Cri de coeur

From a former NCO (E8) with Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children who is truly feeling it.

So after several years of listening to the faint of heart and the lowly in character sob over the use of wrong pronouns, the meritless claims of institutional racism, continual cries of inequity, inequality, privilege and oh yeah, mean tweets, we arrive at today’s latest fruit of globalist clap-trap; 13 dead American Service members and another 15 wounded by some as yet unnamed cabal of Satan worshipping cretins in Kabul.

This follows a week of watching one of the most disgraceful egress operations in the annals of Military History. And it is an easily foretold ending to an historically ill-advised military doctrine which supplanted the hunt-kill strategy in place in Afghanistan until June of 2009. I “predicted” this, that same fateful month and reiterated over the following decade.

I will remind those who forgot and the rest who have been too self-absorbed to know, that in June of 2009 Stanley McChrystal brought to light the fruit of a year of positing, posturing, submitting and frankly, undermining the probability of any kind of favorable outcome in what has been called, the Graveyard of Empires.

But make no mistake, the genesis of this horrific turn in Afghanistan rests with the then newly Minted/Corronated/Sainted, Barrack Hussein Obama 6 months earlier. Obama had been very clear in his narcissistic “memoir”, Audacity of Hope, pg 261 …” I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction…

What makes what we are witnessing in real time all the more frustrating is knowing his not too bright advisors had at least, warned him of the probability of failure a full 6 months before they pulled the metaphorical trigger on the egress.

Again, predictably, the White House Press Corps seems incapable or unwilling to ask the most obvious questions:

Why bother? It’s not as if there’s a snowball’s chance we’ll ever get the smallest grain of truth out of ’em, on this or any other topic.

Instead we have been treated to that age old political witchcraft, enjoined by both politician, bureaucrat, politruk and media entertainer alike: the effort to polish a turd. Somewhere along the line it became knee-jerk to spin a story, create a tale, redirect the public gaze and basically, lie, rather than own up to the mistake.

Unfortunately, a full 50% of this population is more than happy to play along and even gleeful at the prospect of actively participating as long as it props up their questionable selection for the Presidency.

Obama may have started us down this path.

Obama’s Politruk may have sullied themselves in the name of relevancy.

But it is Biden and his corral of miscreants who own this astoundingly shameful excuse for an egress.

And now he can add the names of at least 27 United States Marines; dead and wounded who were tasked with nothing short of a cleanup operation in a vain attempt to help a feckless “president” save face.

Democrats and their legion of facilitators would do well to learn at least one lesson:

Sometimes, a Turd is simply a Turd.

A-yup. The thing to keep in mind is that, no matter how hard they try to sell you on the sweetness of its aroma, the delightful bouquet and attractive coloration it has, that turd still smells like shit.

Herschel—another righteous brother who knows whereof he speaks, and via whom I found the above Strong Message—has plenty to add his own self, including this:

Gen. David Rodriguez made it difficult for Marines in Helmand and during the initial parts of the larger campaign for Helmand he issued an order that every use of artillery receive his approval. The ignorance of U.S. brass taking Viagra to the tribal chieftains so that could continue their abuse of little boys is so repugnant that it’s amazing the enlisted men didn’t turn their weapons on their own command.

Tim Lynch (who has spent longer time in Afghanistan that any English speaking man alive today, nearly ten years) told me personally that the DoD had thousands of hours of video footage of Afghan boys engaged in sexual activity with animals. Against this backdrop, Islamist militants only became more incensed and enraged.

From the beginning I favored sending the Rangers and Marines to the border with Pakistan so that AQ could be killed in the caves of Tora Bora rather than escaping to live and fight again. Chase the Taliban, kill them, and then there would be no Quetta Shura. And then leave. But we had to play armed social worker, and now here we are.

The final exit is a debacle of mammoth proportions, Americans will be left in Afghanistan to be beheaded, and Bagram Air Base (the best and brightest hope for a smooth withdrawal) was shut down. And they are proud of it. Meanwhile, twelve Marines perished today. It is a dark day.

Indeed it was, with more and darker still to come.

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1

Credit where due

Bruce Bawer spreads the love around.

For four years, we had a president who, over the course of a single term, managed to undo a great deal of the mischief wrought, and a great many of the mistakes made, by his recent predecessors. Trump revived America’s economy, shored up Americans’ individual liberties, forged several remarkable peace agreements, and greatly strengthened our international position—thus firmly checking the ambitions of our powerful adversaries.

But, Biden voters, he had a personality that rubbed you the wrong way. He wrote nasty tweets. In the language of TV production, he was too “hot.” You wanted “cool.”

That’s gotta be the first time the words “Biden” and “cool” have ever been seen in the same sentence, I’m thinkin’. And even then, it was in the “temperature” sense, kinda-sorta.

The Democrats put up a candidate who was plainly in mental decline. It was obvious every time he spoke. But you didn’t pay terribly close attention to his speeches. The sources from which you get your “news” carefully clipped out all of the bits of his appearances in which his befuddlement was manifest. If you heard someone speak out about his senility, you dismissed the charges out of hand.

Biden also had a less-than-stellar professional history. He’d spent decades in the Senate as little more than a fixture, an empty suit, a vapid, smiling shill for the credit-card companies and other corporations based in his shabby little state. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, mountains of evidence were made public indicating that Biden was even more deeply corrupt than we already knew, taking massive bribes from nefarious foreign powers.

Yes, that story was banned from social media. Still, you could have known about it if you’d had the slightest bit of curiosity—and the slightest sense of civic responsibility.

Presumably you don’t like Alpha Males. Most likely you saw Trump as a wellspring of toxic masculinity.

It never occurred to you, apparently, that in a complex and dangerous world, it might be a good thing for the most important and powerful country to have a strong, self-assured, can-do individual at the helm—a man who knew how to reassure allies and strike fear into enemies.

You didn’t have a clue about how power works in the real world. You should have. You were a grown-up. You had no excuse.

Trump understood power. He’d made his fortune in the toughest arena in American business: New York real estate. His experience in the private sector made him a perfect choice for president: for four years, he used the talents he employed to make himself rich to make America great again.

But you didn’t see it.

Biden was rich, too. Not as rich as Trump, but plenty rich. The difference was that he’d amassed his millions not through hard work or talent but by selling his influence. Like many another politician, he whored himself out, betraying his voters, his state, and his country.

But what did that matter to you? You acted as if you were voting for a morning talk-show host or veteran local news anchorman. Or a maître d’. It’s as if you didn’t even have a concept of the role a president of the United States plays on the global stage.

Well, now you know. At least I hope you know. If you don’t know now, you never will. And if you’ve still managed to miss all the obloquy heaped on the man you voted for—well, congratulations. That’s quite a coup.

Thanks to you—yes, you (look in the mirror!)—Biden, in the eyes of military experts around the world (and, for that matter, the eyes of anyone on the planet with an ounce of sense), has pulled off the most disastrous military operation in modern times.

As a result, America has reached perhaps the lowest point in its history. Biden has betrayed every member of our own armed forces. He’s betrayed every Westerner stationed in Afghanistan. And he’s betrayed every last one of our allies, none of whom he even bothered to consult with before issuing his catastrophic orders.

In doing so, he’s dramatically increased the likelihood that China will invade Taiwan or that Russia will invade some place in Eastern Europe. Commentators who a couple of weeks ago were still covering up for Biden are now admitting that he’s beyond incompetent and that this single event could spell the end of America as a superpower.

