Category: Our Enemies

To include not only Islamofascists and other terrorists, but also those who seek to thwart American aims, undermine American strategy, and harm American interests. Yes, that means France and the rest of the UN diplo-dinks

The echoes are getting louder

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Like the man says:

The Kristallnacht othering of people can cut both ways. And it should. It’s probably time the Vaxxholes found that out, personally. And I’m totally not responsible if someone spray paints a swastika over the word “Vaxxhole!” on anyone’s ride. The “Just following orders…” crowd needs to feel the pain as much as the ones pulling the strings at the top, and their staff cars should be properly marked. Tyranny gets a lot less fun that way, don’cha think? By all means, make them own it.

The hardcore Nazis will require something a bit more kinetic to get their attention. But every little bit helps.

And let no one alive ever say again, “I can’t understand how Nazi Germany happened.”

Now you know.

We always did, really. It’s just that some of us need to have their memories refreshed. Which we should do right away, using any and all means necessary to ensure the job is done.

PWNED!

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By the Taliban, who are unexpectedly turning out to have quite a sense of humor when it comes to rubbing Amerika v2.0’s nose in it.

The soi-disant “superpower” now resembles one of those stories you see from time to time on Eyewitness News: the 700-lb bedridden guy unable to get up, even to go to hospital, and requiring the fire department to slice off the upper wall of the house just to winch him out of there. The inability of Lloyd Austin, Thoroughly Modern Milley, Tailspin Taylor and the other beribboned buffoons of the Potemtagon to adapt swiftly and effectively to ground conditions that are changing hour by hour is as telling as anything.

It is not just that General Milley and the Joint Buffoons of Staff cannot plan; they cannot execute. Compare the 2,500 Americans evacuated from Kabul over this last week to the 7,000 Americans and allies choppered out of Saigon in just nineteen hours. Can Milley do anything in nineteen hours other than call his tailor and order up his next row of ribbonry?

The Taliban know an American humiliation when they see one, and for the moment they’re content to let Austin and Milley and the rest of Washington’s worthless elite dig deeper. Aside from that, the mullahs are waggish enough to tease western media with hints of a “broad-based government”, although we all know that in the end the broad-based government won’t be based on broads. Other than that, the Sharia crowd confine any direct engagement with the Great Loser Satan to social media trolling, such as recreating (in American uniforms left at Bagram or elsewhere) Iwo Jima with the Taliban flag.

In case you missed it, and I don’t see how you could’ve, here t’is:

Steyn continues:

Funnier than Colbert and Fallon and the other court eunuchs, but who isn’t? And once again you get the feeling that these guys know us rather better than all the Ivy League tosspots of the world’s most ludicrous “elite” know them. On the subject of which, see the Tweeted video of the brother of Afghanistan’s president (the guy who fled with 169 mil in American tax dollars) joining the Taliban.

Enjoy it while you can: the big beards are not going to audition for Comedy Central indefinitely. Having won a spectacular victory, the beneficiaries of two decades of American “nation-building” will at some point want their international airport back.

Correctimundo. There’s a second big winner now emerging from the smoke and ash of Amerikan ruin, though, and guess who it might be.

This is a human tragedy for those desperate to flee Afghanistan. But, as I’ve said repeatedly, for everyone else this is a story about America. We like to think of our site as a big-picture pad, so what would that be in this scenario? Well, the big picture is that, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States blew its unipolar moment and has chosen to surrender the world, after half-a-millennium, to post-western dominance. Whatever the truth of Biden’s charge that the money-no-object Afghan National Army went over to the other side, there is no question that key elements of American national power have gone over to China’s side: the Chamber of Commerce, Hollywood, the NBA, not to mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s protectors at the CDC and NIH; oh, and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, at least two of whom have checked out with respect to anything to do with China…

Beijing has won without firing a shot, which is the way to do it. They have no desire to occupy Afghanistan or to prioritize (as did Washington, confusing the Great Game with the Gay Games) Pride Month in Kandahar. Your average goatherd will barely notice the ChiComs’ presence, except insofar as the best tables at the only Michelin restaurant in Spin Boldak seem to go to the visiting Chinamen. But, an hour south of Kabul, Chinese development of the world’s second largest copper mine will proceed apace. We were there for two decades, but all the lithium will go to Chairman Xi, just in case you thought the Chinese didn’t have a tight enough hammerlock on the world’s batteries, without which all your high-tech toys are novelty paperweights and doorstops.

