The Other McCain

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Complete Disaster in Afghanistan Doesn’t Interrupt Senile Joe Biden’s Vacation

Posted on | August 15, 2021 | Comments Off on Complete Disaster in Afghanistan Doesn’t Interrupt Senile Joe Biden’s Vacation

There is no way to alleviate the political damage Joe Biden has suffered as the Taliban captured Kabul today except, perhaps, by keeping Biden hidden away at Camp David, while the administration’s various spin doctors are deployed to major media outlets to make excuses:

President Joe Biden remained hidden at the presidential retreat at Camp David on Sunday as the Taliban swiftly seized control of Afghanistan.
But a senior administration official indicated to reporters Sunday evening that Biden might address the country “in the next few days,” according to reports.
It remains unclear whether Biden will speak from Camp David or return to the White House to deliver his speech, the reports noted.
The president was previously scheduled to return to the White House on Wednesday.
Biden has not spoken publicly on Afghanistan since Tuesday after expressing optimism that the leaders of the Afghan government would rally to defend their country. . . .
Biden told reporters Tuesday he did not regret his decisions on Afghanistan, leaving the following day for the rest of his August vacation in Delaware before he shifted his vacation to Camp David on Friday. . . .
On Saturday, the White House released a 600-word statement from Biden defending his decision to leave Afghanistan and blaming former President Donald Trump for empowering the Taliban.
On Sunday, the White House sent Secretary of State Tony Blinken to speak about the crisis on the Sunday cable and network news shows.
But Biden has remained off-camera as images and footage of the Taliban entering Kabul flooded onto various forms of media.

Gosh, if they can’t blame Trump for this debacle, who will they blame?

Great job you’re doing there, Kamala.

Even liberal journalists like Mike Allen can’t hide the truth:

Rarely has an American president’s predictions been so wrong, so fast, so convincingly as President Biden on Afghanistan. . . .
Just five weeks ago, President Biden assured Americans: “[T]he likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.”
In April, Biden said: “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.”
This morning, the Taliban is entering the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, “from all sides,” a senior Afghan official told Reuters. Jalalabad, the last major city besides the capital not held by the Taliban, fell earlier today.
Afghan forces today surrendered Bagram Air Base, the Grand Central of America’s longest war, to the Taliban.
CNN showed video of choppers over Kabul — believed to be ferrying U.S. diplomats to the airport. . . .
Ryan Crocker, a U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama, said last weekend on ABC’s “This Week”: “I think it is already an indelible stain on his presidency.”

A few quick headlines:

Final Failure in Afghanistan Is Biden’s to Own
— David E. Singer, New York Times

Biden Ordered Afghanistan Withdrawal Against Warnings From Top Generals: Report
— Mike Miller, Red State

Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy
— George Packer, The Atlantic

All Biden Had to Do Was … Nothing
— John Podhoretz, Commentary

All of those stories are worth reading in their entirety, but the last one from Podhoretz captures how unnecessary this disaster was:

Had Joe Biden done nothing, Afghanistan would not have fallen to the Taliban today. Had he just let the status quo continue, the status quo would have continued. Afghanistan would have plodded along and we would have kept the Taliban from power with a small force of American military personnel among whose ranks there had not been a single fatality since March 2020—17 months without a death. Keep that in mind as you listen to and watch people try to analyze away the horror that has befallen the Afghan people. The idea being retailed by the increasingly defeatist left and the increasingly isolationist right is that what has happened was inevitable. It was the opposite of inevitable. It wouldn’t have happened if Biden hadn’t acted.

Look, a U.S. Army infantry company is about 150 men. At no time in the three or four years prior to Biden becoming president had the Taliban been willing to fight even a company-size action against U.S. troops. Earlier today (“Afghanistan and Chicago”), I explained that in the worst year in Afghanistan, U.S. forces suffered a total of 440 troops killed in action, which is less than the number shot and killed so far this year in Chicago. But the Biden administration is not abandoning Chicago, are they? And I’m willing to shrug off Podhoretz’s jab at the “increasingly isolationist right” because the point he’s making is absolutely correct — our forces in Afghanistan weren’t actually fighting a war, because the Taliban were afraid to fight them. Instead, our troops in Afghanistan were just keeping the peace, and with as much or more success as the police in Chicago. While keeping our troops deployed over there may have been expensive, what the hell do we have a military for, anyway? I mean, if we’re not occasionally gonna bust some heads, why even have a military? Whatever else you might say about Afghanistan, it was an excellent training ground, a chance for our forces to engage in firefights with actual enemies every once in a while. Maybe that wasn’t a “vital U.S. national interest,” but it was not entirely without value, either.

There may be an “increasingly isolationist right” that fails to appreciate that assessment, but I’m not trying to win any popularity contests, and nobody at the Pentagon has ever sought my advice, so anyone who wants to criticize me is wasting their time. Certainly, it’s not as if I have any influence over the Biden administration, and do not let anyone deceive you — Biden 100% owns this catastrophe:

Was it inevitable that it had to end up this way? Having this happen in this disastrously humiliating way was not inevitable. That’s completely all on Joe Biden, the guy who has been wrong about everything for the past forty years.
Early in July, when Joe Biden still had the opportunity to do things but was sitting on his hands acting as though he had all the time in the world, he claimed it wasn’t inevitable that the Taliban would take over again, despite the fact the U.S. intelligence was predicting it would happen.
“There’s going to be no circumstance where you’ll see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” Biden said when asked about the possibility of an airlift off as happened in 1975 during the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

Joe Biden is already The Worst President Ever. As has been said, comparing Biden to Jimmy Carter is an insult — to Jimmy Carter.

Remember: 81 million people allegedly voted for this senile fool. If you don’t want to blame Biden, blame the idiots who elected him.




 

Category: Democrats, Foreigners, Military

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