Daily Broadside | One Reason for 7 Months of Mayhem

Daily Verse | Ezekiel 5:15
“You will be a reproach and taunt, a warning and an object of horror to the nations around you when I inflict punishment on you in anger and in wrath and with stinging rebuke. I the Lord have spoken.”

Happy Tuesday, my Broadside friends and the last day of August. What if tacos didn’t start with a “T” but you still wanted to have them on Tuesdays?

I’m becoming more and more convinced that the demoralizing chaos we’re seeing in Afghanistan is an intentional act of sabotage and is an impeachable offense. There is no way that the United States is this incompetent. It’s true that there’s no ignition for Biden’s cognition, but there are supposed to be several checks and balances in place to limit the damage any one branch of the government can do.

Congress can demand answers, can close the checkbook, or can impeach the Resident if necessary. Trump was impeached over a phone call. Yet we hear nothing from the either side of the aisle that gives us any hope that they’re fighting this corruptocrat and his cronies on behalf of normal Americans.

The military is supposed to an apolitical civilian institution that is wise in the ways of war. Yet, it is clear that they are either following orders that are destructive to America’s reputation most likely because they’ve been overtaken by ‘woke’ leadership that started under Barack Hussein Obama, who replaced nearly 200 generals, colonels and flag officers in the U.S. military over five years with men and women who supported his socialist views in an unprecedented purge.

We were warned back then that Obama’s purge was a huge mistake. It wasn’t a “mistake.” It was the purposeful degradation of the greatest military the world has ever seen.

Add to the wreck that’s Afghanistan the invasion of illegals across our southern border and the ongoing population displacement; the Peking Lung Pox lock downs, mask mandates, the vaccination jab pressure campaign and vaccine passports; the shut down of the Keystone pipeline and high gas prices along with huge inflationary pressures; the unrestrained rioting in cities across the country with very few criminal charges or prosecutions; the January 6 breach of Capitol Hill being made more than what it was, and a black officer murdering an unarmed white woman during that breach who claims he “saved multiple lives” while being absolved of any crime; and the irrational spending campaign of $3.5 trillion dollar budget along with a $1 trillion infrastructure bill — and people are understandably alarmed at the near-anarchy that has engulfed the nation in just seven months.

The big question not being asked is, “Why?” Why is this administration allowing everything to go to hell?

Doug Wilson wrote a post on Monday that he described as “one of the more important things I have written. Not to overstate it, or to puff it up, or to give way to ungodly hype, but I do believe we are converging on a crisis moment in our nation, and the way we respond to that crisis moment when it comes will be critical.”

He goes on:

I saw a meme float by the other day that I thought summed up one part of our situation quite nicely. The sentiment expressed was pungent, provocative, and pithy. “You cannot screw up a country this bad in seven months unless it’s on purpose.”

That seems like a compelling observation, except for just one part of it. And that would be the question why? How would that benefit anybody? Cui bono? Who stands to benefit from a deliberate dismantling and degradation of the American way of life? Surely no elected official, right?

He then pivots to exactly what he thinks is the “why” behind the “what” (my emphasis):

I believe that middle America is being deliberately exasperated in order to provoke an unseemly and gaudy reaction sometime prior to the midterms. In other words, I believe that the ruling elites are picking a fight, trying to provoke unrest, and are doing so in order to be able to justify measures that are genuinely repressive. Repressive measures in the aftermath of some big incident could be trumpeted as “saving the republic” from her enemies. But if they do it without such an incident, the power grab would be just naked and kind of out there.

If that reaction finally happens—say a right wing protest at a federal building somewhere turns violent—it will be used as an excuse for emergency measures. The reaction from middle America will have to be violent enough to justify the emergency measures, but not violent enough to accomplish much of anything for the participants.

On top of that, the resultant emergency measures will need to be robust enough to alter or delay the results of the midterms. This is because the party in power almost always loses ground in the midterms, and if that pattern were to hold true in 2022, then the Democrats would lose both the House and the Senate. Now in the current climate, do you believe that they are in any frame of mind to lose the House and the Senate? I didn’t think so. Joe Biden is about as sharp as a pound of wet liver. Can you imagine a feckless Biden with a Congress controlled by the opposition? Sitting on top of a gigantic 300 million strong rugby scrum?

He then counsels caution.

And so the takeaway lesson for conservatives is: don’t take the bait. Under no circumstances should we take the bait. I think I may have mentioned before that we should not take the bait.

