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Afghan chaos undercuts Biden's promise of competence


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2021 Aug 18, 2:48pm   161,528 views  1,308 comments

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

...

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



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

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1104   Patrick   2024 Feb 19, 2:05pm  

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


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

Gearing up? I’m sure. If gearing up means calling a lid on your life an hour after breakfast. And what do you suppose they mean by “a more traditional form of leadership.” Arranging serial overseas military humiliations? Selling favors to all comers from foreign lands? Inviting transsexuals to cavort on the White House lawn? Abolishing control of US borders? Running a $2-trillion annual deficit? Mandating unsafe and ineffective so-called “vaccine” shots on millions? Cancelling the First Amendment? Stealing elections? Conspiring to jail his political adversaries?
1112   Patrick   2024 Feb 27, 9:39am  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/greedflation-tuesday-february-27


On Friday, Politico reported that Team Biden is strongly considering making snack-food shrinkflation — “fewer chips in the bag,” as Joe said — the magnificent centerpiece of Joe Biden’s belated State of The Union speech on March 7th. I realize that idea sounds more like an SNL sketch than a real plan. It’s literally unbelievable that the leader of the free world would target smaller processed food packages as America’s primary problem.

On the other hand, maybe they haven’t told Joe yet about the border, Ukraine, the Middle East, or Taiwan? I could understand not telling him; it’s a lot for someone in Joe’s condition to handle.

Politico’s article seemed like a trial balloon designed to test-market the shrinkflation concept and debut two new Biden Administration catch phrases, a new, made-up buzzword, “greed-flation” (I am not making that up) and the old standby, “price gouging.”

Greedflation combines two bad things: greed and inflation. It’s a twofer! It is tempting to believe Joe came up with that himself, or maybe during a chat with John Fetterman, because if that’s the caliber of thinking of the people managing Joe, then we are in serious trouble.

Now imagine what Saturday Night Live could do with this kind of material — if they were allowed. Sadly, you just can’t get that kind of entertainment in the United States anymore; we’ll have to wait for the next Republican president. But fortunately, you don’t have to wait, an Italian comedy show released its new skit mocking Joe Biden yesterday. It might even be better than SNL.




https://twitter.com/RadioGenoa/status/1762369822149488711

And if you are still hungry, like there were too few cheese-its in the can, here is another recent Biden skit by the same outfit, which is even more brutal than the first one (2:28).

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1761552726570188957

Enjoy! I’ve heard that laughter is the best medicine when suffering from greedflation. It seemed appropriate that the humor should come at Biden’s expense.
1113   HeadSet   2024 Feb 27, 10:48am  

I notice the Biden skit above has the actor with a blatant latex mask for the top of the head. I wonder if that is a prop artifact or an intentional part of the skit.
1116   HeadSet   2024 Mar 4, 6:46am  

Dems Begin To Panic As Biden Not Dead Yet

A temporary condition.
1117   Patrick   2024 Mar 4, 1:22pm  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-abolition-of-woke-monday-march


Looking and sounding just like the Energizer Bunny running down on those unreliable generic batteries, Mumbly Joe laboriously and monotonously updated reporters this weekend about his cunning plan to airdrop humanitarian supplies into Gaza, except — painfully — he told them he ordered air drops into Ukraine — twice! — even though he was reading from pre-prepared notes in his lap.




As much as Joe wants to dump pallets of cash out of helicopters in Eastern Europe, airdrops in Ukraine would be an especially bad idea right now, since the Russians have near-total control of its skies. Not only that, but the Ukrainians have demonstrated a keen ability to more nimbly shoot down their own aircraft even more accurately than Russian planes.

I wouldn’t suggest it. Joe should stick with dropping things on Gaza.

He has to make it eight more months. But it looks like the courageous final five functioning neurons in Joe Biden’s brain, worn and thin and desperately clinging to life, may be finally giving up the ghost, packing it in, and closing up shop. You can’t blame them. I really, really hope they’ve taken the nuclear football away from Joe. At this rate, instead of nuking Moscow, Russia, he’d probably accidentally nuke Moscow, Pennsylvania.
1119   Misc   2024 Mar 5, 1:08pm  

HeadSet says

Dems Begin To Panic As Biden Not Dead Yet

A temporary condition.