Last Saturday, in an impassioned j’accuse, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr asked: “Are you happy now, Biden voters?”

Carr’s assumption was that any cognizant, conscientious Biden voter must now, at long last, be feeling buyer’s remorse. But I suspect otherwise. Of all of you Biden voters, the one I know best has just celebrated on Facebook the fact that Rachel Maddow—the individual who has perhaps done more than anyone to demonize Trump and whitewash Biden—has signed a new contract with MSNBC.

So I guess even the catastrophe in Kabul isn’t even enough to make you rethink your vote. Even now, you’re still not through coughing up your anti-Trump bile.

I guess that the question, then, is this: will you ever be? In the times to come, as you witness the consequences of Biden’s incompetence, will any of it affect your opinions? Years from now, will you be crawling around the rubble in the remains of the world whose destruction Biden has precipitated and still be howling about the evil that is Donald Trump?

Doubt it. They’ll all be too busy scrabbling through restaurant dumpsters for a moldy crust of bread, begging for mercy, or running for their lives at that point. Which, y’know, is fine by me. Serves ’em right.

2

Man without a country

Probably the best, most comprehensive top-to-bottom and end-to-end post-mort of the Ashcanistan fiasco I’ve seen yet.

I remember September 11, 2001. I never knew what people meant by “blood running cold” until I looked at New York City from my favorite hill and saw the smoking ruin where the Trade Center had been. I felt a deeply personal insult.

An abstraction called “America” hadn’t been attacked. This was something real. “Freedom” wasn’t under attack. It was my city, my people, my country that these savages had assaulted. American unity was awesome. President George W. Bush could have asked for anything from the country. The grief and righteous anger could have changed the world.

Now these feelings seem absurd and embarrassing. Patriotism is at a record low, even among conservatives. It’s hard to define what “America” means, or if it even exists.

Part of this is because the response to the attacks had nothing to do with defending America. President Bush could have stopped immigration, worked to defend the Christian faith he supposedly holds, and renewed patriotism. He did none of these things. Multiculturalism and anti-white preferences are far stronger today. Rather than seizing the moment to push assimilation and patriotism in schools, they teach Critical Race Theory and other anti-white ideas. Islam, once a marginal force in American life, has joined homosexuality and black identity as one of our national totems.

What was the purpose of the wars? If they were to “spread democracy,” they failed. If they were to defend the “American way of life,” they failed. The America of 2021 is a nightmare to a patriot from 2001. It’s bad enough that today’s “American way of life” is imposed on us, let alone on foreigners. If the War on Terror was supposed to keep us “safe,” that also failed. America seems far more besieged than before 2001, despite trillions spent and intrusive surveillance. America even faces the possibility of real defeat in a conventional war against great powers. If our government took foreign terrorism seriously, we would not have a porous border.

After September 11, Americans thought American power had been roused and we would smite our enemies. Instead, we sacrificed thousands of young men to bring “democracy” to foreigners. Iraqi and Afghani cooperation (or collaboration) went no farther than a paycheck. Many Americans even died at the hands of their supposed “allies” in “green on blue” attacks, which killed more than 150 coalition troops by 2020.

Now we have a supposed “obligation” to bring in Afghans. How many “green on blue” attacks will we get in the homeland? President George W. Bush (in)famously defended the wars by saying that “we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.” Now, it appears we fought Afghans “there” so we could bring Afghans “here.” If an estimated 99 percent of Afghans want to make Sharia the basis of law, it’s hard to claim we are bringing “pro-American” Afghans here. The ones who come will learn in no time to complain about “white supremacy.”

The United States could have pulled out of Afghanistan in late 2001 after removing the Taliban and still continued the hunt for Bin Laden, who was in Pakistan. The US could have declared victory after it killed Bin Laden. Instead, the country spent trillions trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. This included propping up a miserably corrupt government, promoting female politicians who never visited their constituencies, spending more than $780 million on “gender programs,” celebrating “Pride Month,” and, most infamously, punishing American soldiers who tried to stop child abuse by Afghan allies. And we were supposed to be fighting for the “good guys?”

Whites are second-class citizens. The “American” government discriminates against us, “American” schools shame our children, the government hands out contracts by race, and anti-white mobs tear down our history. Media and academia have successfully broken many whites to the point they have a negative bias against their own group. “American” law enforcement is selective. Corporate America funds Black Lives Matter and other anti-white movements. If this were happening to any other group, many Republicans would say it justified military intervention in the name of human rights.

Is the system that rules us worth defending? No. If that makes me a “traitor,” I would say only that there is nothing to betray. Our rulers have already betrayed us.

The Afghan and Iraqi wars did nothing to protect this country. They made things worse. Every servicemen sent was sacrificed by a government that doesn’t deserve them. Soldiers deserve respect, but their commanders and politicians deserve scorn. I have yet to hear one veteran say the wars were worth it. Even the legendary Pat Tillman came to oppose the Afghanistan War — before he was accidentally killed by his own comrades. “Were all our sacrifices wasted?” heartbroken veterans ask. Yes.

When I see the scenes of retreat and shame in Afghanistan, I feel humiliation, but also schadenfreude. This strips naked the fools who have been sending soldiers to die. I long for the America that was, and mourn for the brave men who died for a government that doesn’t deserve them. And yet there is a certain satisfaction in the ruling class’s humiliating defeat.

Indeed there is—particularly the delicious realization that—after a too-long career of corruption, graft, and general witless incompetence—perennial boob Biden finally hoodwinked and bamboozled his way into the Presidency he had so desperately lusted for all those years…only to wind up with the Biden Bugout as his enduring legacy, his and his entire family’s name and reputation to be appropriately dogged forevermore by the disgrace, the shame, and the humiliation of it.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes, if you ask me. Try as I might, I can’t come up with a more fitting way to cap a decidedly less-than-stellar career as a greedy, grubby hack politician than this. Who says there ain’t no justice in this world, anyhow?

13

Criminal, inhuman, unacceptable

I. Can’t. Even.

Whelp…Australia’s gone full retard.
Completely fucking insane-retard.
Make that Potato-Insane…

According to the Sydney Morning Herald: “Bourke Shire Council, in the state’s north-west, killed the dogs to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals last week, according to council’s watchdog, the Office of Local Government.”

They. Shot. The. Doggos.
WOW
Somewhere there’s a lesson here:  Something about the fact that IF they’re so willing to kill innocent animals, then they sure as hell wouldn’t have a problem killing humans… especially those who would oppose them.

Willing? The sick fucks probably sprang a stiffie while offing those poor blameless pooches, and will react the exact same way when they get the chance to start cutting down people in job lots. Read the rest of it, every word of which I second with every fiber of my being.

All of which just means that the KTF* rule is now in full effect, and Spicy Time is imminent. Because if it’s coming down to either Us or Them, and it is, I know which team I much prefer to come out on the other side of all this victorious.

Kill. Them. ALL.

*NOTE: KTF— “Kill Them First”—is the Legion motto in Jason Anspach’s and Nick Cole’s great Galaxy’s Edge series, one Team Liberty needs to adopt for meatspace use

1

Biden Bugout: the gift that keeps on giving

Loss of US military gear, civilian personnel, and all respect, trust, and standing in the world: costly. Ongoing mockery and humiliation of ****”President”**** Biden from every corner: PRICELESS.

A former British military commander in Afghanistan said he believes that President Joe Biden should not be impeached, as some Republicans have suggested, but rather court-martialed as a failed commander-in-chief for “betraying the United States of America and the United States’ armed forces.”