This is a hard bit of advice to hear, because I know people who are angry at the destructive nature of this administration and who suspect a puppeteer behind the scenes telling Biden when he can and can’t take questions and which reporters to call on.

We’re being scammed.

So the counsel to not act creates a tension between the fear that we’re losing our country and needing to wait until 2022 when we will (presumably) win back Congress and apply the brakes to the runaway train we’re riding. That is, if we can get a fair and honest election anywhere.

In the meantime, Joe Biden checks his watch during the “dignified transfer ceremony” at Dover Air Force base as the bodies of our murdered service members are brought home, and falls asleep (or, at a minimum, refuses eye contact) during a conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister.

I know I’m not alone in my thinking that this is “malevolent incompetence” (Roger Kimball). There is something deeply disturbing about all of this, and I’m afraid that the reason isn’t something we will be happy to learn.

Buy ammo and keep praying that the Lord will intervene.

Daily Broadside | We Left More Than People and Weapons Behind

Daily Verse | Lamentations 3:22-23
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

Good morning my friends. A new week and as the verse above says, the Lord’s compassions are new every morning and his faithfulness is great. That’s good news for those of us who watch in dismay the foolishness on display across the world.

The names of our dead in Afghanistan were published over the weekend. They are:

Rylee McCollum, 20
David L. Espinoza, 20
Dylan R. Merola, 20
Jared M. Schmitz, 20
Kareem M. Nikoui, 20
Maxton Soviak, 22
Hunter Lopez, 22
Humberto A. Sanchez, 22
Daegan Page, 23
Nicole L. Gee, 23
Ryan Knauss, 23
Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25
Darin T. Hoover, 31

The Epoch Times carried a short profile of each person, which you can read here.

Kathy McCollum, the mother of Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum vented her grief at Joe Biden, who is absolutely responsible for the wreck occurring in Afghanistan (and don’t let him or his enablers tell you otherwise). Listen if you can bear it.

Sgt. Nicole Gee had posted a photo of her cradling an infant on Instagram a week prior to her death. Accompanying the picture, she wrote, “I love my job.”

This, to me, exemplifies the American military. We are strong, but we are also compassionate. We fight when we have to, but we aren’t unnecessarily cruel or heartless. Of course, there are exceptions like the boneheads at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but our shock at their behavior proves the rule.

The tragedy here is that these 13 deaths didn’t have to happen. They could have, they might have, but with another president in office, the chances that they would have were exceptionally small. The original plan (Trump’s) that the Biden administration abandoned had civilians out first rather than last. There wouldn’t have been the tightly packed crowds offering themselves as targets like the current situation with flights scarce.

It is so hard for me to understand the thinking behind the decisions that led to this outcome. I don’t know who’s doing the ‘thinking’ but I conclude that this is the preferred result for whoever is pulling Joey Ice Cream’s puppet strings. We aren’t this incompetent nor destructive.

Another thing that just short-circuits my brain is the massive amount of armament that Joey Sprinkles basically gifted to our enemies. The mind-numbing scale and sheer numbers are becoming increasingly clear. A graphic going around shows the enormity of the ‘error.’

I assume that these weapons were meant for the Afghan army which, as you can see, totaled some 300,000 troops. But that army disintegrated at the first sign of having to stand on their own two feet. 22,000 Humvees? 358,530 assault rifles? Helicopters? Airplanes?

It’s not just weapons that we used to arm Afghan forces and then fell into Taliban hands. It’s vehicles and equipment that, like Bagram air base, Biden simply ordered be abandoned. Left behind, like American citizens in the streets of Kabul.

The Biden retreat will have worldwide consequences for decades.

I’m not the only one who thinks this whole thing stinks to high heaven, and not just because of what looks like raging incompetence. Roger Kimball suspects it’s more than that.

The question that has not really been pressed about this rather awe-inspiring armory is, why?

Why did we leave it behind to be used by the Taliban?

I don’t believe that question has been addressed with anything like the determination it deserves.

Some people have suggested that it was just a matter of simple incompetence on the part of the Biden administration, particularly the State Department, which is overseeing the evacuation, and the president himself, who apparently chose to ignore advice from some of his advisors about the time table for the evacuation.

But I suspect there is something more insidious than simple incompetence.

What we’re dealing with here is politicized, and therefore, malevolent incompetence.

