Things over the last week have veered wildly between comedy and tragedy. Like everyone else, I’m heartsick at the news coming from Afghanistan. The thought of all of the people who sided with us and resisted the Taliban being abandoned to savage reprisals is bitter indeed. And the terrible impact of emboldened terrorists and a weakened US will be felt for years to come.
There are legitimate points to argue about our 20 years in Afghanistan. On the one hand, I’m glad that we’re the kind of optimistic and idealistic country that tries to help people in countries where they’ve been oppressed and victimized. I think it was a noble effort to try to protect Afghani girls from torture and sex slavery, and to try to offer Afghans a chance to chart a new path.
On the other hand, it’s very easy to slide past optimism and into utopian naivete, and in this case, that mistake has cost us a great deal of blood and treasure. And the mistakes were bipartisan. W was right to pursue the Taliban, and our military did a great job of killing and capturing their top leadership, and driving them from power. But W’s good intentions got us into nation building where there wasn’t the raw material to build on.
Obama was typically feckless there, too. As the war in Iraq lost popularity, he and the Dems championed Afghanistan as the truly justified war, and the one that we should have been focused on. Whether that was his genuine thought, or a dishonest but convenient cudgel to attack the GOP with, it’s hard to tell. (I think the smart money is on the latter.) He also traded Taliban commanders for a creepy deserter, apologized to Islamic countries who were terror-adjacent at best, and generally made us look like the weak horse in a world wherein only strength is respected.
Trump channeled the zeitgeist accurately, and planned to get out, though he didn’t get that done in his term. His willingness to at least try to negotiate with the Taliban can be reasonably criticized, and if we had been spared the Biden presidency, he would have faced a by no means easy task of finding a smooth, minimally damaging way out.
But can anybody honestly think he would have botched it as badly as Biden has? And that’s not a compliment to Trump so much as a statement of awe in the face of the metaphysically horrific Biden presidency.
That doddering mother-friender has an unerring instinct for friending up every decision he makes! It’s incredible. Just a few weeks ago he was asked if our leaving Afghanistan would be like Saigon, and he scoffed at the very idea. With his trademark unjustified certainty, he said, “There’s going to be no circumstance for you to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
And of course he was right. Because the people desperately trying and dying to get out of Afghanistan were falling from airplanes, not helicopters. So it’s totally different.
To make matters somehow even worse, Biden spent the crucial 48 hours at Camp David, where he watched a Matlock marathon while the disaster unfolded.. When even his dimmest supporters recognized that he had to come out and say something, he gave maybe the worst speech of his life. And that’s saying something, considering he had to end two previous campaigns after two different plagiarized speeches.
Consider the way Biden opened the speech: “My national security team and I have been closely monitoring the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, and moving quickly to execute the plans we had put in place to respond to every constituency – and contingency – including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now.”
Has there ever been more dishonesty crammed into one sentence? His team may have been closely monitoring the situation, but only in the open-mouthed, horrified way that anybody with a tv was. After that: all lies.
They weren’t moving quickly. They weren’t executing any plans. They didn’t have any plans in place to deal with either a constituency or a contingency like what was happening.
And no one is going to believe that he planned for a rapid collapse, because in the last month he and his mouthpieces repeatedly and explicitly denied that there would BE any rapid collapse. “This will not be Saigon,” says ‘Baghdad Bob’ Biden.
At this point, the best thing that Biden and the Dems have going for them – besides a dishonest, sycophantic media – is that they are screwing so many things up that each new scandal knocks the previous ones out of even peripheral news coverage.
Remember a week ago, when the fall of Grandma Killer Cuomo was the biggest story of the year? That should have tainted the media and Biden for pretending that Cuomo was anything other than the bullying liar that he transparently is. It should also blunt their attack on DeSantis or any other GOP governor, after the way they beclowned themselves over Cuomo.
There are long video montages of the love affair the MSM had with Cuomo. They were “Cuomo-sexuals” and he was – hold onto your gag reflex — the “Love Guv.” Not the “Grope Gov” or the “Gross Gov” – both of which have the benefit of truth, and alliteration. He wrote a book on how well he handled covid – you can’t make this up! – and the Hollywood idiots gave him an Emmy for his performance.
An Emmy! Can you imagine a less deserved award than that?!
Oh yeah: Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was nominated when he’d been in office for 11 days. (That’s not an exaggeration for comic effect. 11 days!) And murderous Yassir Arafat got a Peace Prize, too. And commie fraud Rigoberta Menchu got a Nobel for Literature for a book she didn’t write, and that wasn’t true.
Points taken. But the Emmy for Cuomo was still a bad joke.
And he wasn’t dumped because he killed thousands of seniors by his heartless, authoritarian edict that forced covid patients into nursing homes, or for faking the numbers to show less nursing home deaths than there were. He also wasn’t really dumped for groping women. Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton groped their way – and worse! — through sorority houses and intern pools for years, and Joey Gaffes himself has been accused of digitally raping a supporter, and there hasn’t even been an investigation.
Cuomo is gone because he no longer had any value to the Dems, and because he had been such a jerk to so many Dems that he had no supporters when the chips were down.
What does it say about the left that their two biggest crushes in the last 5 years are Michael Avenatti and Andrew Cuomo?
Remember when – post-Cuomo and pre-Kabul – the president’s degenerate, addicted, brother’s widow-jumping son was revealed to have lost yet another laptop filled with blackmail material, this time probably to the Russians?
How do we know this? Because he video- and audiotaped a conversation between himself and a hooker during which he confessed all of this!
Let’s review the Top 5 Rules for Sex Scandal Behavior:
1. Don’t leave the girl to drown afterward.
2. Don’t mess up the girl’s dress, especially when it’s dark blue, which shows stains easily.
3. Don’t email genital pics to teens, especially when your last name is Weiner.
4. Don’t spend taxpayer dollars on strip club lamb chops.
And the new leader in the clubhouse:
5. Don’t record yourself telling a hooker that your earlier drug-fueled hooker-centric behavior is on a laptop that the Russians can now blackmail you with!
Ooh, I just thought of another one, and it’s probably the most important one: Don’t do any of the above if you’re a conservative.
Because THEN there will be consequences.
More than ever, it’s been a long 4 years, and it’s only been 27 weeks.
Martin Simpson 