After the US abandonment of Bagram air base, the Germans began moving their people out last month, quietly and without fanfare. Also in July, Mullah Baradar, the Taliban honcho now back in Kabul, flew to China to meet with Xi’s Foreign Minister. And the government of Greece (which no German or Scandinavian would consider a functioning administration) somehow managed to anticipate a looming Afghan migrant tide and construct and complete a border fence with Turkey, in order to prevent another 2016 “refugee” stampede.

Everyone – Greeks, Germans, Chinese – knew where this was headed (and very quickly) …everyone except the decadent, decayed hyperpower in nominal control of the timeline.

On Friday the chump who serves as US Defense Secretary was asked why his US troops at Kabul Airport couldn’t do (as the French, British and others are doing) and fan out into Kabul and surrounding provinces and extract their nationals. Mr Austin replied that American forces don’t have “the capability” – and, as a hack lobbyist formerly on the board of Raytheon, he should know.

But what exactly does America have “the capability” to do? The “Special Immigrant Visa” for loyal Afghans who made the mistake of trusting the infidel takes two years to process. What’s so “special” about that? Well, the regular visas take five-to-ten years. Impressive as the government’s comparative SIV urgency is, if you’re in Jalalabad and your application isn’t already in the mail, you’ll find it quicker to bicycle over the Khyber, take a rusting steam packet from Karachi to Mexico and use the Rio Grande express check-in.

Which is what will happen. The implosion in Afghanistan and the dissolution of America’s southern border will converge, and thousands of excitable young Mohammedans will wind up in the Lower Forty-Eight – while the few actual loyal Afghan support staff get stuck back in Kabul to be beheaded on jihadist snuff videos.

Why cannot the great flabby leviathan rouse itself? Why do French paratroopers have the “capability” and not their more lavishly funded Yank counterparts? Why can the Greeks build a border wall in a month but in America a winning presidential candidate can merely campaign on it for a year and a half and then get screwed over by his own corrupt donor-beholden party leaders?

That’s just the nature of flabby leviathans, once they’ve disavowed all the things that made them great. Lots more, of which you’ll want to read the all.

Tell ’em NO

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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.



Hidin’ Biden: “I have seen no question of our credibility from our allies around the world”

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I’m sure that’s perfectly true, actually. He sees only what his handlers allow him to, understands very little of it, and immediately forgets the whole thing the moment somebody hands him another ice cream cone.

Biden says he’s seen no ‘questioning’ of Afghan policy by allies – despite angry scenes in UK parliament
But despite Mr Biden’s words, plenty of European politicians have objected.

In the UK, former prime minister Theresa May was among dozens who criticised Mr Biden’s decision to follow through with former president Donald Trump’s exit plan from Afghanistan.

Similarly, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, himself a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, told The Independent earlier this week: “Blame shifting in the face of the predicted disaster that is Afghanistan today is extraordinary.”

Following Mr Biden’s speech on the situation in Afghanistan on Monday, British Conservative MP Simon Clarke posted on social media: “The more you reflect, the more you realise the speech POTUS gave last night was grotesque.

“An utter repudiation of the America so many of us have admired so deeply all our lives – the champion of liberty and democracy and the guardian of what’s right in the world.”

Not quite. In truth, it’s the repudiation of Amerika v2.0—the misbegotten, dysfunctional obscenity that replaced the America you’re talking about. And that phony “America” is deserving of all the repudiation that can be heaped upon it, and of a lot of other things besides.

And with that, the time has come for me to write something I never, ever expected to.

I understand that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division has told the commander of the British special forces at the Kabul airport to cease operations beyond the airport perimeter.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue has told his British Army counterpart, a high-ranking field-grade officer of the British army’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, that British operations were embarrassing the United States military in the absence of similar U.S. military operations. I understand that the British officer firmly rejected the request.

Emphasis mine, and nothing short of stunning, at least to me. With all the fissures, fractures, and structural weakness now being laid bare by the stresses this past week has subjected Amerika v2.0’s jerry-rigged foundation to, British soldiers are displaying some of the good old Limey mettle that saw them through the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz so long ago—the grit and balls-out courage that made Britain truly Great, that inspired the awe and admiration of the once-free world, but that afterwards appeared to have been forever lost. Good on ya, chaps, and may God bless you all.