The U.S. has left American citizens, Afghan interpreters, allies and millions of people at the mercy of the Taliban. But we’ve also left something else behind that is ultimately more damaging:

Daily Broadside | Just As Promised, It’s Not Saigon. It’s Worse.

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 46:28c
“I will discipline you but only with justice;
I will not let you go entirely unpunished.”

Friday and the end of the week. When I put on the moves, I’m talking about chess.

You’ve undoubtedly heard that the exit from Afghanistan just keeps getting worse and worse. Yesterday saw the worst day for U.S. troops in ten years.

A suicide bomb attack Thursday outside the Abbey Gate at Kabul’s airport in Afghanistan killed 13 U.S. service members and injured at least 18 more, U.S. officials said – making it the deadliest day for U.S. troops in 10 years.

Officials told Fox News late Thursday that those killed included 10 Marines, two Army soldiers and a Navy corpsman, correcting earlier reports that 12 Marines were killed.

In a press conference, Resident Biden said that he bears “responsibility for fundamentally all that’s happened of late.” Good on him for saying so. But that lasted little more than 30 seconds before he pivoted and pointed fingers at president Trump for setting a deadline by May 1, 2021, implying that the former president was to blame for the violence.

“You know as well as I do that a former president made a deal with the Taliban that he would get all American forced out of Afghanistan by May 1,” Biden said.

In addition to the human slaughter, and perhaps invoking more of it, we learned yesterday that the Biden administration gave the Taliban the names of American citizens and our Afghan allies. The Taliban!

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials …

But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials …

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

Great imagery, that. Those of us who still have a moral center are outraged over this cataclysmic clown show being run by very stupid people.

Asked about POLITICO’s reporting during a Thursday news conference, President Joe Biden said he wasn’t sure there were such lists, but also didn’t deny that sometimes the U.S. hands over names to the Taliban.

Scum alert: the “Tally-ban,” as Biden calls them, are known for executing Afghans who worked with Americans.

Biden promised us this would not be a Saigon moment and, by golly, it isn’t. It’s a hundred times worse.

He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. In fact, he admitted that he’s told who to call on when conducting a presser.

While it has become normalized for the president to rely on a list of pre-selected reporters, he made a rather stunning admission in the process.

“Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O’Donnell from NBC,” Biden kicked off the press conference.

Who’s in charge here? Who’s “instructing” the Resident? Is Joe Biden really that incapable? (I know, rhetorical question.)

Josh Hawley called for Biden’s resignation.

The man that the U.S. media and “81 million voters” put in office. God help us all.

I’m not kidding at all when I say if you haven’t bought ammo, you really need to do it. Thanks to Weasel over at Ace of Spades for the following sources:

AmmoSeek – online ammo search tool
GunBot – online ammo search tool
SG Ammo
Palmetto State Armory
Georgia Arms
AmmoMan
Target Sports USA
Bud’s Gun Shop

Have a good weekend.

Daily Broadside | Our Leaders Mercilessly Tax Us and Callously Squander It in Complex Fiascoes like Afghanistan

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 45:5
Should you then seek great things for yourself? Seek them not.

Happy Thursday, Broadsiders! I splurged on a waterproof encyclopedia for my shower.

The outrage taking place in Afghanistan is almost beyond belief. In my opinion, the situation is the consequence of what was deliberately intended. But it buggers belief to see the extent to which our government has gone to completely screw us over.

I mean that just as it’s written. Our federal government has screwed us, the American people.

The withdrawal process was performed completely backwards from what our military planners know works, resulting in American citizens being stranded in country without the U.S. military conducting evacuations. In essence, if you’re in Afghanistan, it’s up to you to evacuate yourself to the Kabul airport, dodging the Taliban along the way and at the airport. Same if you’re an Afghan ally — you’re on your own unless you get to the airport (on your own).

Just as bad, there’s the staggering amount of deadly weapons that we’ve essentially abandoned to the Taliban and whoever their allies will be (most likely the Russians and Chinese). Have you seen the list?

I think the numbers she cites, plus several others, are in this article in Forbes magazine. You might want to sit down in a soundproof room before clicking that link and reading about the loss that you and I funded.

I can’t confirm the following compilation posted on Facebook by Jon Thompson, who didn’t provide a source for his list. It seems to align, though, with the broad numbers Mollie Hemingway cites above.

How much money is represented by the weaponry we left behind and that is now in the hands of the Taliban?