In an interview set to air Sunday evening, Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, formerly in charge of all British military operations in the country, also told Fox News host Mark Levin that he believes Biden’s debacle of a pullout has humiliated U.S. armed forces and Americans in general.

Two GOP House members — U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Bob Gibbs of Ohio — have drafted articles of impeachment against Biden, though last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., would not commit to impeaching the president if Republicans gained control of the chamber in next year’s midterms, saying he did not want to turn the process into a political exercise.

“I don’t say this lightly and I’ve never said it about anybody else — any other leader in this position. People have been talking about impeaching President Biden,” Kemp said. “I don’t believe President Biden should be impeached.”

“He’s the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces who’s just essentially surrendered to the Taliban,” he added. “He shouldn’t be impeached. He should be court-martialed for betraying the United States of America and the United States armed forces.”

It’ll never happen, obviously. But I love it just the same, and look forward to much, much more of it.

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1

Tell ’em NO

To the planned Afghani “refugee” Immivasion.

The same people who tried to morally blackmail you into supporting a failed Forever War in Afghanistan—the ones who declared that you were either on board with the new international interventionist imperative or you were with the terrorists—are now trying to morally blackmail you into supporting open borders with Afghanistan and every other country that America’s incompetent elites thought they could turn into Stepford if only they invaded it hard enough. In truth, the entire foundation of the Washington establishment’s failed foreign policy is its members’ own feelings of guilt.

They felt guilty that Afghanistan looked like an awful place to live, so they set about rebuilding the country in their own image, complete with gender equity courses and lectures on how the predominantly Muslim citizens of the country need to be more like their secular Western counterparts.

They felt guilty about what they spent 20 years doing in Afghanistan—falsely offering hope of an eternal American safety net, constructed and maintained not with their own blood, sweat, and tears, but with those of enlisted American military men and women scoffed at and mocked by the smart set—so you must accept the risk posed by a terrorist who pretended to be a refugee to get across the nation’s increasingly non-existent southern border.

They feel guilty about their wealth and privilege (not guilty enough to give that wealth or privilege to anyone else, of course), so you must accept the lower wages that are the obvious result of inflating the labor supply while depressing demand through job-crushing progressive economic policy.

These concerns about the runaway costs of interventionism, however, are based firmly in reality. Take the story of an Afghan interpreter told in “Outlaw Platoon,” the spectacular war memoir by Sean Parnell, who served as a combat platoon leader in one of the most violent parts of Afghanistan.

In his book, Parnell details how one of the Afghan interpreters in his platoon, a man who had been thoroughly “vetted” and given access to some of the Army’s closest held secrets, helped engineer an improvised explosive attack that killed one of Parnell’s troops, Cpl. Jeremiah S. Cole, and seriously injured four others. That interpreter, who went by the name Yusef, also arranged for the murder of his counterpart Abdul so Yusef would have total access to all sensitive information, such as troop movements and attack plans, which he then passed along to America’s enemies.

“Knowing where Abdul had been going and the road he had used to get there, Yusef’s tip had allowed the insurgents to establish an ambush in time to catch Abdul on his way back to Bermel from his family’s house,” Parnell writes. “With Abdul dead, Yusef knew he would be promoted to head interpreter.”

“We’d gone through our year in country, judging these Afghans through the prism of our own value systems, never fully grasping what we were up against,” Parnell concluded.

Earlier this week, Parnell shared that story on Tucker Carlson’s primetime show on Fox News. Media Matters immediately responded by slicing and dicing the transcript of Parnell’s appearance to smear him as a racist for believing, based on his own personal experience with a vetted Afghan who murdered one of his brothers in arms, that America could not properly vet the thousands of Afghans wishing to immigrate to America.

This is but one story of literally millions from around the Western world, of course. Unfortunately, the Immivasion has already begun, thanks to the conniving US goobermint.


See what I meant when I mentioned priorities in the preceding post? More:

Press propagandists, government bureaucrats, and pro migrant wave activists have continued to claim that virtually all of the Afghans being imported into the United States are akin to “fully vetted” Medal of Honor recipients. These tens of thousands of Afghans are a cadre of patriotic war heroes that “helped us” in our “war on terror,” we’re told. Therefore, they are somehow immediately entitled to permanent relocation into the United States.

And this isn’t a new policy push. For several years, lawmakers have been passing massive funding in Congress to relocate Afghans to the United States on “special immigrant visas,” which entitles them to access the U.S. social welfare system immediately and in perpetuity. It also allows Afghans to avoid deportation under almost any circumstances.

While the migration wave proponents tell us that almost every Afghan is the equivalent of a “fully vetted” Captain America who remained true to the U.S. mission in the country (whatever that actually was still remains unclear), reality tells us a much more grave tale. During the 20 year war, American soldiers have been repeatedly targeted with “green-on-blue” attacks, in which supposedly vetted, trusted Afghan allies turned their US-supplied weapons against our troops.

Hundreds of American service members have been killed and wounded by Afghan army soldiers, who “helped us,” until they didn’t. After cutting a deal with the jihadists, these outwardly allied troops turned their guns on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, repeatedly and consistently.

Why is the Afghan migrant wave so U.S. centric this time around? Well, the European continent is understandably balking at the idea of taking in more Afghans. The 2014-2015 Afghan migration wave into Europe resulted in a massive uptick in criminal activity.

In Germany, which absorbed a 6-figure tally of Afghan migrants and refugees, Afghans stood out as the most frequent perpetrators of gang violence and sexual assault. Now, following the unprecedented violence committed by Afghan migrants, six EU nations are fighting to deport them back to their homeland, even despite the chaos unfolding in their home country.

The massive Afghan migration wave that is coming to the United States will represent a more grave threat to our homeland security than anything that will have occurred over the course of 20 years in the far away lands of Afghanistan.

Indeed it will.

Folks, we now stand at one of those recurring historical pivot-points, or crossroads; the fate of the nation, quite literally, hangs upon which path we choose. If that sounds as if I’m callously advocating for the Biden Bugout to be exploited for political gain…well, yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. If it seems a bit cynical and opportunistic about this…well, guilty as charged. If you’re worried that the Left will try to weaponize what they’ll decry as “heartless,” “racist,” and/or “selfish” and turn a perfectly reasonable and rational opposition to the importation of hordes of unvetted, unassimilable “refugees” against us…well, of course they will. There’s only one sane response to such moral blackmail. Back over to Davis to spell out what it is.

Like one of those old magic eye posters that contained images hidden among visual white noise, once you see the American ruling elite’s reflex to resort to moral blackmail to win an argument, you can never unsee it. Every policy, every argument, every talking point asserts that you are a racist and a bad person if you believe America’s government should first and foremost protect American citizens. This is a fun game for the failed foreign policy establishment, because they reap all the benefits of using Americans’ blood and money to pump up their self-esteem while bearing precisely none of the costs.

One of the primary reasons this cadre of credentialed incompetents loathed former president Donald Trump is because, as a secular, thrice-married New York billionaire, he was impervious to the moral blackmail that had worked like a charm on everyone else for over a decade. He didn’t much care if they called him racist for wanting to secure the border and put an end to open borders. He didn’t care if they called him heartless for wanting to shut down immigration from “sh-thole countries” to preserve the wages of American workers. And he didn’t care if they called him stupid for refusing to go along with their plans for forever wars all around the globe.

