see the advance of the Taliban, not in days, but over months, as they closed in on the capital? Who pulls out your on-the-ground intel capability while your citizens and assets are still in harm’s way? And what kind of calculation would one have to make to completely withdraw all of one’s troops, leaving behind more than 10,000 American citizens, thousands more citizens of our allies, and tens of thousands more of those Afghans and their families who assisted our 20-year effort in the country?

If none of that makes sense to you, you have more sense than our Babbler-in-Chief, his benighted advisers, and those in the top leadership who allowed and facilitated him to go through with such a catastrophic plan. But, wait! It gets better. Or, more correctly, worse. While we haven’t had a U.S. service member killed in almost a year and a half in Afghanistan, now you pull out all 2,500 troops, only to have to send 6,000 back in within days. And we give up our embassy, another key safe haven, because we have no capability to defend it, so we move everything to a civilian airport inadequate to the task it now has to carry out, and surrounded by hostile and malevolent forces.

None of this, none of what currently is being done, considers that thousands of Americans aren’t in the capital. They’re out in provincial cities, and in surrounding Medieval boondocks. Even those in Kabul have been prevented from getting to the airport. What is someone hundreds of hostile kilometers away supposed to do? “Stranded” is indeed the correct word for their situation, despite what Baghdad Bob Psaki says about the situation. And to listen to the child-idiot Sullivan, maybe they should just call an Uber. Such moronacy. Such callousness.

As one military person with on-the-ground experience in Afghanistan said, we need to send at least another 6,000 troops, above the 6,000 already sent — my estimate is closer to 12,000 additional — back in, and to secure every airport around the country, and escort AmCits and others to those airports to extract them from the country. They should be authorized to use whatever lethal force is needed to secure our citizens. But that isn’t being done, and already troops are being withdrawn so Jell-O Joe can meet the artificial deadline of August 31 he set, American citizens be damned. By another knowledgeable estimate, most troops are going to have to be withdrawn as early as the end of this week to meet the deadline. It’s hard to imagine a greater show of disregard for one’s own citizens, let alone the citizens of countries that supported us and helped us. Our credibility isn’t hurt in the world — it’s gone.

As CIA Director William Burns goes on bended knee to Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar in Kabul to beg to extend the artificial deadline, and Baradar tells him to stuff it, we have officially turned 20 years of expenditure of blood and treasure and reasonable success to utter and acknowledged defeat. What can be more shameful?

Now at this point, maybe lying is the only defense you have left. And since the official pronouncements are so transparently and verifiably false, we’re left with our cadre of Baghdad Bobs in Washington. Even the toadies in the left-wing media can’t cover up such an obvious disaster. As one CNN reporter said from Kabul, she had been covering many crises in many places over many years, but she had never seen anything like what she was seeing in Kabul.

“It’s mayhem! It’s nuts!” she shouted on camera.

And meanwhile the top Dems, Pelosi and Schumer and the rest, party and dance and raise funds, and their NPR lackeys already are saying they hope the American public has a short memory when the 2022 mid-term elections come up.

I know one American who won’t forget this. Not in 2022. Not in 2024. Not ever. And I hope you don’t, either.

Baghdad Bob gif from gifimage.net, used under Fair Use.

“No One Being Killed in Kabul,” by Marcus Yam, Los AngelesTimes/Rex, from DailyMail.Com, 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

By | | Comments 4 comments

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.