The Taliban has seized US weapons left in Afghanistan worth billions — possibly including 600,000 assault rifles, some 2,000 armored vehicles, and 40 aircraft, including Black Hawks, according to reports.

The US gave the Afghan military an estimated $28 billion in weaponry between 2002 and 2017 — including seven brand new helicopters delivered to Kabul just a month ago.

The war chest also included the supply of at least 600,000 infantry weapons — including M16 assault rifles — as well as 162,000 pieces of communication equipment and 16,000 night-vision goggles.

In just two years from 2017 to 2019, the US gave 7,035 machine guns, 4,702 Humvees, 20,040 hand grenades, 2,520 bombs and 1,394 grenade launchers, The Hill noted, citing a report last year from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

I’m sputtering with anger. This isn’t just incompetence. This is a massive, indefensible failure of the greatest magnitude, with ramifications for not only America, but for our allies and most of the rest of the world.

Not only that, but billions of American tax dollars were redirected to fund lavish lifestyles for those in power (emphasis mine):

[Dostum] remained an integral part of the government that the U.S. was propping up, and so when Taliban jihadis filmed themselves walking around his unbelievably opulent residence, it was hard not to think about all the rusting bridges, trestles scrawled with graffiti, and pothole-laden roads in America, and wonder if our taxpayer money might have been put to better use

How could this dedicated military officer and public servant possibly have amassed the funds to pay for his Disneyland dream palace? Why, you and I paid for it, along with all the other American taxpayers. And that’s by no means all that we bought. Dostum wasn’t the only Afghan official who got a luxury home …

In sum, “the waste of taxpayers’ money was astonishing, with ‘ghost’ schools and military forces, counter-narcotic efforts that backfired, dodgy construction and fuel deals siphoning off billions, and cash and gold smuggled out through Kabul airport.”

If president Trump were in office and this happened, Nancy Pelosi would be drawing up her third or fourth set of articles of impeachment by now and marching them over to the Senate in some kind of somber parade — we all know that. The fact that she isn’t tells you all you need to know about her partisanship and the fact that she isn’t a champion of We, the People.

But the media-ocracy has created a terrible situation for the American people. It arranged to install an unqualified cypher as “president” with a cringy and completely unqualified “vice-president” in Kamala Harris. Neither of them should be anywhere near the top of our political structure.

“Biden is a media-made mediocrity.” Yet here we are.

If we boot Joe Biden out of the White House (where he is fraudulently squatting), we get Kamala. She would not be an improvement. So we keep Joe Biden?

No one is going to be held accountable for the callous irresponsibility this administration has shown. Biden is merely a sock puppet. He’s a doddering fool and has lost his mental acuity (not that there was much there to begin with). That’s not an insult; that’s the truth.

You should be furious over the humiliating spectacle that is Afghanistan. That’s money that was taken from you and me through profligate taxation and wasted over twenty years in a stone-age country while enriching contractors and the men at the top. It’s always been that way and always will be that way. How do you think Biden became a millionaire while in Washington for 50 years?

The junior commies in Washington are wrecking this country and putting us all in grave danger. They need to be thrown out, and soon.

Daily Broadside | You May Soon Want a Fake Vaccine ID

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 35:15
“Each of you must turn from your wicked ways and reform your actions; do not follow other gods to serve them.”

Wednesday and we’ve hit the middle of the week. I think I’ve missed my window to try high-diving into a pool of jello.

One of the guys that I enjoying reading is Doug Wilson over at Blog & Mablog. He’s a theologian/philosopher of a reformed/evangelical bent and writes with clarity, wisdom and wit about God’s truth and its intersection with our culture and politics. He’s a careful student of our times and an expert at explaining the disease behind the madness.

In his post on Monday, he presented a biblical defense of fake vaccine IDs. (I personally prefer reading his posts, but he also records them as audio and, below, video.)

What he impressed on me is not so much the logic and biblical support of getting a fake vaxx ID (which is strong), but that he is convinced we are fast approaching a situation in which fake IDs will be necessary. In other words, he and I agree that we are unlikely to avoid further descent into the tyranny of the ruling political class. As he says, “things really are that dire.”

That means that Christians who oppose vaccine mandates will have to make a choice. For Wilson, “Believing Christians have three basic options—compliance, non-compliance with a guilty conscience, and non-compliance with a clean conscience. I am urging you all to the third option, and I believe that these principles below can help with that.”