The headline of that last piece says something very different about our own military “leadership,” alas:

US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you’re making us look bad

Umm, no sir (spelled with a “c” and a “u,” mind), not exactly. From what I can tell, you accomplished that mission quite thoroughly on your own, with no assistance necessary from those stout SAS and 2nd Para squaddies. Further deets:

According to some reports, conflict is developing between US forces, who seem to be content to let potential evacuees make their own way through Taliban checkpoints to the airport (we are literally referring them to a web form Up to 10,000 Americans Remain Trapped in Afghanistan as We Face a Second Iran Hostage Crisis) and the British forces who are going out to bring in evacuees. This is from a freelancer inside Kabul Airport.

There are also unconfirmed reports that 2 Para has exchanged shots with the Taliban on some patrols.

Some thoughts on all of this.

The tweets from the freelancer mesh with the frustration expressed by the British commander on the scene. I don’t know anything about the journalist’s background, but bashing the American Army and puffing the British Army up as superheroes is an accepted journalism genre in Britain; keep that in mind. [I have some personal experience with 2 Para; they were the partnership battalion with my battalion in Berlin. The troops are tough…I might even say sort of thuggish. One of my friends was chatting up a German girl outside the Irish Harp in Charlottenburg. The last thing he heard before getting his ass kicked was, “F***, it’s a Yank!” He knew it was 2 Para because the people stomping him wore jump boots with their civvies.] There is no doubt that they are aggressive, and if their vision of evacuation is pulling people in while ours is waiting for them to walk through Taliban checkpoints, I have no doubt that there have been several frank and open exchanges of views. The cascading tragedy at Kabul probably hasn’t helped the working relationship, either. As with any terrific story, there are caveats. The actual veracity of the report of conflict between British paras and American airborne is being challenged.

I’ve seen and heard reports that, far from being “content to let potential evacuees make their own way…to the airport,” there is widespread and increasing anger in the US rank-and-file over having been told to sit on their hands whilst the Brits—even the French, for chrissakes—are going out and getting the job done.

Another interesting item I saw the other day said that British troops at Karzai airport charged with checking the IDs of British and Irish civvies before allowing them inside their perimeter were summarily denying entry to all Afghan nationals, regardless of any claimed status as employees, translators, and etc. In fact, the story said that the Brits were turning them down flat without even bothering to check any paperwork the Afghanis had with them at all, grounds for that being that UK subjects had first claim on the limited airlift capacity available to evacuate them.

Which seems to me to be the correct way to handle this mess. If these stories are accurate, which I hope they are, then the British military has its priorities squarely in order here, in a way that Americans can only envy. Then again, if our military and political “leadership” had their priorities similarly aligned—putting the interests of their country and its people first and foremost, as they should be—it’s doubtful any of this would be happening in the first damned place.

In any event, if the Brits are angry about all this, well, they’re right to be. ALL of us ought to be, and ought to keep that anger well-stoked, too. For my part, I intend to go right on hammering away at this story indefinitely; right now, my big fear is that the Biden Bugout will be encouraged to slink quietly out of the national Zeitgest and then fade away, just as the Benghazi blunder has done. Don’t kid yourself that it couldn’t happen, either. It most certainly could, and a lot faster than you might believe. It cannot, MUST not, be allowed to happen this time. The blaze of anger and disgust sparked in so broad and varied a portion of the population must instead be not just maintained, but intensified.

A culture of faith and force

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When it clashes—as it inevitably must—with a culture bereft of either and wildly, reflexively averse to both, guess who comes out the winner every time?

Here’s a story about CENTCOM Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie meeting with the heads of the bloody subhumans comprising Taliban, at Doha, in order to beg permission to scuttle out of Kabul without, at best, his people getting their asses chewed off by AAA-fire before the landing gear is in the wells.

That’s where that all is, now.

The second video clip on the page is among the most harrowing that I’ve seen in the whole catastrophe, so far. I can see everything implicit in a scene of illiterate Southwest Asian peasants running alongside and climbing, where they can, onto a C-117 heavy-lift jet airplane, cheering it along a taxiway like some uncanny burden-beast in an appearance in the village festival parade.

We’re talking about the pre-scientific mind. Their leaders have for generations suppressed and overthrown every approach to modern life, all of which is born and borne in the West. Everything they have that’s modern, came from the minds and work of people the like of which they have never raised.

Now, they have fallen to the ravages of this murderously anti-human scourge, the Taliban, among whose stated intents is to bring the whole world under their blade. It’s awful to see anyone driven to such abject mortal terror. Among the recurring attractions of my eye in watching various Kabul videos is the children, almost always holding tightly to an adult hand, illustrating the last shred of trust that someone is going to do something to make everyone stop running and screaming.

