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Afghan chaos undercuts Biden's promise of competence


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2021 Aug 18, 2:48pm   163,902 views  1,308 comments

by RWSGFY   ➕follow (4)   💰tip   ignore  






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The shambolic unravelling of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook of "how to lose at everything". Warnings hadn't been heeded, intelligence was clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful.

Let's just focus in on one thing - although there are any number that are worthy of examination.
The withdrawal came during the "fighting season" - a phrase I have to say I have always found rather odd. But in Afghanistan there is a fighting season which starts in spring - and then in winter, when the country freezes over, there is a time when the Taliban go home to their tribal homelands. Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren't there, poised to fill the vacuum?

The end result might have been the same - a Taliban takeover - but it would have almost certainly led to a more orderly drawdown. Yet the Biden administration wanted an eye-catching date. They wanted the withdrawal completed by 11 September. Twenty years on from 9/11 - an artificial, self-imposed deadline.

...

Biden's election campaign could be boiled down to three messages to distinguish himself from Donald Trump. First, he would be more empathetic. He would be more competent. And instead of "America First", it would be replaced by the mantra "America is back".
But in his address yesterday, there wasn't a whole lot of empathy towards the thousands of Afghans who've helped Americans these past 20 years. On competence, even his biggest cheerleaders would struggle to say the withdrawal of American troops has been anything other than shambolic.
And after the bewildering events of the past few days, how exactly is America back?

...

But on the policy itself, Joe Biden is utterly defiant. He summoned up his inner Harry Truman and made clear in his speech that the buck stops with him. He was, however, happy to distribute blame in much the same way that a muck spreader disperses manure in all directions. The Afghan leadership weren't up to it, the Afghan armed forces had no fight in them; Donald Trump had negotiated a bad deal.

...

A fascinating nugget from a briefing that's just been given by Joe Biden's National Security Adviser. Since the fall of Kabul, Jake Sullivan revealed, Biden hadn't spoken to another world leader. Wasn't that just a bit surprising, given that there were a lot of other nations - including Britain - who'd committed vast resources to Afghanistan?

...

When the G7 gathered in Cornwall and the Nato nations met in Brussels the sense of relief was palpable among the prime ministers and presidents that a more outward looking American president was in charge. But given what has unfolded - how America has been humiliated, how Joe Biden embarked on a policy he was cautioned against by these leaders - there is now a good deal more wariness.
And who will feel they have gained most from America's departure - apart from the Taliban, of course? Why, three countries near Afghanistan - Russia, Iran and China. I'm not sure that is what Joe Biden had in mind when he said after his inauguration that "America is back".



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-58252174?source=patrick.net

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1072   stereotomy   2024 Jan 14, 8:34am  

I remember back in the late '80's when Time Magazine published Regan's scribbles during cabinet meetings to show how he was senile. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, well . . .
1077   Patrick   2024 Jan 26, 10:54am  

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/michelle-ma-belle


And what if the opposition — say, Mr. Trump, or Vivek, or Tulsi, or Tom Massie, or Rand Paul, or a dozen others in that camp — make the case that the “Joe Biden” regime was actually Mr. Obama’s third term, and look what mess he managed to make of the USA while running the puppet-show from his Kalorama redoubt: nine million illegal aliens ushered into the country with lavish benefits, phones, loaded debit cards, free four-star hotel rooms. . . the years-long assault of the drag queens and oral sex instruction for third-graders. . . the preposterous war in Ukraine engineered by neocon catspaws for the benefit of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and the rest of the arms-makers. . . big cities full of homeless encampments and their noxious excretions. . . fentanyl killing 1,500 Americans a week. . . an extravaganza of flash-mob looting, shop-lifting, and car-jacking. . . the trillion-plus dollars in annual interest payments on the national debt. . . not a pretty picture. So, it comes down to: do you want another four years of that? And how did America end up under the thumb of an Obama dynasty, anyway?

I’ll tell you how: because the Democratic Party has become a criminal operation now solely dedicated to keeping its dignitaries, office-holders, and their factotums in the executive agencies out of prison for a range of crimes so vast that all the Lawfare specialists ever spawned in the hatcheries of Yale and Harvard would not run out of billable hours defending them in court before the sun turned into a red dwarf. The mighty effort consumes all the party’s energies these days, when they are not attending to the destruction of Western Civilization. The Michelle gambit would only be the party’s final hoax. After that, the deluge.
1080   Patrick   2024 Feb 3, 7:15pm  

https://emanuelprez.substack.com/p/joe-biden-as-a-weapon


What are we to make of this campaign of Joe Biden for president? Let us step back from the regular questions like whether he is in a hospice and three other actors play his role at different times. That is perhaps true, but it is not our topic today.
The interesting question is who is running his campaign?

First, it does not seem to be the Democratic Party, if there is anything left of that institution. It seems as if the Biden campaign is run by a set of contractors working as PR agents. But who tells them what to do? After going through the website carefully, I came to the painful conclusion that they are getting their orders from lobbying and private intelligence contractors, like Booz Allen Hamilton, and probably from three or four so as to spread the money around and make it more difficult to trace the responsibility. But they question is then, who gives the orders to those contractors.