He then goes on to outline seven principles regarding fake IDs. Let me briefly summarize them for you:

  1. Resist openly. “If massive numbers of people simply refuse to take the vaccine, there is nothing they can do.”
  2. Resist clandestinely. If you can’t resist openly, “then feel free before God to resist” using fake vaccine IDs.
  3. Fake vaccine IDs are not to be used just in the context of doing gospel work. “These are liberty issues, and any kind of lawful liberty is never a trifle.”
  4. You can be right with God and use a fake ID, but “there are wisdom issues involved also, and so you should do a reasonable cost/benefit analysis with regard to whatever it is you are doing.”
  5. “If you are a Christian elder or pastor … at least have the decency not to rat out Christians who do have that liberty in their conscience” to use fake vaccination IDs
  6. If you choose to “use a fake ID, then don’t settle for less. Use only the best” fake vaccine IDs.
  7. Think longer term. “Behave in such a way now as that you will not be ashamed to talk about it afterwards.”

I haven’t written about it for a while, but I still believe there’s a good possibility that our current cold civil war will go hot. I don’t particularly want that to happen, but I’m not the one forcing the issue. It’s our lying government and the lapdogs in the media who cover for them.

When it comes to dealing with leaders who deceive and take away liberties that have been long established, it is they who have broken “comity” as Wilson calls it, and we are then faced with a choice of being complicit in our own destruction or resisting sin, potentially to the point of shedding our blood (Hebrews 12:4).

Whether you agree with Wilson or not, he provokes thought, and now is the time to do your thinking.

Daily Broadside | Like Magic: Close the Border to Illegals and Presto! The Backlog Goes Away Too!

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 30:6
Ask and see: Can a man bear children?
Then why do I see every strong man with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor, every face turned deathly pale?

It’s Tuesday my friends. Most people don’t know that my alter ego is a Scottish ax juggler who writes children’s books.

An article published on FoxNews.com makes a comparison between processing border jumpers in the southern U.S. versus the Afghan nationals who want to emirate to the U.S.

The Biden administration has moved to quickly process migrants streaming across the southern border but has not been able to speed up the processing times for Afghan interpreters and other allies who assisted in America’s 20-year war effort.

The White House announced last month that it will speed up asylum claim processing for migrants at the southern border, claiming in a release that they are seeking to “fair, orderly and humane” immigration system after the Trump administration policies “unjustly prevent individuals from obtaining asylum.”

The new policy grants asylum officers full authority to rule on asylum cases, allowing migrants to bypass the federal immigration courts that often are backlogged and have long wait times.

So we’re now streamlining the service to make faster decisions and cutting out the pesky federal immigration court system that are often “backlogged.” Hey, I have an idea! How about we REDUCE THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THE COUNTRY FROM THESE THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES? Wouldn’t that also “speed up processing times”?

If you go to the Department of Homeland Security’s website (dhs.gov), you can find the full text of the proposal: DHS and DOJ Publish Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Make Asylum Process More Efficient and Ensure Fairness.

The title is a dead giveaway that this is a woke proposal with the words, “Ensure Fairness.” Fairness? “Fairness” to whom, exactly? The people who legally enter the country legitimately looking for asylum, or the invasion over the southern border of third-world foreigners who come from who-knows-where to the land of plenty to live on handouts and displace the native population?

Population displacement is the goal, friends. Democrats will accuse me and you of “racism” and “xenophobia” and “hate” if you oppose their reckless open borders policies, which is rich coming from the loons running the country formerly known as America. The current administration outright lies when they write in their Blueprint for a Fair, Orderly and Humane Immigration System that they are “reckoning with the prior Administration’s cruel and reckless immigration policies, which exacerbated long-standing challenges and failed to securely manage our border.”

Under Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, anyone wanting to be granted asylum in the U.S. had to wait in Mexico — not in the United States — for their claim to be adjudicated. That relieved the pressure of more people pouring into our country and disappearing into the interior, never to keep their court date.

But Resident Biden and his sidekick Kamala are letting anyone in and then transporting them around the country to be deposited, sometimes in the middle of the night, as I’ve written about previously.

So I’m not sure how they can claim to be doing a better job than Trump when the Pew Research Center reports that Migrant encounters at U.S.-Mexico border are at a 21-year high. I believe Trump was president for some portion of the last 21 years.

The U.S. Border Patrol reported nearly 200,000 encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in July, the highest monthly total in more than two decades.