This is a very old culture of faith and force, virtually untouched by the attributes of reason which are an essential characteristic of the Western mind, except in various expedient mimicries: they can machine an AK-47 right there in front of their hut, but they’re not interested to work-up what it takes to invent something like that and everything that goes into genuine industry of anything on a national scale.

Their sketch of “government” is Victorian, at best, foggily-lensed as a sort-of cargo-cult apprehension of form and baksheesh in practice — at worst, it’s plainly medieval and it’s about to get medievaler.

For now, the world is just going to have to suffer this one. This; on top of twenty years of America doing its own suffering at just living with a constant state of war so sublime that it takes something like the past forty-eight hours of Afghanistan for even CENTCOM to finally take it seriously as it really is. The imaginable horrors awaiting that place harrow up the soul.

Just imagine the horrors awaiting US, once we’ve upped the importation of these primordials to, say, Merkelian standards.

It’s Billy Beck talking, so you know what you must do, Glasshoppa.

It could NEVER happen here

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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.

    The enemy among us

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    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.

    Post-mort

    Posted on      by     

    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.

    “We are led by buffoons”

    Posted on      by     

    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.

    “America’s Elites are trash”

    Posted on      by     

    NAILED. IT.

    Former US intelligence colleagues are angry and deeply worried at what has happened in Afghanistan. Here’s what I’m hearing, and why there’s nearly universal belief that America and the world are in for one of the most dangerous, unpredictable times in modern history.

    Afghanistan has shown the world — enemies & allies alike — that our military & intel assets are largely irrelevant because we can’t deploy them successfully. The blame lays at the feet of multiple Presidents. The Generals. The Spies. The Congress.

    America’s Elites are trash. China knows it. They will become emboldened, covertly & overtly. War over Taiwan and contested islands in the S. China Sea and E. China Sea is now more likely. Russia will consider similar covert & overt moves, focused on Crimea, & former Soviet satellites. The fear is that China & Russia will act in concert.

    Why? America was whipped by a tiny rebel force and couldn’t even retreat properly. Meanwhile, the American people are angry, COVID weary, & divided. If there were ever a time to push American hegemony aside, this is it. If Cold War III grows hot, America will need to quickly build up & work with foreign counterparts. But who will trust America after Afghanistan? Who believes we have the leadership to use our military might well? Who will trust us when we say “We Will Stand With You”?

    Nobody with half a lick of sense, on every one of those questions. Including me.

    Beyond China/Russia, others will take gambles too. Terror orgs like al-Qa’ida & ISIS are degraded but not dead. Their ideology is very much alive. Iran’s Hizballah — with terror cells throughout the US — may see an opening to create chaos too.

    Meanwhile, the disaster inside Afghanistan is only just beginning. The Taliban will launch a terror campaign against American collaborators. The pictures will shock the conscience of the world, further degrading American moral authority. Biden & Co will struggle to respond.

    There’s also the nightmare of tactical weaponry now awash in Afghanistan, in the hands of the Taliban and — soon — on the global black market. These arms will fuel chaos around the world for decades. The Pentagon has no idea where this stuff is and no plans to destroy it.

    Finally, if Afghani refugees pour into the US, there are profound implications for security, culture, the economy, & politics. Are they properly vetted? Do they hold Western/tolerant values re: women, gays? Do they bring skills/education? Which party will they support?

    More questions for which sentient beings already have the answers: no, RUFKM, HELL no, and three guesses, DUH. Expect to see much more splodeydopery, head-choppery, and sidewalk-murder-trucks driven into crowds up close and personal-like all across the too-feckless-to-bother-saving-itself Woke West, as the victorious Taliban expands its power and reach to put all those new war-toys abandoned by the fleeing Uncle Sam to best use.

    The existential problem is that America needs good leadership to right its ship but there is none. Our federal bench is weak. Biden is a corrupt old man. Impeachment is a long shot; VP Harris is an unpopular paperweight. The Legislature is a feckless cabal of empty suits. Leadership could come from a state Governor, it’s true, but not soon enough. The above threats by China, Russia, & Co will metastasize well before the 2024 elections, and even a heroic new President will need years to clean things up.

