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Afghan chaos undercuts Biden's promise of competence


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2021 Aug 18, 2:48pm   126,197 views  1,176 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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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.
1148   Patrick   2024 Mar 31, 3:24pm  

https://sashastone.substack.com/p/biden-admin-deliberately-provokes


As a former Democrat, it was easy for me to see the strategy. Provoke the Right, get all of the self-important narcissists on social media to harumph and huff and puff, and just like that, you’ve rallied the base. Political viagra for a dying campaign. It’s just so cynical. So cruel.

The reaction is the action. ...

As I’ve said before, the Christians were on the right side of history during slavery and they’re on the right side of history now. Going to war on them, as the Biden administration is doing, just means that the Democrats will own every terrible thing that comes next. All of the lawsuits. All of the documentaries. All of the memoirs. Do not let them slime their way out of it. They had all of the information they needed to protect kids and they refused.

Children growing up in America now have no way out. They are encouraged to head down this path and only the strongest of parents can stop them. Everywhere they look, they see the same messaging, that there is something wrong with being straight or heterosexual or white. Since they can’t un-white themselves, all they can change is their gender. If they change that, suddenly, they are in one of the sacred, protected groups and are celebrated on a day like today. ...

There doesn’t seem to be any way out except to elect Republicans to, at the very least, separate this ideology from government, and from public schools. And again, if this ideology was not directly harming women, girls and boys I would not care. You do you. But that isn’t what’s happening.

Children’s programming, books, and movies are now required to be “inclusive” so that everyone must accept their cult-like mandate that children choose their own genders and that they’ll kill themselves if they aren’t allowed to take puberty blockers and head toward sterilization.

They grow up with this madness being shoved down their throats and very few people who have the courage to stand up and say STEP OFF YOU CULTISH FREAKS. Not on my watch. No, instead we have compliant, mealy-mouthed cowards who are too afraid of being called transphobic and having their careers ruined.

Billboard Chris is out there every single day fighting for kids. And God bless him.

We need an army of Billboard Chris’s. We don’t have them. So we have to vote the Democrats out. It’s not going to be easy. They have all the power and the money. The one thing they don’t have is the truth. As long as their ideology is rooted in fanaticism and delusion, it will eventually collapse.

What they have coming is entirely of their own making. They have made it impossible for reasonable people to be both accepting and protective. They’ve pushed all of us too far. And now, they’ll have to suffer the consequences.

Anyway, Happy Easter.
1150   Patrick   2024 Mar 31, 9:05pm  

https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/pawn-shop-inventories-are-exploding-as-the-failing-u-s-economy-hammers-those-at-the-bottom-of-the-economic-food-chain/


When the economy is doing well, pawn shop inventories tend to go down because people aren’t pawning much stuff and there is lots of buying going on.

But when the economy is not doing well, pawn shop inventories tend to go up because people are pawning lots of stuff for fast cash and there aren’t as many buyers as there were during the good times.

So what are we seeing during the early stages of 2024?

One pawn shop owner that was recently interviewed by USA Today admitted that he has “a glut of inventory” right now…


Pretty much every poor person should be able to clearly see how disastrous Biden's occupation of the White House has been for them personally.
1152   HeadSet   2024 Apr 1, 6:22am  

Patrick says

Pretty much every poor person should be able to clearly see how disastrous Biden's occupation of the White House has been for them personally.

That is working poor. The single mom managing a department at Target sees this. The folks on welfare or federal checks see pay raises to compensate. Even so, Dem voters blame "greedy corporations" for high prices.
1158   Patrick   2024 Apr 10, 3:29pm  

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/consequences-day-april-xx-2024-c


Thanks, Joe Biden! The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday headlined, “Russia and China Double Down on Defying U.S.” I would just like to take a moment to point out, don’t cancel me, that Russia and China were always adversaries until Joe Biden invaded the White House. Just saying.

Days after Joe Biden “urgently” called President Xi on Friday — for the first time since 2022 — and warned the Chinese leader to stop helping Russia or else face sanctions, and we mean it this time, Russia and China yesterday publicly pledged to “deepen their growing alliance and shared opposition to what they describe as the U.S.’s attempts to dominate the world order.”

While NATO leaders increase their deranged threats to supply another $100 billion to Ukraine and even send NATO troops there, Russia and China are sending a clear message that Russia will not face NATO alone in the event of a direct kinetic conflict. That is a clear message that, unfortunately, Joe Biden cannot hear, since the batteries in his hearing aids have run down.

In the aftermath of Joe’s sanctions catastrophe against Russia, which just poured jet fuel into Russia’s economy while leading the United States’ economy to the brink of a tall cliff, the Biden Administration’s threats to sanction China seem particularly hollow:

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen repeated Biden’s concerns during a visit to China this week, telling officials that Chinese companies that aid in Russia’s military procurement “will face significant consequences.”

Please, no more significant consequences. I don’t know how many more “significant consequences” we can take.

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