The number of monthly encounters had fallen to 16,182 in April 2020, shortly after the coronavirus outbreak forced the closure of the southwestern border and slowed migration across much of the world. But migrant encounters have climbed sharply since then, reaching 199,777 in July, according to the latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency that encompasses the Border Patrol.

The July figure is the highest monthly total since March 2000 and far surpasses the peak during the last major wave of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which occurred in May 2019.

Our so-called leaders talk as though every citizen of the world has a right to apply for asylum here. Sure, everyone has that action available to them, I suppose. But we also have the right to shut off the spigot when we have a backlog and long wait times.

There is no “law” that says we must always and forever hold our doors open to anyone who decides they’re coming here. We Americans have the right and the duty to protect our borders, our citizens, our economy, and our way of life. No one and no group of people have the right to just let themselves in and settle down.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to work, but that’s how the junior commies have decided it will work. They are invested in flooding our nation with future Democrat voters to keep themselves in power, and they don’t care if they have to turn our country into a third-world sh*thole to do it.

Really, they don’t.

It’s past time we begin to think about kicking the Democrat commies out and taking control of our borders for good.

Daily Broadside | A Word That Fits Biden Better Than Empathy

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 29:13
“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity.”

Happy Monday, my friends. In my opinion, sushi is best served in a vat of bacon.

I was hoping that the weekend would prove that last week was just a bad dream and there would be daisies and unicorns waiting for us this week.

Nah, not really. I knew that our most recent national nightmare was only getting started.

Joe Biden is a Failed Commander in Chief!

Turns out that the wretched fiasco in Afghanistan just keeps getting worse as the nation formerly known as the United States of America continues to suck at its basic responsibilities. Or, rather, the idiots running the place suck at theirs.

Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News the U.S. has no intelligence in Kabul outside the airport, marking a victory for the Taliban, Russia, China and Iran.

[…]

“We have no intelligence on the ground now,” he continued. “We are completely dark. With the exception of the airport we will be dark.”

[…]

“That is a victory, not only for the Taliban but for Russia, China and Iran because we can’t see their activities in the region anymore.”

Gee, who screwed up our intelligence, leaving our troops at the mercy of our enemies?

Numerous reports have indicated that the Taliban are tracking or killing anyone found to have connections to the U.S., despite promising to pardon them.

What?! I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the Taliban would lie to us! SoME0nE sHUd riTe tHaT dOUn. Might come in handy later.

McCaul told Fox News that he pleaded with the Biden administration for months to evacuate interpreters and Afghan partners.

“They completely failed to do so,” McCaul said. “The intelligence community was very clear and had gave a very grim assessment about the conditions on the ground. The Biden administration chose to ignore that intelligence.”

This is what you get for being suckered into voting for empathy. We’re a nation of emotionally-shriveled lightweights who think they are literally being killed when their feelings get hurt. Empathy is great for a pastor or a counselor, but it’s not the trait you need when dealing with evil malignancies like the Taliban. And Biden, unlike president Trump, does not have a killer instinct — unless it’s chasing down white Americans. Then he’s all business.

“Listen, fat …”

“Empathy” comes from the ancient Greek ἐμπάθεια (empatheia), meaning “physical affection or passion or state of emotion.” Derived from ἐν (en, “in, at”) and πάθος (pathos, “passion” or “suffering”). It literally means, “in passion,” which might be expressed as Bill Clinton did: “I feel your pain.”

In other words, you can identify with someone else’s pain or feelings. I suppose if I were trapped in Afghanistan, I’d be thrilled that Joe could identify with my fear, anxiety and sadness.

Meanwhile, “Robert Charles, a former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush, told Fox News there could be as many as 40,000 Americans in the country.” Not just 10,000 or 15,000, which is alarming enough, but nearly three or four times that amount.

40,000 Americans in a country overrun by murderous Islamic jihadists. I wonder how Joe’s empathy is working out for them?

There’s another word that is derived from πάθος (pathos) and fits Biden and his administration better than “empathy.”

That word is pathetic and means miserably or contemptibly inadequate.

But his tweets are nice.

Daily Broadside | It Takes a Village Idiot

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 17:9-10
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind,
to reward a man according to his conduct,
according to what his deeds deserve.”

Friday and the end of another week — and what a week it has been.