What ???? He got better ???
1120   Misc   2024 Mar 5, 1:09pm  

I'm gonna watch that Shit Show they call the State of the Union Address on Thursday.

I think it is showing on some comedy channel.
1123   Patrick   2024 Mar 8, 12:10pm  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/yelling-friday-march-8-2024-c-and


Last night, Joe Biden yelled at Congress for an hour straight. In a sort of furious, manic reverie, Joe Biden ‘delivered’ his divisive, angry, overcooked State of the Union speech on fast mode. It wasn’t so much a coherent speech, per se, as it was a long litany of loud one-liners. Joe was outraged about everything. Especially Trump. He shouted every single sentence in all-caps at the top of his lungs in his scratchy old-man voice, and then speared it to death with a double exclamation point. Every line sounded like a made-for-media punchline to a bad, overly elaborate, political inside joke.

Distractingly, Biden often stressed the wrong parts of his sentences and slightly slurred his words, eliding each syllable like an annoyed chronic drunk weaving a super complicated story explaining how that open bottle of vodka got there to the cop who pulled him over. One wonders whether Biden’s slurring, missed syllables, and other uncharacteristic speech issues could have been side effects from the powerful cocktail of downers offsetting the twenty Adderall Biden obviously gobbled up right before the speech.

Overall, Joe reminded viewers of an overly caffeinated wind-up monkey, feverishly clanging its cymbals over and over so fast and hard it falls over and then keeps flipping around and falling off the table, banging its furry arms together the whole time.




... Surprisingly, CNN ran a pretty fair fact check, which found most everything Biden said to be either an outright lie, a lie by omission, or misleading.

Vexed Republicans often booed Biden. Marjorie Taylor Greene, no wallflower, heckled Biden throughout, while Mike Johnson sat behind Joe, shaking his head and looking especially sour whenever Joe fired off a particularly mendacious rhetorical cannonade. But afterwards, the social media battlefield was oddly muted; Joe doesn’t seem to have said anything particularly memorable apart from simply surviving what must have been a painful, demanding and expensive physical effort.
1124   Patrick   2024 Mar 8, 2:09pm  

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/the-fate-of-the-union


Let’s face it: as pure theater, the president’s annual address to Congress has become a disconcertingly shabby affair, bursts of gloatish barking wedged into an hour of nearly continuous hand-clapping, as if drowning public utterances in applause might divert the audience from the empty, vicious bluster “Joe Biden” served up Thursday night. You couldn’t help but be reminded of the old Supreme Soviet in the twilight hours of Konstantin Chernenko, whose country’s renowned mortuary experts managed to embalm a year or so before his actual decease and interment.

The Ruskies back in the day had a secret recipe for premature mummification of their leadership; our pharma-driven experts prefer to mummify not the body but the personality with a cocktail of adderal, clonazepam, and prednisone — the latter responsible for the ‘roid rage on view whenever “Joe Biden” is hauled out of his catacomb for public performances.

The Kid from Scranton’s most memorably mendacious line got front-loaded, so as not to be lost on the watching millions already nauseated by “JB’s” pre-speech triumphal journey from the entrance down the aisle through the mob of his elected admirers clamoring for selfies:

“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” the president squawked.

True dat. The part he left out was that said assault emanates entirely from the very government he pretends to head. It’s reported (in The Epoch Times today) that since the start of this year the FBI has rounded up 93 new suspects in the event of 1-6-21 touted as “the insurrection” — most of the years-old charges related to trespassing, disorderly conduct, and parading, conduct now regarded as nation-threatening. He also left out the prodigious three-year-long campaign of his inter-agency flunkies to abolish the First Amendment by capturing all the transmitters of free speech. And never mind the regime’s banana republic style lawfare op to jail “JB’s” chief political opponent on spurious charges before the November election — rank, in-your-face election interference.

Also up front in the show: the regime’s lust to start World War Three by asserting falsely that Russia intends to invade and overrun Europe at any moment, in order to continue justifying our insane proxy war in Ukraine, now on its last legs. Putin Putin Putin is “sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” the president barked to hearty applause, as if anyone in the chamber really believes it. The truth is that our country, now effectively the Intel States of America, has sown all that chaos.

