RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-rush-to-the-afghan-exits-taliban-kabul-august-31-11629842701?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Some readers were upset by our editorial last week: “Biden to Afghanistan: Drop Dead.” But that headline looks more sadly accurate than ever after President Biden’s decision Tuesday to stick to his arbitrary Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Unless you’re Nancy Pelosi or a media partisan, there’s no sugarcoating what this means. Mr. Biden is bowing to Taliban demands, reiterated on Tuesday, not to extend the deadline. He is rejecting the advice of such G-7 leaders as Britain’s Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron of France to stay longer to get more people out of the country safely. And he is abandoning thousands of Afghans who fought with the U.S. and NATO to the Taliban’s brand of retribution.

***

There was an alternative. Mr. Biden could have sent in enough military force to provide safe zones and retrieve stranded Americans and Afghan allies. He could have done so with a NATO coalition of the willing. The U.S. Army has 31 active duty combat brigades of several thousand soldiers each.

He could have told the Taliban that the U.S. is not negotiating over the deadline and that U.S. forces will remain for as long as it takes to complete the mission of rescuing our people. This would have salvaged some honor and credibility from the botched withdrawal.

Instead Mr. Biden has negotiated with the Taliban from a position of weakness. He has sent too few troops to protect the Kabul airport and retrieve our allies. He sent his CIA director to negotiate with the Taliban, who adopted Mr. Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline as their own and rejected William Burns’s entreaties.

On Tuesday the Taliban escalated by barring Afghans from even going to the airport. “We are not in favor of allowing Afghans to leave,” said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. Yet in his remarks Tuesday at the White House, Mr. Biden raised no objection to this command that could strand thousands of Afghan allies.

The White House and Pentagon say they don’t even know how many Americans are still in Afghanistan. As for the Afghans, James Miervaldis of the nonprofit No One Left Behind tells us via email that “we’ve got a list of 1,200 families (approx 6,000 people) who have their visas in hand. Really curious how the President is going to get them inside the airport and fly out before 8/31.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/25/americans-await-evacuation-as-biden-takes-a-knee-to-taliban/

When President Joe Biden met with this year’s WNBA champions Seattle Storm in the White House on Monday, he took a symbolic knee, apparently to show he’s Woke. No surprise. He just took a knee before the Taliban, too, after the terrorist group’s humiliating rejection of his request for an “extension” on his Aug. 31 deadline for evacuating Afghanistan.

Biden’s plans, if you can call them that, to get Americans out of Afghanistan have been an epic disaster. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the incompetence and duplicity of Biden and his administration.

Biden rejected extending the deadline, citing the “increased risk” of terrorism as a reason for doing so. The fact is, he really had no choice, after the Taliban rejected the U.S. plea, calling the Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawal a “red line.” The U.S. president did what the Taliban told him to do.

That rejection, by the way, came after Biden sent CIA Director William Burns to Kabul for emergency talks with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar sent Burns packing with nothing for his efforts, another humiliation.

“If the U.S. or U.K. were to seek additional time to continue evacuations, the answer is no,” said Taliban official Suhail Shaheen. “Or there would be consequences.”

Adding insult to injury, Biden told our allies that the U.S. “won’t be able to get everyone out of Afghanistan,” according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, twisting the knife, the Taliban demanded that the U.S. take only Americans, not Afghans, with them.

Late in the day, facing a barrage of criticism from all quarters, Biden appeared to abruptly change tack, calling for “contingency plans” for lengthening the withdrawal, whatever that means.

It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the incompetence and duplicity of the Biden administration, which in a brief two-week period has managed to alienate and weaken our major allies while emboldening and empowering our foes, in particular Russia, China, Iran and the myriad Islamist terrorist groups across the Mideast and South Asia.

And things are about to get even uglier in Afghanistan, if that’s possible.

The good news is that, as of Monday, the U.S. had already helped evacuate 37,000 people from Afghanistan, according to a leaked ambassadorial communication. The bad news: Only 4,000 Americans were among those evacuated.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/biden-has-shown-us-that-his-promises-are-worthless/

Democrats who continue to hitch their wagon to the president going forward cannot say that they were not warned.

A few weeks from now, Joe Biden will stand before the American people and make his case for adding another $3.5 trillion in spending to the $1.9 trillion the federal government spent in March and the $550 billion more it hopes to spend by the end of the summer. As is now customary, the president’s presentation will be chock-full of performatively dropped g’s, of sigh-laden appeals to the “folks,” of labored, down-home clichés, of emphatically whispered entreaties, of absurd straw men, and — if he encounters even the slightest resistance — of brash assurances that none of the objections that have been raised could possibly come to fruition.

Those of us who have lived through the last two weeks should refuse to be fooled again.