When the 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium building collapsed in Florida back in June, initial reports found that, while the cause of the collapse isn’t known, “the structural slab was deteriorating because it was flat instead of sloped. That meant the water didn’t drain off the concrete’s waterproofing quickly” and that “failure to complete the ‘extremely expensive’ repairs … would ’cause the extent of the concrete deterioration to expand exponentially.'”

It feels like the United States has finally slid off its “structural slab” after decades of neglect and abuse, and is collapsing in a heap on the world stage. Perhaps the anti-American wokesters and progressive Marxists who pollute our country are learning that facts don’t care about your feelings.

But probably not.

It’s a pleasant LARP, with self-reinforcing loops of hashtags, New York Times puff pieces and Psaki ‘circling back’, until one day the Taliban roll in and everyone is running for the helicopters. It’s like US elites finally had the VR headset knocked from their faces and actually had a look around. And what they saw was a roomful of men with faces out of an illustrated bible looking like they’d just pillaged a Cabela’s—that’s how much top-shelf, modded-out AR hardware they captured—sitting down for a super-awkward Zoom meeting announcing a sudden change of plans for American foreign policy.

While there is plenty of blame to lay at the feet of George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama, and Donald J. Trump for the situation in Afghanistan, the one who matters is Joseph Robinette Biden. The most far-left executive ever to hold office (and that includes Obama), Biden has proven to be a one-man wrecking crew. It’s not that he’s doing it all himself; he has plenty of help from the junta installed after the hijinked election in 2020.

But he’s the acting head of our government.

More like acting the village idiot:

10,000-15,000 (!) American citizens are trapped in Taliban-held Afghanistan.

The U.S. government cannot go out and give them safe passage to the airport.

The U.S. government cannot guarantee the safety of American citizens in Afghanistan.

The Biden administration is making Americans pay $2,000 for a flight out of Afghanistan. (Hunter needs new shoes, baby!)

Afghan parents so desperate they’re passing their babies and kids over the crowd at the airport!

US soldiers stuck at Kabul airport while UK and French soldiers are getting their citizens out.

The Taliban are using our abandoned equipment. Say, where do you suppose the surplus will end up?

State Department won’t say why it killed Pompeo’s crisis evacuation unit. (One hint: #OrangeManBad!)

Joe Biden reacts to George Stephanopolous bringing up Afghans falling off our planes as if he’d “brought up irrelevant ancient history.” (Listen, fat.)

Joe Biden calls it a day for the weekend while Afghanistan burns. (He’s tired, doncha’ know.)

Our closest allies for more than a century, the UK, just held Biden in contempt for the disaster in Afghanistan.

Can one man literally be this incompetent? Or is there something more sinister at work here? I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Biden has been compromised by China, so one can legitimately wonder if there’s more than just poor management at work here.

Lara Logan thinks that the United States “chose this outcome” and it’s tough to deny her logic.

“Whoever is in power right now, whoever is really pulling the strings — and I don’t know [who is pulling the strings] — they could do anything they want to change this. And they’re not.” — Lara Logan

Are Biden and his cabal so utterly ruthless that they would proactively destroy all the work we did in Afghanistan just so that the U.S. would be humiliated before a watching world? So that our reputation as a so-called superpower would take such a massive hit as to be mocked by China and censured by the UK? To degrade the intimidation factor that Trump had recently brought back? To wreck a country with no regard for how many people die?

Honest answer? Yes, I believe they would. They are in a “no holds barred” situation because 2022 is coming and they know they have the potential to be slaughtered (figuratively speaking!) in that election. That is, unless they depend on late-arriving ballots to swing the elections to themselves.

It’s no secret that the far-left has taken over the Democrat party, and they HATE America. They hate our founding, they hate our constitution, they hate our rights, they hate whites’ skin color, they hate men, they hate normal marriage, they hate normal sex, they hate normal gender, they hate God, they hate Christianity, they hate Christians, they hate churches, they hate law and order, they hate our traditions, they hate our history and they hate our norms. These people are filled with a seething rage and indignation over the Western tradition and wisdom that gave us the most powerful and wealthy nation in all of human history.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a logical connection between the unmitigated disaster that is Afghanistan, the Left’s control of our government, and the beating that our country’s standing in the world is taking right now. What other country in its right mind would trust the United States to be a strong and stable partner with financial and military might when they need it?