Granted the bizarre fusion between the Biden and Netanyahu administration, and the radical privatization of governance by both, my guess is that the orders come from private consulting firms in the US, in Israel, and perhaps elsewhere, and that those consulting firms take their orders from the usual suspects:

multinational investment banks and private equity, multinational corporations (increasingly corporations have banks telling them what to do), and the strategic teams of various billionaires and billionaire families.
1081   richwicks   2024 Feb 3, 9:07pm  

HeadSet says


Patrick says


Another ominous sign for Democrats is that voters across all income levels felt that Mr. Biden's policies had hurt them personally

Oh yeah? My state of Virginia just gave the Dems both state houses, seemingly based on abortion rights (Repubs wanted a 15 week ban). When it comes to woman voters, economic issues take a distance second to what woman reflexively see as an attack on their rights.



Yep, they were voted in, just like Biden got the largest percentage of the vote in all of US history, and also just like 25 million NEW voters voted in 2020 than 2016.

Just vote harder. If you pretend that we have a voting system, we do! Isn't that magical? It's like when I close my eyes, the entire world stops existing.
1086   Patrick   2024 Feb 9, 1:08pm  

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/eventful-events


Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report issued Thursday said it rather plainly:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013, when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice president?”). He did not remember even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”

The disclosure raises not a few uncomfortable questions. If Mr. Biden’s declining mental condition was apparent to federal attorneys interviewing him — admittedly not top psychologists — then wouldn’t the same picture present itself to the scores of assistants and subalterns busy toiling with the president around the clock for three years in the White House? Not to mention the myriad other government officials, agency heads, corporate nabobs, and news media notables streaming through the Oval Office every hour of the day? And yet, every last one of them has gone along with the pretense that Mr. Biden is doing just fine and is capable of running for reelection. Weird, a little bit.

If there has been any discussion about Mr. Biden being in possession of the so-called “nuclear football,” the briefcase full of launch codes for our arsenal of missiles and bombers, it has gone unnoticed in the press. I suppose a conspiracy to suppress that chatter would be labeled a “conspiracy theory,” which also suggests that Mr. Biden’s mental deficiencies have somehow infected the entire body politic of the USA. That is, much of the whole US population is mentally unwell, living in a national hall of mirrors. How did that happen? Is it possible that there are branches of our government dedicated to driving the population crazy. . . a kind of ordeal-by-gaslight? ...

A not inconsiderable part of our Ukraine problem has been that our chief executive was for years engaged in bribery and money-laundering misadventures there, for which there is abundant and powerful evidence, meaning he may have had very personal interests in keeping that country disordered — and sending billions of dollars there, some of it surely embezzled among the Zelensky government. You’d have to also be aware that the bag-man in those operations, the President’s son, Hunter, might well have misbehaved with drugs and prostitutes on his many trips to Ukraine as a board member of Burisma. Hunter’s self-compiled archive of round-the-world drug-fueled porn recordings on the laptop that (the FBI confirmed recently) was unquestionably his own, suggests that the Ukraine authorities may have their own recordings of him behaving similarly, or worse, and are using them to blackmail “President Joe Biden.”
1089   Ceffer   2024 Feb 11, 9:42pm  

Biden Actor doesn't have the football, anyway. Not CIC, and Trump never gave up the football.Patrick says

https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/white-house-locks-nukes-with-new-security-question-which-of-these-images-shows-mexico



1090   Patrick   2024 Feb 12, 9:33am  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/implausible-deniability-monday-february


Here’s a serious question. Would you let your grandmother drive in this condition? Of course not. You’d take away her driver’s license for her own protection. Sorry Nana. It’s better this way. Should someone who can’t safely drive his convertible Camaro down the street to Martha’s Vineyard Frozen Custard have access to the nuclear football?

Democrats will bark that these days you don’t elect a man, you elect a team. But if we are really electing Biden’s team, and not just him, then let us meet the team. The team should be running for President along with — or instead of — Joe Biden.

I’m sure they are terrific folks and would make the campaign proud. Aren’t you? Let’s get them out there. Somebody ask the media to do it … oh never mind. I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.
1094   HeadSet   2024 Feb 13, 2:42pm  

Patrick says





Do not fall into this trap. It is not about age, it is about senility.
1104   Patrick   2024 Feb 19, 2:05pm  

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/brandon-rotting-in-the-white-house


“Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” the report states.

Gearing up? I’m sure. If gearing up means calling a lid on your life an hour after breakfast. And what do you suppose they mean by “a more traditional form of leadership.” Arranging serial overseas military humiliations? Selling favors to all comers from foreign lands? Inviting transsexuals to cavort on the White House lawn? Abolishing control of US borders? Running a $2-trillion annual deficit? Mandating unsafe and ineffective so-called “vaccine” shots on millions? Cancelling the First Amendment? Stealing elections? Conspiring to jail his political adversaries?

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