It All Falls Apart

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.

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