For a time, America had a president who wouldn’t be bullied into doing things that weren’t in America’s national security interests. They hated him for it, and it’s why they spent every waking moment for four years, including two impeachments, desperately trying to throw him out of office.

Moral blackmail only works when the target cares what the blackmailer thinks about him. America’s interventionist elites have publicly failed in the most spectacular way possible, with the evidence of their failures playing on repeat on television for all the world to see.

Breaking their hold on power from here on out is simple: stop caring what they think, and stop caring what they say about you. Their ideas are disastrous and their rhetoric—that anyone who disagrees with them is a racist traitor—is toxic in a society built on free expression. The architects of the nation-building policies from Afghanistan to Iraq are failures and should be treated with the same disdain reserved for flat earthers or bloodletters.

Do you want to prevent the next Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Syria from being foisted on the American public at the cost of who knows how many decades, lives, or trillions of dollars? Stop giving them an inch. Stop kowtowing to their moral blackmail. Start telling them no.

Precisely. But that’s only the first step. There are others we’ll have to take, much more drastic and dark ones. But as with any journey, this first step is an absolute must. Because if it isn’t taken, the nation will be irrecoverably lost, and all those other steps will be no more than what-ifs, to be looked back on with regret.



1

It could NEVER happen here

It already is, of course. Oz is about fifteen-twenty minutes ahead of us on this, that’s all.

Travelers visiting or returning to Australia will have to quarantine for 14 days at their own expense. Quarantine camps are going up around Australia and to little surprise. Australia has seen massive riots, protesting draconian lockdown measures. The Australian military has been brought in and is going door-to-door to make sure people are obeying lockdown orders.

Follows, a Tweet featuring a 12 year old child being pepper-sprayed by Australian Stasi goons. A dangerous White Supremacist revolutionary insurgent, no doubt. Then, another with New South Wales Gestapo head David Elliott declaring it every “patriotic” Aussie’s duty to rat out any of their family, friends, neighbors, or casual acquaintances who might be considering committing a Crime Against the Reich by attending a protest of any sort. And then we down to to the meat, potatoes, and curdled gravy.

Australia has begun construction on their second COVID-19 quarantine camp, deceptively called “Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience.” It’s down the road from Melbourne Airport, known locally as Tullamarine Airport, which serves the city of Melbourne, and is Australia’s second-busiest airport.

Fear-O-Rama! New Zealand recently locked down after one suspected case of COVID.

The 1,000-bed quarantine facility will be finished by the end of the year but will be operational as soon as it can accommodate 500 beds. It will have the ability to add room for an additional 3,000 beds if needed.

The holding pen is being modeled on the Howard Springs Centre for National Resilience. Australian authorities have found that quarantine camps are more successful than hotels, many of which were found to have substandard ventilation. Australian authorities claim high viral loads have caused “COVID leakage,” which resulted in the government declaring a stage-four lockdown of 6 million people in the Australian state of Victoria. Only three of 19 hotels considered as possible quarantine quarters were equipped with the necessary ventilation.

Local residents called for and were granted a community briefing session, which was held last week. Discussion topics included how such a facility will affect real-estate prices and the fear of COVID escaping into the community. The camp is roughly half a mile from the closest neighborhood.

The locals were assured the camp would follow the highest infection-control standards, set by the Howard Springs facility, and that the staff will be fully vaccinated. The workers will also be unable to work second jobs.

When asked why locals weren’t informed there was a camp being built in their community, the Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews (the Aussie equivalent of a state governor) responded by saying, “We want the community to know what’s going on there, we want the community to be part of that program and that process, but we’ve got to get this built.

“There’s much greater risk to people across Victoria, Mickleham included, by having thousands of people in hotels that are not built to quarantine them,” he added. “That’s the site that’s been chosen and everyone, including locals, will be better off because of that.”

In other words, he dodged the question.

Of course. But what he also did was remind the serfs of their proper place in the grand scheme of things:

  • Know your role
  • Shut your hole
  • Do NOT question Authority
  • Submit and Obey
  • Hey, remember the days before tyranny took root and spread like a toxic weed, when the people of the West threw around now-phantasmagorical terms like “the Free World” and such with great pride? Nah, me neither.

    6

    The enemy among us

    Make America Mogadishu Again?

    So what happens to you now in a country run by the Taliban? It’s hard to think about that. And yet tonight many Americans are thinking about it and they’re feeling distressed as they do. Americans are kind people and generous. They’re quicker and more eager to help strangers than anyone else in the world. We haven’t seen polling on it, but we bet if you asked one hundred people, should we try to help Afghans who are facing persecution for helping us, most Americans would say, of course, we should. And we should be glad that they say that you should be happy you live in a country where your neighbors love children and dogs and want to help refugees. We are generous and empathetic people and we should be proud.

    Unfortunately, there are many in our ruling class who are anxious to take advantage of that, anxious, to take advantage of our best qualities. They see our decency and our weakness, and they exploit those things and they do it relentlessly. Let’s try to save our loyal Afghan interpreters, we tell them. Perfect, they think. We’ll open the borders and change the demographic balance of this country. Of course, that’s exactly what they’re doing right now on our southern border, naturally in the name of human rights and compassion. And they would like to do the very same thing with the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan, the disaster that they created. Look at what this kid on MSNBC said yesterday, and remember, as you watch, that he is regarded with total seriousness in Washington as a foreign policy expert and that his fellow foreign policy experts wholeheartedly agree with him.

    SPENCER ACKERMAN: We’re talking about an evacuation of people who helped the wars, and that’s an obligation of the United States but it’s sort of a moral floor that’s functioning as a moral ceiling. The Bush administration, I’m sorry the Biden administration, pardon me, isn’t doing things necessary like increasing TPS access and letting in refugees by the millions to escape their certain fate at the hands of the Taliban.

    So we must “let in refugees by the millions,” said the mustachioed foreign policy expert. The millions. Millions is not a handful of loyal Afghan interpreters. That’s not even a fleet of cargo planes full of loyal Afghan interpreters. Millions is a good chunk of the entire population of Afghanistan, brought to our country at our expense to live in your neighborhood at the very moment our national fabric is fraying, in case you haven’t noticed, and the United States is becoming unmistakably poorer.

    Do we really need millions of Afghan refugees in Phoenix, you ask? Shut up. Racist. OK, go ahead and do it. That’s how the process typically works. In fact, that’s pretty much how it always works with everything now. At this point, fighting racism is the universal justification for every bad idea. Tear down our statues. OK. Stop teaching math. OK. Get rid of standardized testing. All right. Defund the police, move millions of Afghan refugees to swing states to help the Democratic Party. OK. Oppose any of it, and you’re a racist. So in the end, it always happens. And in this case, it may happen. It probably will.

    But what happens then to us? How will this new wave of immigration affect America? Will America be a better country or will it be a little more like Afghanistan, which is to say not really a better country? We can’t be sure of what’s going to happen. We can’t see the future. But for a hint, a glimpse, maybe we ought to pay some attention to what has happened in Europe recently. They just went through this. 

    OK, so Afghan refugees have destabilized countries into which they have moved in large numbers, but we have a moral obligation to take them anyway. Really? Why is that? Why is this our unique moral burden? Isn’t the U.S. government’s first obligation to its own people? Isn’t that the only point of having a government to look out for its citizens? Why else have a government, actually?

    After digesting all the other hard facts Tucker spells out in this crucial piece, the real question we need to ask ourselves is: why have THIS government?