    Hate to be the one to hip ya, buddy, but the problem is even more existential than you may realize. NO President—however heroic, over whatever span of time he’s given—can or will clean this up. The mess is simply too big, the rot too deep, the national fabric too tattered and torn. This Augean stable is beyond hope of restoration; even the mighty Hercules himself would only throw up his hands in despair and just walk away from the job, shaking his head and muttering under his breath about what a total dick that damned King Eurystheus was for assigning it to him in the first place. Which, as it turned out in the end, he really was a dick. Anyhoo.

    Again, our enemies and allies know this. Upshot: There is fear and outrage streaming through former intel officers over the Afghanistan debacle. America is rudderless. And the world now knows it. Grave dangers lie ahead, some predictable, others unimaginable.

    ‘Fraid so. The closing plea to “vote for change” is risible and pathetic, of course, in enforced accord with Beck’s First Law of TINVOWOOT™. But the rest is pretty much spot on, I’d say. Makes one wonder, since Wright is identified as a “former CIA ops officer,” whether there might not actually be a few white hats in the US spook community after all. Or might have been in the past, shall we say.

    The weakness of Wokeness

    Posted on      by     

    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.

    Living in interesting times

    Posted on      by     

    Could there possibly be a more perfect day to run something from a fellow blog-site yclept Clusterfuck Nation?

    I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere). The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse — which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years?

    Well, we’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise — e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.” The USA is running on fumes economically as the Soviets were. Our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy. Is it our turn to collapse?

    Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of signal weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well? I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken!

    Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a truncheon to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers — that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.

    Since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen? I have friends and relatives — I’m sure you do, too — who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda — and today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work?

    I doubt it. And the fall of Afghanistan is sure to spark a resentful reaction among the many ex-soldiers who paid a heavy price pulling tours of duty in that hapless venture over twenty years. There’s a lot of them out there in Red America, and they were already pissed-off about the pernicious nonsense being jammed down their throats by the minions of Wokesterism: the race-and-gender hustles, the off-the-charts rise of violent crime, the wide-open border, the off-shoring of jobs, the Covid lockdowns and wrecking of small business, the MMT experiment launching inflation, and the new pussification of the armed forces they served and suffered in. They’ve laid rather low through years of this, just watching the scene in wonder and nausea, but you may see them turn more active now. And consider: they’ve been well-trained in weaponry and tactics.

    Sometimes, Vlad Lenin observed, events take decades, and sometimes years happen in weeks. This looks like one of those times for the USA. Heads will soon be spinning like the little girl’s in The Exorcist, releasing a pea-soup spewage of shocking revelation. The old narratives will fall apart before our eyes. Minds will have to get right. Prepare for a whole lot of strange days rolling out.

    Kinda like the well-known Hemingway line about going broke: Gradually at first, then all at once. Yes, I know that’s actually a misquote. But I like that version better, so I’m sticking with it.

    Gun grabbers are the same the world over

    Posted on      by     

    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.

    Kabul falls, hilarity ensues, Trump blamed

    Posted on      by     

    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…

    Fecal Fascist Fauci drops another pantload

    Posted on      by     

    Astoundingly, Herr Doktor doubles down.

    Fauci: ‘Put Aside All of These Issues of Concern About Liberties’
    “You have to get the overwhelming proportion of people vaccinated, but you also have to do mitigation, and that gets to the controversial issue of mask wearing, and the mandating of things. Mandating vaccines, for example, for teachers and…personnel in the school,” Fauci said during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

    Fauci went on to say that, while vaccinated individuals have become infected with the coronavirus, the unvaccinated are the ones with more severe cases. He also took the stance that personal liberties should be put on the back burner in favor of mitigating the spread of the virus.

    “It’s the unvaccinated that are doing that, so we have a lot of tasks,” Fauci said. “We’ve got to do mitigation. Put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal liberties and realize we have a common enemy and that common enemy is the virus. And we really have to go together to get on top of this. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to suffer as we’re seeing right now.”

    Oh, there’s a common enemy here right enough, although it assuredly is NOT some overhyped virus. The real problem here is, it’s Real Americans who have been doing all the suffering to date. Herr Doktor shouldn’t be cherishing any illusions, though, that that situation can’t be corrected, with a quickness. Or that, just because it hasn’t yet, it never will be.

    “Put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties,” you say? I’d suggest instead, with utmost urgency and vehemence, that you rethink your own patent lack of concern about them, you officious, mouthy, snot-nosed little prick. Trust me, it would be to your own benefit. A little more in the way of humility and reticence would do you one hell of a lot of good at this point, and your goobermint colleagues as well, assuming it ain’t too late for y’all to collectively pull your withered chestnuts out of the coming conflagration already.

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