Joe Biden ran for president promising, “I’ll always tell you the truth.” But the debacle in Afghanistan has put an end to all that. In July, Biden broke out his usual “Are you stupid?” mien to insist that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable”; he swore that there was “zero” chance that Americans would “see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan”; and he assured the nation that the Taliban was “not even close in terms of their capacity” to “the training and capacity of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the training of the [Afghan] federal police.” Given what we now know, there are only two possible explanations for why Biden said all of this. The first is that he was lying. The second is that he’s a fool.

https://spectator.org/everything-woke-turns-to-shit/

‘Everything Woke Turns To S**t’

Aside from Ronald Reagan, who was a fountain of witticisms and profound truths in his nearly three decades as a political figure, Donald Trump is probably our most quotable modern president.

But it was something he said on Saturday which might well be the single best distillation of truth Trump has ever offered.

In front of a Cullman, Alabama, rally crowd which might have numbered as many as 50,000 people, Trump drove home something everybody now knows.

“You know what woke means,” he said. “It means you’re a loser. Everything woke turns to s**t. It’s true.”

Yes, Mr. President, it is.

The word “woke” hasn’t been around all that long in mainstream American life. It’s only the last few years since it’s been inflicted on us. Prior to that, we were stuck with political correctness as a term to describe the effort to deny us our freedom of expression or an independent point of view.

But “woke” is worse than PC. PC was navigable essentially by being polite about things. There were topics it demanded avoidance of, but one could survive PC mostly by being nice. And PC wasn’t all that aggressive.

Woke is aggressive. It’s intolerably aggressively terrible. How bad is it?

Who lost Afghanistan? Woke lost Afghanistan.

As this space noted late last week, some utter halfwit thought it was a good idea to fly a rainbow Pride Month flag at the U.S. embassy in Kabul for the whole month of June and then send out a tweet bragging about it.

By the end of that month the Taliban were on the move. They spent July taking over most of the country, particularly the rural and wilderness areas populated by the more traditional Afghans, and then two weeks into August the rest of Afghanistan collapsed.

https://www.city-journal.org/will-policymakers-let-the-covid-crisis-end

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”

I am an admirer of John McWhorter who is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. His articles on race and education are excellent and run against cancel culture and prevalent bias.

Now, he has stopped publishing independently and has been snared by the New York times.

Here his letter to subscribers:

Many of you may know that I have been hired by The New York Times to write essays for them twice a week, as a subscriber newsletter. Yes, I’m surprised too — but I’m going to do it, and in fact have started.

However, understandably they will not allow me to continue doing this newsletter for Substack at the same time. Thus, with sincere regret — this has been a blast — I have to suspend my newsletter here.

I wish him well….sort of…..rsk

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/23/feds-lower-expectations-for-january-6-probe/

The FBI continues to hunt down Americans even for minor involvement in the breach of the Capitol on January 6. Four Ohio residents were arrested last week and charged with common misdemeanors. It appears the group was inside the building for about 15 minutes and committed no violent crimes.

It’s the latest example of the absurdity of the Capitol breach probe; rather than pursue the handful of violent offenders, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is rounding up alleged trespassers. And it would be laughable if this eight-month manhunt to punish Trump supporters wasn’t destroying lives and tearing families apart in the process.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the insurrection gulag; the overwhelming number of cases consist only of low-level offenses. That is not what Michael Sherwin, the head prosecutor handling the first few months of the Capitol breach probe, promised one week after the protest. “The initial charges we’re filing, these misdemeanors, these are only the beginning,” Sherwin said at a January 12 press conference. “We’re looking at serious felony cases tied to sedition and conspiracy.”

Yet, in spite of Twitter’s best efforts, no one so far has been charged with insurrection or sedition; the best the government can do is file hard-to-prove charges of obstruction of an official proceeding or conspiracy, both felonies.

The Justice Department set expectations extremely high early on. Revenge against Americans who dared to protest the election of Joe Biden would come fast and fierce, the public was assured. Attorney General Merrick Garland promised the investigation into January 6, which he compares to the Oklahoma City bombing, would be his top priority. And when FBI Director Chris Wray designated January 6 an act of “domestic terrorism,” Trump haters smelled blood in the water.

No Evidence of Serious Plans

The Justice Department now seems to be prepping the ground for a major letdown. “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result,” Reuters reported August 20. Nearly all of the cases, four former and current law enforcement officials said, are “one-offs” while roughly five percent are associated with so-called militia groups.

“FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside,” the unnamed sources told Reuters.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17676/who-is-directing-american-policy

Biden was repeatedly told by military brass and intelligence officials that this was going to be the nightmare scenario if he unilaterally pulled American forces out at the end of this month.

How could he do this? For those who follow the grifters, pilot fish, and “consultants” who wallow behind the wake of this administration it should come as no surprise.