    How many of these Afghans and their family members, you have to wonder, are excited about coming to America? Huh. It’s interesting, maybe you should ask that question, maybe you should ask Ilhan Omar. Her position is the only reason that American citizens might object to being flooded with millions of new refugees from Afghanistan is that Americans, people who are born here and built this country are actually mediocre and insecure.

    ILHAN OMAR: And then you’ve got these crazy people on the right doing what they always do with their fear-mongering and their hateful rhetoric, and I know what some of these people are worried about is that they’re worried that refugees like myself when they come to this country, will outshine them.

    So the obvious response to that is to attack poor Ilhan Omar, but we’re not going to do that. The truth is, this is our fault. It is our fault. Ilhan Omar is living proof that we are not very good at resettling refugees. She was saved from a refugee camp in Kenya as a child by the kindness and generosity of America. And yet she has grown to hate America and the people who live here.

    Where did she learn those attitudes? Well, of course, in college, our colleges, we taught her to hate our country. She became worse after she got here. We ought to pause before we do that again, to anyone, even if they’ve been translators.

    Reading this article, it fairly well slaps you upside yo’ haid that the enormity of the multitudinous problems we face is simply overwhelming, almost beyond human ability to comprehend. That said, those problems all flow from a single source. We know full well what that source is, just as we also know the one and only way it can ever be shut down. That’s the long and the short of it, folks.

    2
    1

    Post-mort

    Another real no-shitter, this one quite comprehensive and in-depth.

    I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said.

    I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner.

    We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw.

    However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”.

    Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well.

    The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system.

    It SHOULD be, sure. It won’t.

    General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy.

    Won’t happen, and we all know it won’t. I suspect the only people who seriously think it might are the self-same purblind Pollyannas who blibber on and on about the vitally vital importance of “taking back Congress in 2022.”

    Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work.

    Won’t happen.

    Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists.

    Won’t happen.

    The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs.

    Hey, what better way to exhaust said military; demoralize the warriors at the pointy end; erode the support for said military among its natural base of same; reinforce the paramount urgency of the fundamentally anti-American idea that participation in multinational forces (as no more than “one among equals,” even though the contribution demanded of the US will always and forever exceed that of all other “coalition partners” combined, by orders of magnitude) and submission to the authority of globalist organizations—in short, to invalidate and demolish the very concept of national sovereignty and independence, thereby achieving the eternal Leftist dream of One World Government: omnipotent, unchallengeable, eternal. Why, one might almost imagine the whole thing had been planned in advance or something.

    Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war.

    Clearly, it couldn’t even win a minor one.

    Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds.

    More importantly, it will take a clear-eyed, stout-hearted populace whose will to victory hasn’t been broken by seeing the lives of friends, family members, and neighbors who are in the military squandered for no discernible purpose or gain by an entirely loathsome and corrupt political/military complex, in pointless conflicts half-heartedly fought in farflung shitholes all over the world—places in which there there is no national interest to be found.

    Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk.

    Done.

    Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large.

    Agreed, wholeheartedly. Won’t happen.

    And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary.

    Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity.

    Okay, I’m gonna just lay off the “won’t happen” schtick—do I really even need to say it again? No, I do not—so we can get to the last crucial bit.

    Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

    Actually, we’ll never know for sure whether “success was possible” or not…because it was never actively, vigorously pursued. In reality, it was barely ever even discussed—certainly, it was never defined, after the original goal of “find and kill bin Laden” shifted to “remove the Taliban, destroy their ability to provide a base for the projection of jihadi power a la 9/11,” morphing from there into “Make Afghanistan Georgetown Again.”

    Once again, The Power and its Grand Scheme has been undone by its own arrogance, incompetence, and witless disregard for the harsher realities. If it weren’t for the way the horrific consequences of their folly always crash down onto the heads of the hapless wretches so uncaringly used and manipulated by them, watching the serial pratfalls of our grotesquely-misnomered “Elite” would be funny as all hell to watch.

    8

    A real no-shitter of an AAR

    STRONG message follows.

    Some of you Afghan Veterans out there are hurting, trying to make sense of what this all means. Including some of my peers, who are not immune to the feel bads coming out of this clusterfuck. So allow me to give you a different perspective, one that will perhaps sooth the pain a bit. I shoot straight, and this isn’t all sunshine and roses. There is going to be some Grim Dark up front. But it does have a silver lining, hear me out.

    Was this a foolish mission to start with? Yes. The only way to decisively win in Afghanistan was full scale genocide, which we knew from about 2003 forward. We don’t have the stomach for that, and that is probably a good thing.

    Nah, not so much. All’s we ever had to do—ever SHOULD have done—is hew closely to LeMay’s Maxim, a man who very much knew whereof he spoke when it came to waging war: If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.

    Did we lose? Yeah, goddamn right we lost. Let’s just get that out of the way now, like ripping off a band aid. Do not get out the “ We were winning when I left” hats and slap a Ghan flag on them. Face the facts, and then act. If the goal 20 years ago was to remove the Taliban, and now the Taliban is back 100% in control without even requiring a name change, then the objective was not met.

    Is it your fault? No. The failure here, while stunning, rests on the political class and the Generals. So like I said, the political class. Who, exactly, do you think lost this war? You, out slogging the mountains, and mowing down Taliban fighters with a machine gun, and surviving on fish sticks and MRE crackers at the firebase, and winning EVERY tactical level engagement for 20 years? Or the spineless General who didn’t hear a gun shot despite 9 tours, who was the architect of the grand strategy, and spent his time quite literally getting his dick sucked by his biographer in his office at Bagram instead of trying to win?

    We can safely say at this point that the real goal in Afghanistan was a transfer of wealth from the tax payers to the MIC ( Military Industrial Complex) and the politicians they bought with the profits. $88 billion dollars ( for the ANA alone) is a staggering figure. For that much money, you could have paid half of Afghanistan to kill the other half. You could have paid China or India or even Pakistan to do it for you. That money was wasted, and we all knew that well over a decade ago.

    Afghanistan should never have been anything except a punitive expedition. We should have left in 2004, 2006, 2007, or ten minutes after Osama Bin Laden died. Any one of those would have been a leave with honor type situation. Instead, we opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and look like incompetent boobs to the entire planet. I should say, our Generals and Politicians opted for that. Almost like that was the goal………

    The idea of spending 2.2 trillion dollars to “export our way of life” to cavemen is retarded, and anyone with an ounce of sense knows that. I often said that giving the Ghans a Jeffersonian Democracy was a fool’s errand, since we could barely keep one functioning ourselves. Post Nov 4th, 2020, we know that “barely functioning” wasn’t true either. The idea of the US Government fighting corruption is laughable in our own country. So no shit we laundered 2.2 trillion into bribes and fake projects, what did you think was going to happen?

    How many Company Grade Officers were relieved of command or run up on charges over 20 years? A lot. Hundreds, if not thousands. How many Generals faced the same fate, or resigned in disgrace over their incompetence? None. Stan McCrystal resigned for saying not nice things about Obumer to a Rolling Stone reporter, but that doesn’t count. In fact, perhaps it is telling that General JSOC himself was played in such a manner. If ole Stanley is too much of a fucking idiot not to effectively give his enemy kryptonite and ask him nice not to use it, what does that say about the rest of the Officer Caste? For that matter, how many children did the CEO of Ratheyon or Boeing or Lockheed Martin lose to the meat grinder?