The feckless Ukraine project has failed. The end of the Zelensky fake-out is near. The CIA announced it in last week’s Sunday New York Times, and all that’s left to do is cover-up the Biden family’s private racketeering activities in that notorious money-laundry and then somehow escape the massive national humiliation that will ensue when this fiasco is concluded, finalizing America’s loss-of-standing in the world. It’s all on “Joe Biden” and everybody knows it.

Now, the catch to the adoring hoo-rah ginned up on the left side of the chamber last night is that all the wildly applauding ninnies are plotting desperately to find some way to ditch “Joe Biden” before the party’s August convention, to avoid the embarrassment of having to toss him overboard at the last minute in a smoke-filled back room there — which would be an admission that his entire reelection campaign has been a ruse all along.

As of this week, they’ve lost on the simple expedient to get Mr. Trump erased from blue state ballots. The biggest court actions against Mr. Trump are collapsing spectacularly. Fulton County DA Fani Willis has so wrecked herself that she’ll certainly be dropped from the case, could be kicked out of her job altogether, and stands to lose her law license for committing crimes ranging from perjury to conspiracy with White House lawyers to interfere with the coming election — and then lying about it under oath. The case itself is now so tainted with prosecutorial misconduct that any sane jurist would dismiss it on summary judgement

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s main case (the “insurrection” rap) is getting batted around in the sure-thang DC federal district court, and could be defenestrated altogether by the Supreme Court any day now. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the so-called Mar-a-Lago document case will get tossed by Judge Aileen Cannon on the grounds of gross procedural misconduct as “discovery” reveals that the FBI raid was a dishonest pursuit of documents other than the ones logged on Jack Smith’s warrant — namely, Mr. Trump’s archive of RussiaGate crimes committed by the very DOJ that is going mad dog on him, an obvious gross embarrassment for them.

It remains to be seen what other sort of election interference mischief can be cooked up by the Party of Chaos. We know that Rep. Jamie Raskin is grandstanding to concoct a bill to kick Mr. Trump off the ballot by an act of Congress. It’s already fulfilled its purpose of getting Jamie’s puss on MSNBC to impress the home folks in his Maryland district. Short of the CIA or some other clandestine outfit from the fathomless depths of the Intel Community gunning down Mr. Trump outright, the party’s best bet probably is to bring on the chaos needed for martial law and cancellation of the election by activating sleeper cells of the jihadists, “military-age men,” Maoist agents, and mental patients they’ve illegally ushered across the border to join with Antifa and BLM in an extravaganza of street violence as warm weather sets the stage for rioting and mayhem.

All of that could easily be mooted by what looks like a dollar and bond market crisis shaping up on the financial scene in the spring days ahead. Why do you think Bitcoin and gold have made record leaps in recent weeks? I’ll tell you why: because a bunch of really rich people are fleeing desperately out of the dollar and things denominated in it for safe harbors as a financial ill-wind blows in from offshore. Alas, the BRICs are about to dethrone the world’s reserve currency. The value of our dollars could sink thirty percent or more overnight. The “unthinkable” approaches. So, maybe you better start thinking about it.
1126   Patrick   2024 Mar 8, 8:15pm  

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/national-international/who-was-the-heckler-escorted-from-bidens-state-of-the-union-address/3253522/


Who was the heckler escorted from Biden's State of the Union address?

Republican Rep. Brian Mast, who also served in Army in Afghanistan, invited Nikoui to the SOTU as his guest.

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech was interrupted by a heckler Thursday night to criticize the administration's controversial withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Steve Nikoui, the father of a U.S. Marine who was killed during a 2021 airport bombing in Kabul, was escorted out of the SOTU after screaming "Abbey Gate!" across the House chambers.

Nikoui's son, Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, and 12 other U.S. service members were killed during the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate airport that also killed 170 Afghan civilians. ...

"For the last three SOTU speeches, Joe Biden REFUSED to say the names of the 13 U.S. servicemembers who were killed by his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal," Mast posted on social media after Nikoui's SOTU outburst.
1137   Patrick   2024 Mar 27, 8:46pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/tucker-talks-to-gold-star-father


Tucker just posted this video to X.

Ep. 85 Steve Nikoui is a carpenter from California whose son was killed during Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan. Joe Biden won’t say his name, so at the State of the Union speech, Steve Nikoui did. He was immediately arrested for it.


Very emotional.

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