“All our efforts in Afghan have be uprooted by a complete disaster of an administration…. you can spin it all you want…. We Afghan/Iraq vets did not lose this…. our government did… our government lost it for us… but while most of America was at the mall, we were all in the mix shedding our time, effort and blood…. What broke me was the video of the mother throwing her newborn to the Marines on the wall…. but this is all squarely on who’s in office now…. even if he doesn’t know it.” — EMT worker on 9/11/2001 and later a US Marine.

That final observation from an individual I am proud to know reveals what many of us wonder. This president is making terribly flawed decisions for which history and the American people will hold him accountable. And if it is not Biden directing American domestic and foreign policy, then who is?

The images of our desperate Afghan allies begging for rescue as their nation falls into the darkness of the Taliban will become permanently etched in the legacy of the Biden Administration. So too will infants being handed by frantic parents into the arms of U.S. Marines, more than 800 people jammed into a departing C-17 cargo plane, and Taliban beating and whipping those seeking access to the Kabul airport.

Yet the Biden administration was repeatedly told by military brass and intelligence officials that this was going to be the nightmare scenario if they unilaterally pulled American forces out at the end of this month. President Joe Biden’s order that created heart-rending havoc ignored all professional advice, insight, and guidance. His Kabul chaos has made the disorderly evacuation of Dunkirk during World War II look like an act of military precision.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/where-are-feminists-jason-d-hill/

Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Bawer’s excellent Frontpage article “Where Are the Gays?” paints a chilling portrait of the imminent torture, execution and amputations that await gay men under Taliban rulership in Afghanistan. And, of course, western gays are silent. Many are too busy hooking up on multiple sex apps. Many have never been concerned with rights that extend beyond the erogenous zones of their genitalia, and several are too busy celebrating the pedophilia presented in the best-selling young adult pornographic novel, Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), as a moral victory over heteronormative patriarchy.

The majority of sex-addicted gay men live in a curated silo where drugs, hook-ups, flaunting open relationships, and chasing youth and beauty supersede condemning the horrific agenda of the Taliban — an agenda that will no doubt transport Afghanistan back to the Dark Ages.

A reader suggested that a better article would be named: “Where Are All The Feminists?” Given the plight of women under the Taliban when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, feminists should be concerned about the repression of the rights of individual women in that country. This concern should extend to the current resurgence of child marriage of young teenage girls to Taliban soldiers.

No, feminists in America will not be criticizing the Taliban, just as neither they nor gays in America have dared criticize the brutal treatment of women and gays under the governance of Hamas in Gaza. Feminists in this country are too consumed with another task: the destruction of the American male, who is seen as the producer of imperialism, “racist capitalism,” and systemic racial and gender oppression. This is their obsession. The destruction of the American male supersedes moral concern for the wanton annihilation of human lives in other countries. They will not speak out against the Taliban because they hate America and American men more than they care about the rights of any individual singled out as a target for discrimination based on membership in a demonized group.  

As we hurtle towards a possible post-American future, this new breed of feminists, a phalanx of zealots, has forged fourth-wave feminism, and it’s far more rabidly anti-male than previous iterations of the ideological movement. You’d think because of its petty maliciousness and deranged radicalism, its appeal would be narrowly limited to the faculty lounges of liberal arts colleges. Yet since the inception of the #MeToo movement, the crazed foot soldiers of fourth-wave feminism managed not only to take their worldview mainstream, but also to put a headlock on the commanding heights of American culture. This is as impressive as it is terrifying.

These new man-haters are seething with toxic feminism, and the further spread of their noxious sentiment could likely spell the death of our country as we know it. Increasingly prevalent is their practice of exploiting female agency and identity to make blanket attacks on men, to neuter manliness, and to advocate for the end of masculinity. These goals are being achieved while simultaneously promulgating the dual concepts that men are by nature nefarious and that female advancement can only come through the wholesale annihilation of heteronormative constructs of maleness. The destructive consequences for relationships at every level of society—from the simple couple to the community to the nation—will be vast and irreparable.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/director_of_the_national_institutes_of_health_grossly_misstates_the_science_on_vaccination_vs_natural_immunity.html

“A sad state of affairs when you can’t trust the data from the top public health official in the United States.”

On the August 12, 2021 Special Report, Bret Baier asked NIH Director Francis Collins: “Can you definitely say to somebody that the vaccine provides better protection than the antibodies you get from actually having had COVID-19?”

Dr Collins replied to Bret and the almost 2 million viewers of Special Report:

“Yes, Bret, I can say that.  There was a study published by CDC just ten days ago in Kentucky, and they looked specifically at people who had had natural infection and people who had been vaccinated and then ended up getting infection again.  So what was the protection level?  It was more than two-fold better for the people who had had the vaccine in terms of protection than people who had had natural infection.  That’s very clear in that Kentucky study.  You know that surprises people.  Kind of surprised me that the vaccine would actually be better than natural infection.  But if you think about it, it kinda makes sense…That’s a settled issue.”