    Yeah, it hurts. I feel you. We all lost friends. Had our brothers return home mangled and broken. Was it worth it? No. But those are sunk costs, so we might as well look at what we gained from the experience.

    He goes on to list a few of those silver-lining items before laying down some 24-karat-gold, capital-t Truth:

    We lost this war the minute Code Pink was taken seriously. The minute Bradly Manning and Bo Berghdale weren’t hung. The first time we charged one of our warfighters with murder or using excessive force. The first time we denied a element in contact air support. Our people, 49% of them at least, are weak and stupid. The great sifting has just begun, and it will get worse. That is the price you pay for allowing weakness to take root in your society.

    All of us, I promise, will be needed once again. And soon. And not in some Bureaucrat, Blue Blood , Skull and Bones created debacle on the edge of the Empire. I mean needed as in needed like the Spartans at Thermopylae. The weakness on display right now by the Government of the United States will not go unnoticed by the world at large. We can expect now to be poked in the chest, because we have shown that we will take it.

    Seems to me it ain’t really the rest of the world that we need to be concerning ourselves with now. As I keep saying, the war has been brought home to us, right to our very doorsteps. The primary threat to American liberty, American prosperity and security, and Americans themselves, no longer comes from enemies abroad. As in the classic old horror-movie line: The calls are coming from inside the house.

    (Via WRSA)

    6

    “We are led by buffoons”

    Well, there’s no arguing with THAT.

    TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: Joe Biden went on television today, this afternoon, and talked to the country about Afghanistan. He said, among other things, that we had no choice but to leave, and on that question, he is right. The United States should have left Afghanistan 19 years ago when it became obvious that Osama bin Laden wasn’t there and had fled to Pakistan. There was no reason to stay in the country.

    And the longer we remained, the worse it was always going to be. The question is, and the relevant question today, is how exactly do you get out? Just because something is necessary doesn’t mean you get to ignore the details of it. If you learned you needed an emergency appendectomy, would it matter to you who performed the operation? A surgeon with a scalpel or a drunk guy with a pocket knife? Yes, it would matter to you.

    But it didn’t matter to Joe Biden, apparently. He barely mentioned the withdrawal today. Biden did the necessary thing in the ugliest possible way. If you’ve been watching television during the day, you’ve probably seen this footage. It’s terrified men in sandals clinging to the side of a C-17 as it attempts to leave Afghanistan.

    This is the iconic photo of the moment. It’s the final humiliating scene of the American occupation of Afghanistan. That means that after 20 years and trillions of dollars, our leaders couldn’t manage to pull off an orderly retreat. They couldn’t even secure a single runway, and that’s the main lesson of the fall of Kabul. We are led by buffoons. They have no idea what they’re doing. We know that now. They are imposters.

    Everything they touch turns to chaos, not just there but here. These are the people who run the Amtrak station in Midtown Manhattan, the one that’s filled with drug addicts. They are the people in charge of the power grid in the State of California, they have no useful skills, and yet somehow, these same people assured us they were going to turn Stone Age Afghanistan into Modern Belgium. Remembering it now is bitter and hilarious.

    At this point, our leaders are so discredited, they are running out of ways to criticize the Taliban. Is the Biden administration really going to attack the new government of Afghanistan for forcing women to cover their faces? Are American diplomats actually going to lecture Taliban leaders about toppling statues? Probably not going to happen. That’s how much credibility our leaders have lost, how much moral authority they have squandered in the past 20 years.

    But most of what they’ve lost is their self-awareness. They have none.

    Okay then, ONE thing I’ll argue with: as nothing but walking, talking skin-bags of pure conceit, they’re ALL self-awareness, ALL the time. The trouble is that their perception has been so radically skewed by their monstrously bloated egos, that’s all. They aren’t what they think they are: not nearly the capable, intelligent, admired, and influential leaders they believe themselves to be. None of which fazes them in the least, natch. Obama said a mouthful when he told author Richard Wolfe, “You know, I actually believe my own bullshit.” They all do, and demand that everybody else must as well.

    4

    The weakness of Wokeness

    He’s dead, Jim, and doesn’t even seem to realize it.

    The War on Terror began with men plunging to their deaths from the highest floors of skyscrapers hit by airplanes; it ended with men plunging to their deaths from the undercarriage of a US airplane taking off from what’s left of “Hamid Karzai International Airport” (the signs will be coming down even as you read this).

    America is a global laughingstock right now, but that’s no reason not to give Chairman Xi and Putin and every up-country village headman in Helmand a few more yuks. Step forward, State Department spokeswanker Ned Price:

    State Department calls for Taliban to include women in its government

    The United States is dead as a global power because of this kind of indestructible stupidity. You’ve lost, you blew it, it’s over: The goatherds just decapitated you; could you at least have the self-respect not to run around like a headless chicken too stupid to know it’s nogginless? Or like a broken doll lying on its back with its mechanism jammed on the same simpleton phrases: “Diversity is our strength… diversity is our strength…”

    Contrast the Washington presser with that in Kabul:

    Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid says ‘We have defeated a great power.’

    Wrong, asshole. If Amerika v2.0 was a “great power,” you goat-humping, dress-clad lower primates would never have defeated it. America That Was, on the other hand, would have exterminated every last Muzzrat in the Hindu Kush and reduced the flatter areas of your cesspool “nation” to so much steaming glass in the first fucking month. Then Our Boys would have loaded up the gear and headed on home with, as Billy Beck once put it, the last US soldier pausing his trot up the troop-transport ramp to nail up a sign warning DON’T MAKE US COME BACK HERE AGAIN.

    And know what? I bet you wouldn’t have, either. You mouthbreathers would have been very, very careful to make sure it didn’t happen, your bowels instantly going gooey at the mere thought of giving us a reason to, what with the unpleasant memory of your asses having been kicked up between your shoulder blades fresh in mind and all. No, don’t y’all be breaking any arms patting yourselves on the back for “defeating America.” You weren’t fighting America; America no longer exists, not as anything other than a fond memory. It hasn’t for many years.

    Hmm. Ned Price vs Zabiullah Mujahid: tough call. The mountain of non-existent dollar bills that the bloated husk of federal government blows through every minute surely should buy sufficient self-awareness to know that, whatever else it may be, this is not a day for wankery as usual. Even CNN has a more proximate relationship to reality.

    Wokeness is weakness, and diversity is where nations go to die. Contrast our spokesmen with theirs: in the White House, Jen Psaki picked the weekend to take a vacation, possibly to film her scenes in another hilariously viral Mr Non-Binary Goes To Washington video; at Foggy Bottom, Buffoon McStriped Pants III issued a stern warning on the need for the firebreathing mullahs to include more female deputy-assistant-undersecretaries; and, at the Potemtagon, Kabul Kirby stood there doing his usual anguished-eyebrows Saddy Sadcakes routine.

    All these images project global impotence: none of these people would be a serious and prudent power’s projection of itself to the world.

    Meanwhile, back at the palace in Kabul, the Taliban commander giving a victory speech is Gholam Ruhani, released from Gitmo (under Bush) because he said his “only wish” was to return to Afghanistan to (per the Department of Defense documents published, natch, in a London newspaper) “assist his father, who is sick, in operating the family appliance store in Kabul”.

    I don’t know what appliances they sell at Ruhani & Son over at 237b Sword of the Infidel Slayer Street, but evidently they’re enough to take out the global superpower. On social media, the wags are having great sport with Joe Biden’s recent taunt that no American needs an AR-15, because, if you want to defeat the mighty US government, you’re gonna need fighter jets and nukes.

