The Other McCain

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The Post-Afghanistan ‘Pivot,’ as Predicted

Posted on | September 10, 2021 | Comments Off on The Post-Afghanistan ‘Pivot,’ as Predicted

Less than two weeks ago — Tuesday, August 31, to be exact — I warned that Biden’s White House speech about Afghanistan was the signal for the start of a media “pivot” away from the subject. What had caused Biden to arbitrarily choose August 31 as the final date for U.S. military withdrawal was, of course, his desire to give a September 11 speech declaring victory in Afghanistan. Unfortunately for Biden, the Taliban had other ideas, and so now Biden has to pretend that what happened to the Afghanistan withdrawal — a complete disaster, for which he bears responsibility — is not really important, and the Democratic Party stenographers in the media are expected to play along with this ruse.

Turned the TV on CNN this evening and, sure enough, it’s all about the Biden COVID-19 mandate — or to be more precise, it’s about “right-wing” reaction to Biden’s COVID-19 mandate. Never mind, of course, that Biden himself said in December 2020 that vaccination shouldn’t be mandatory and that he “wouldn’t demand it be mandatory.”

The crew at CNN and other liberal media outlets have gotten the memo: Biden needs to change the subject from Afghanistan, so now he has handed them a story — not a story about how Biden contradicted himself, but rather a story about how those mean, ignorant Republicans (who, of course, are entirely to blame for the COVID-19 pandemic) are reacting to Biden’s mandate in mean and ignorant ways. You would never guess, from watching media coverage, that the real problem of “resistance” to the COVID-19 vaccine isn’t old white guys (I’m fully vaccinated), but rather (a) women under 40 and (b) blacks and Hispanics. These are not traditional GOP constituencies, and so the demographics of vaccine “resistance” are ignored while the media focus all the attention on Ron DeSantis or Marjorie Taylor Greene or whatever Republican politician is the designated COVID-19 scapegoat of the day.

Let’s quote Stacey Lennox’s story here:

Biden then announced that the Department of Labor would issue an emergency rule requiring employers with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccines or weekly testing. This order will cover 80 million employees. Employers will be required to pay workers for time to get vaccinated. In an odd assertion, he said this would protect vaccinated employees from unvaccinated coworkers.

Why does she call this assertion “odd”? Because if you’re vaccinated, isn’t that supposed to be your protection against the virus? But in order to justify making vaccination mandatory, Biden just tacitly admitted the dirty little secret: THE VACCINES AREN’T WORKING!

Or at least, they’re not working well enough to prevent “breakthrough” cases, which are both statistically rare and not usually fatal, but the whole point of the COVID-19 Fear Porn Crusade that we’ve been enduring for the past 18 months is that we’re all required to do whatever is necessary to reassure a bunch of paranoid hypochondriacs, the kind of women who never leave home without hand sanitizer in their purse.

We’re being held hostage by these people, and I had no plan to get vaccinated — figuring my immune system, which had kept me safe from the Wuhan virus for more than a year, would be robust enough to get me through to the end of the pandemic — until late July, when the Delta variant “surge” was approaching its peak, and the Democrats started making a lot of noise about how this was all the fault of “misinformation” allegedly being spread by right-wingers.

It’s about politics, see? And I wasn’t about to let myself become a convenient scapegoat for this blame-game, nor to be caught flat-footed when they predictably resorted to coercion to reach whatever arbitrary “goal” they had in mind. Nope, not me — fully vaccinated, thank you.

More from Stacey Lennox:

Any healthcare facility that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding must also require vaccination. Some estimates report that as many as 40% of healthcare workers are not vaccinated. There is also a skilled nursing shortage. It is unclear how mandates will affect this trend. In Oregon, where cases are rising, 111 nurses are already on administrative leave for remaining unvaccinated.

What? Forty percent of healthcare workers are not vaccinated? Don’t these trained specialists believe the science? Or is it the case, as I suspect, that “healthcare workers” is a category including everyone employed by hospitals, including the janitors and cafeteria workers, most of whom are black or Hispanic? And as for those unvaccinated Oregon nurses, how many of them are women under 40? It’s the demographics again — it’s not because right-wingers are spreading “misinformation,” it’s because so many members of core Democrat constituencies don’t trust the vaccines.

Which is not to say they should trust the vaccines, or that they should be compelled to get vaccinated, but I don’t care either way because — to repeat — I’m fully vaccinated, and therefore can’t be counted as a statistic to prove that old white right-wing guys are the problem.

Checkmate, you liberal bastards! As I say, however, Biden’s vaccine mandate is just a distraction, part of the “pivot” strategy to give the media something to talk about instead of Afghanistan where, by the way, it looks like Team Biden screwed the pooch even worse than we knew:

“A US airstrike in Kabul against a supposed Islamic State bomber actually killed an innocent man who worked for a US aid group and his family, according to newly published testimony and footage — raising the specter that the Pentagon lied to the public about the strike. The reported case of mistaken identity also further tars President Biden for his chaotic pullout of US troops from Afghanistan, which left behind hundreds of US citizens and thousands of at-risk Afghans.”

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” as Barack Obama said, and even the New York Times can’t ignore all his fuck-ups.

Nevertheless, the distraction campaign will continue. Next Saturday, there will be a D.C. rally in support of jailed January 6 rioters:

Thinking about attending the September 18th rally?
Be careful. There is wide suspicion that the entire “rally” is just a trap set up by Your Fascist Pals at the FBI.

Oh, how clever that would be — the feds, through their shadowy network of informers and undercover operatives, organize a “right-wing” event that will (a) lure in a bunch of dimwits too stupid to spot the obvious set-up, and then (b) turn into a violent hate-fest, which the media will report as if this fake event represents typical Trump voters.

Some say that Charlottesville was really a set-up like this, and I’m not sure if that’s a conspiracy theory, but never underestimate the possibility that agents provocateurs are responsible whenever some extremist group gets in trouble. That guy in your Internet chat group who’s always talking about how much he hates Jews, and trying to incite somebody to fire-bomb a synagogue? Probably a fed. “Confidential FBI informant details how he infiltrated group accused in Whitmer kidnap plot.”

Who is this “confidential informant,” and how many other members of the “Wolverine Watchmen” were also informants or undercover agents? To what extent was the whole thing a “sting” operation? It doesn’t matter. My point is that the kind of people who get mixed up in such escapades never seem to become suspicious about whether they’re being manipulated into doing something that will send them to prison.

For all we know, the organizers of next Saturday’s rally are sincere Trump supporters who believe that those arrested during the January 6 Capitol riot are being persecuted as “political prisoners.” However, is it possible they, too, have been infiltrated by FBI informants? And is it also possible that these informants are doing everything they can to make sure this rally turns into a disaster? Beware.

The Biden administration desperately needs a distraction from their endless bungling, and this September 18th rally might do the trick.




 

Category: Joe Biden

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