    Well, the Taliban just took out Joe as Leader of the Free World with no nukes, no F-15s, just a big bunch of AR-15s.

    That could actually be taken as an encouraging thing, were it not for the sure and certain knowledge that The Power in Mordor on the Potomac would be FAR less hesitant about waging full-on, no-holds-barred warfare against Real Americans than against anybody else. Balancing that, though, is the equally sorry truth that America’s military might has atrophied so badly by now that really, the only army in the world that the FUSA stands any chance at all of defeating would have to be the “largely disintegrated” Afghan National Army that just downed weapons and surrendered to the Taliban. So we got that going for us, at least.

    Steyn uncorks a painful-but-funny at the close:

    If you saw my long-form interview by Tucker Carlson yesterday, you’ll know he asked me about writing obituaries. And I replied that it was very difficult to do obits for people for whom you had total contempt; you had to have some basic human sympathy even for the most unlovely types. And yet, as the world dances on the grave of Washington’s “elites”, I cannot muster a jot or tittle of human connection with the likes of Milley and Austin, Kirby and Psaki and Biden: They will all die richer than you, and with half the citizenry convinced of their virtue.

    Steyn Clubber Eric Dale from Iowa appended this somewhat mordant comment to my Sunday column:

    Do you think there’s any chance of getting Taliban commanders to teach at West Point? It might be a nice change of pace for cadets to learn from someone who actually won a war.

    We all laugh…but it’s actually a very fair point: Would you rather hear first-hand from a mullah about how they took out the hyperpower in a week? Or from a corrupt toad like Milley who can only express bewilderment at how showering billions on other corrupt toads from Herat to Jalalabad didn’t pan out?

    Myself, I wonder how many more shiny additions to his chestful of fruit-salad Milley will award himself for Heroic Leadership Above And Beyond The Call etc in the Afghanistan fiasco. Oh, and in case you aren’t angry enough to explode a ventricle quite yet:

    Taliban Leader Obama/Biden Released from GITMO in Swap for Deserter Bergdahl Just Resurfaced
    It was one of the worst trades in history, even worse than Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi or Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac: Back in 2014, Barack Obama traded five Taliban commanders for one American who, we were led to believe, had been captured by the Taliban. Obama did all he could to make the swap seem noble: He said at the time that the recovery of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield,” and the five Taliban jihadis were sent to Qatar, where they would ostensibly be kept out of trouble. Seven years later, Bergdahl is known as a deserter, not a hero: In 2017, he pleaded guilty to desertion and was given a dishonorable discharge. And now Khairullah Khairkhwa, one of the jihadis Obama traded for Bergdahl, is among the Taliban leadership that just took Kabul.

    Obama’s deal was fishy from the start. Bergdahl was known as a deserter even at the time the deal was made. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bergdahl in Afghanistan, wrote in the Daily Beast that Bergdahl was “a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

    Three days before he deserted, Bergdahl wrote to his parents: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”

    The Obama/Biden administration ignored all this, made the lopsided deal, and treated Bergdahl as a returning hero at a Rose Garden ceremony featuring the deserter’s parents.

    Meanwhile, Obama’s own intelligence team warned him that four of the five jihadis he traded for Bergdahl were almost certain to return to the jihad. He ignored this. And so Khairullah Khairkhwa was free to join other Taliban representatives in Qatar in 2019, negotiating the terms of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. During those protracted, fruitless, and foredoomed negotiations, Khairkhwa declared in March 2021: “I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement.” Or, as things turned out, until Old Joe Biden leaves Afghanistan without bothering to have his military, which was too preoccupied with making sure to enforce woke orthodoxy anyway, prepare a coherent exit strategy that would protect our personnel and get them and our weaponry out of the country safely.

    “The horror that is America is disgusting.” I must confess that I’m finding it awfully tough to disagree with Berghdahl’s assessment at the moment.

    Echoes

    This isn’t a rerun of Saigon. It’s way, way worse.

    The impact of America’s failure, of the slow, tragic journey from Operation Enduring Freedom to those images today of desperate Afghans clinging to the undercarriage of the last US military airplanes to leave Afghanistan, will be dire and long-lasting. Most immediately the US has shown itself to be an untrustworthy ally. Which nation or people in need of help would align with this supposedly freedom-loving superpower that abandons its allies to their fate when the enemy comes knocking? Who now will trust the US to assist in the building of new institutions given the rotten fruits of its multi-billion-dollar, 20-year ‘nation-building’ project in Afghanistan – a calamitously weak Potemkin government that capitulated instantly when the Taliban hit the streets of Kabul?

    This geopolitical disaster for the US will also strengthen the hand of its opponents, most notably China. China is already moving to consolidate its relationship with the Taliban and to assert its authoritative influence in the new Afghanistan. Islamist forces will take succour from the victory of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, too. Both regionally and among aspiring jihadists in the West, the victory of the Islamist side in the ‘war on terror’, the return to power of the movement that was hosting al-Qaeda when it visited its barbarism upon the infidels of New York City and Washington, DC, in 2001, will inspire confidence and action. Israel must be incredibly worried right now, knowing that Islamic extremists are again in the ascendant, and that its one-time chief supporter walks away from wars on terror.

    Yeah, well, I’d say Israel will have to look after itself for the foreseeable future, as will the rest of the once-free world. We have knitting of our own to tend to at the moment, and plenty of it.

    The Afghan humiliation is not only a military failure – it’s a political and moral one, too. Extraordinarily bad political decisions have been taken by the US, including its willingness to trust the Taliban and its belief that this brutal, misanthropic, misogynistic movement could be a player in the ‘international community’. Even now, Washington seems completely out of touch with events on the ground in Afghanistan. Its intelligence officers said the Taliban could take Kabul within 90 days. That was four days ago. They know nothing. One gets the impression of a confused, decaying empire looking with bamboozlement upon even those parts of the earth it rules.

    “Impression”?

    But above all of that, above even the political and military incoherence of the American empire, there is the corrosive cultural dynamic. This might just be the most important factor in the Afghan humiliation – the fact that the US, and the West more broadly, clearly lacks the cultural resources necessary for a clash of civilisations. This wasn’t just a territorial battle, a fight over the land of Afghanistan. It was also a cultural clash. It was a war between one side that has very strong beliefs and is more than willing to die for them, and another side that doesn’t know what it stands for anymore and would rather avoid risk and self-sacrifice if at all possible. I’ll leave you to decide which of these is the Taliban, and which the US.

    This was always the West’s problem in Afghanistan: it lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. We will liberate women from life under the burqa, Western officials said. But isn’t it ‘Islamophobic’ to criticise the burqa, or any other Islamic practice for that matter? Our elites have insisted for years that it is. We will replace your intolerant Islamist system with a civil society fashioned by clever professors, the West promised. But isn’t it judgemental and possibly a tad racist – certainly an offence against the ideology of multiculturalism – to imply that Western democracy is superior to Islamist theocracy? As one British think-tank says, in its definition of the term ‘Islamophobia’, it is wrong to suggest that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’. The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation? You cannot partake in a clash of civilisations if you loathe your own civilisation.

    Anyone who thinks the Taliban did not pick up on all of this, on the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself, is kidding themselves. The Taliban will have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory and the problem of ‘white rage’. They will have clocked the British army’s recruitment drive that was aimed at ‘snowflakes’ and ‘me me me millennials’ – for real – on the basis that such people have the ‘compassion’ necessary for the touchy-feely wars of the 21st century. They will know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as being the opposite to all of this. They know this was a cultural clash as well as a military fight, and that they were by far the stronger side on this front.

    Nailed it, clean and tight. I’ve said over and over again: Amerika v2.0 has absolutely, positively NO business involving itself in any conflict, major or minor, that can’t be resolved by pimple-faced doughboys sitting at keyboards in an air-conditioned trailer somewhere in Arizona, launching missiles from drones at high altitude. If that won’t fix it, we need to mind our own business from here on out.

    The point about Amerika v2.0 being a wholly unreliable and faithless ally is an apt one, too. But as with so many of our other current woes, that hardly began this past week either.

    In 1972, Church and Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey were able to push through the Senate an amendment to foreign-aid legislation that would end funding for all U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia except for withdrawal (subject to the release of all prisoners of war). Senate passage of the legislation, with the amendment, marked the first time that either chamber had passed a provision establishing a cutoff of funds for continuing the war. Though House and Senate conferees failed to reach an agreement on the measure, the support for the amendment was seen by the administration as another sign that antiwar forces were gaining strength. The McGovern-Hatfield amendment was enormously popular with the public. A January 1971 Gallup poll showed that public support for the amendment stood at 73 percent.

    During the final negotiations with the Vietnamese over ending the war, culminating with the 1972 Christmas Bombings and the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the president knew that he only had a limited amount of time before Congress finally used the power of the purse to bring the war to an end — regardless of what the administration wanted. Indeed, to make certain that the president could not reverse course, in June 1973 Congress passed legislation that included an amendment sponsored by Church and Case to prohibit the use of more funds in Southeast Asia after August 15. Sixty-four senators voted in favor. When the House assented, its vote marked the first time that chamber had agreed to cut off funds, too.

    Most importantly, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973 over Nixon’s veto. The legislation imposed a series of restrictions on the executive branch to ensure that the president would have to consult with the House and Senate before authorizing the troops for long periods of time.

    For the remainder of the decade, congress continued to legislate its ideas about U.S. conduct in the Cold War and to restrict the authority of the executive branch. In 1975, Congress refused President Gerald Ford’s last-minute request to increase aid to South Vietnam by $300 million, just weeks before it fell to communist control. Few legislators had taken the request seriously; many conservative Republicans and hawkish Democrats agreed by then that Vietnam was lost and that the expenditure would have been a waste.

    Congress also tackled the important national security issues of covert operations and intelligence. Hearings by Church pressured Ford into issuing an executive order that imposed restrictions on the CIA, including a ban on assassinations. Ford agreed to issue the order, rather than waiting for inevitable congressional reforms, after then–Chief of Staff Dick Cheney told him such action would protect the CIA from “irresponsible attack” and protect presidential authority. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required court-supervised monitoring of domestic surveillance operations by the federal government. The reforms were a response to revelations that the government had rampantly abused its power throughout the Cold War.

    In sum, Congress played a very important role in building opposition to an unpopular and failed Cold War intervention. Legislators emerged as major voices of skepticism, criticism, and outright opposition to Vietnam. They checked the hawks in the administration who refused to believe the facts on the ground. Congress was ultimately pivotal to placing pressure on the Nixon administration to end a conflict that cost approximately 58,000 American lives.

    Today, members from both parties would benefit by looking back at the history of Congress in the Vietnam era. 

    Wouldn’t they just, though; in fact, the American people as a whole would. It’s the intentional failure of the government school system to expose the impressionable young minds in their charge to proper, truthful and complete history and civics instruction that’s the primary cause of the catastrophe we’re seeing unfold all around us now.

    3
    1

    Gun grabbers are the same the world over

    Who the hell cares about the doin’s in a totally unsalvageable, Neolithic shithole when we have our very own Taliban right here at home to be dealt with?

    The situation for Afghan civilians continues to devolve. Now, Taliban operatives have begun confiscating people’s personal weapons, promising that they “can now feel safe” and that they no longer need firearms.

    The terrorist group declared victory on Sunday as they took over the presidential palace and re-established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. In a Twitter video, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar celebrated the organization’s triumph. He said:

    We have achieved an unexpected victory. Now is the time to test, to show how we serve our people and ensure their future in the best possible way.

    A spokesman for the Taliban stated that its jihadis have been seizing firearms in Kabul. He acknowledged that while the organization understands “people kept weapons for personal safety,” they “are not here to harm innocent civilians.”

    No, no, of course not. Why, what reasonable, intelligent person could possibly even imagine that you might be? Herschel provides the always-pertinent reminder:

    ISIS did it too.

    “ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

    Guns were confiscated prior to the Armenian genocide in Turkey, prior to the Nazi reign in Germany, prior to Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda, and on the list could go.

    And to repeat, gun control is never about confiscation of all guns, the usual rejoinder to these instances by the left. In fact, claiming so undermines the main point.

    Gun control is always about leaving them in the hands of state-sanctioned actors and outlawing gun ownership by those not approved by the state.

    Yup, that’s about the size of it. The one way, the ONLY way, you should ever allow a tyrant to get his hands on your gun is bullets first. Always remember that lesson, lest forgetfulness cost you absolutely everything.

    5

    Kabul falls, hilarity ensues, Trump blamed

    Parseltongue from the mouth of the lamest, most ineffectual Voldemort ever.

    Biden Says He Stands By Decision to Leave Afghanistan, Doesn’t Discuss Botched Exit Plan, Takes No Questions
    In prepared remarks delivered from the White House, Monday Afternoon, Joe Biden focused on explaining why pulling out of Afghanistan was the right thing to do, rather than addressing why the administration’s plan was so poorly executed.

    “I stand squarely behind my decision,” he said, referring to President Trump’s decision to exit Afghanistan. “The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.”

    Biden cast blame on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, arguing that his administration’s hands were tied by the plan Trump set in motion last year.

    He also repeatedly excoriated Afghanistan’s elected leaders and military for not putting up more of a fight against the Taliban. He said that they in essence squandered the time and money America spent to build up its security forces.

    “We gave them every tool they could need,” he said. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. [What] we could not provide them, was the will to fight for that future.”

    Biden even said that it was “wrong” to put Americans in harm’s way to do a job that Afghanistan wouldn’t do itself, and positioned himself as being a leader who was willing to make the difficult call to leave Afghanistan that a generation of Washington officials were incapable of doing. He added that the United States will continue to provide humanitarian assistance and try to exert soft-power influence to improve the conditions on the ground.

    Biden also blamed our Afghan allies for their dire predicament, claiming they didn’t want to leave earlier because they still had hope for their country.

    “I know there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghan civilians sooner,” he said. “Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier, still hopeful for their country. And part of it is because the Afghan government, and its supporters, discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, a crisis of confidence.”

    The “***president***” then hurriedly scuttled back to his secret lair, contemptuously showing his back to the adoring press gaggle without taking the slightest notice of them.

    And that’s a wrap, more or less. No real need to discuss the bumbling, blibbering dolt’s spluttering dumpster-fire of a statement much further, I don’t think. It’s not as if the doped-up zombie has any real idea of what he’s saying anyway, if he ever did.

    Heart of stone update! Question asked, question answered.

    He walked out without responding to questions from the press. The transcript records one and only one of the questions shouted at him: “Mr. President, what do you make of the Afghans clinging to the aircraft?”

    Oh, a throw rug, a unique and intimidating doormat, some extremely unappetizing pancakes…

    3

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