More to the point, what confidence do regular Americans have in our government and the vast military that it wields? I speak for myself when I say that when I see the fustercluck in Afghanistan and contrast that with “pregnancy flight suits” and pride flags and transgenders in the armed forces, I no longer feel confident in my country’s ability to protect me from our enemies or, for that matter, to protect me from my own government’s overreach.

Maybe they should start focusing on winning wars instead of helping men walk in stilettoes.

In fact, I’m starting to suspect that the military is being prepared to lock down and harass and possibly arrest all those “potential terrorists” who oppose Covid lockdowns, question the 2020 election or support Trump.

I’ve never felt so unsettled about our country as I have this week.

Have a good weekend.

Daily Broadside | Planning to Fail: No Good Way to Get All U.S. Citizens Out of Afghanistan

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 15:1
Then the Lord said to me, “Even if Moses and Samuel were to stand before me, my heart would not go out to this people.”

It’s Thursday, my friends. Styrofoam cups do not a good flotation device make.

I wish there were other things to write about this week, but the catastrophe in Afghanistan remains the top story as even more bad news continues to surface in the wake of our incompetent Washington fool’s monumental failure in that stone age disaster of a country.

When Joe Biden was running for president, he hid in his basement for the majority of his campaign. We all knew that if he couldn’t handle the rigors of the campaign trail, he couldn’t handle the rigors of the office. Now that he’s been installed as Resident, he’s proved the assumption. After being summoned from his vacation to address the American people, he fled back to Camp David after making a threadbare speech that blamed everyone but himself for the disaster in Kabul.

Now we’re told that he cut his vacation short, returning Tuesday rather than on Wednesday as originally planned. Gosh, that had to be tough! All those pesky politicians disturbing his rest over a little intelligence failure and some lost armaments.

*shrugs* Big F***ing Deal, amirite?

But the lie that anybody but Joe Biden is responsible for the calamity in Kabul ain’t gonna hold. The National Pulse dropped a rather interesting story yesterday claiming that the Biden administration killed funding for a Trump-era “critical State Department program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul.”

It wasn’t about Afghanistan per se, but it was about situations just like the one we’re facing in Afghanistan. A couple of key graphs:

In a lengthy article in Vanity Fair from May 2021, the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR) – also referred to in overlap with a predecessor/partner bureau called “OpMed” is described as a “little-known team of medics and miracle workers—hidden deep within the U.S. Department of State.”

“Even before COVID reared its head, OpMed was finding ways to do all sorts of things, serving as the hidden hand behind daring and often dangerous operations to rescue Americans from peril abroad,” the article states, before going on to quote Secretary of State Tony Blinken on the importance of the program’s goals.

“The Bureau of Medical Services’ Directorate of Operation—or ‘OpMed,’ as we call it—is a lifeline for the Department of State and the American people… Though perhaps lesser known outside of the Department, it’s vital to our operations. That’s because OpMed provides the platform and personnel to save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis. During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, OpMed was integral to our evacuation and repatriation of 100,000 Americans to the United States as countries began locking down their borders.”

But The National Pulse understands that career officials inside the State Department objected to the Trump-era aim of creating a Contingency and Crisis Response bureau with the express purpose of avoiding a future Benghazi-style situation for Americans overseas.

Instead, Biden’s team revoked the funding and the approval for the plan, even as the COVID-19 crisis reasserted itself, and and Afghanistan withdrawal loomed.
(Emphasis mine.)

“Career officials.” And now we’re hearing that the State Department has no plan—at least one based in reality—for evacuating American nationals or Afghans who want out.

President Joe Biden’s pledge to evacuate thousands more at-risk Afghans who worked for the U.S. government will run into the cold reality of a fast-closing window of time, insecurity all over Afghanistan and major logistical hurdles.

As one U.S. official told Reuters “too many things have to go 100 percent correctly” to execute the plan to move out those going through the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) process. The Pentagon is aiming to evacuate up to 22,000 SIV applicants, their families and other at-risk people.

But officials and refugee resettlement groups said that number, while admirable, will be much more difficult to reach now that the Taliban have seized the capital Kabul and most of the country.

Biden’s Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, who’s chasing “white supremacists” (read: wrong-think conservatives) out of the armed forces, seems to confirm that, really, if you’re in Afghanistan and want out, you’re on your own.

In another report, Secretary Austin admits, “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people.”

Biden the foreign policy expert! Wisdom gained after more than 50 years in Washington, right fellas? So wise! So stunning! Why, it’s almost as if the American draw down was planned this way!

Wait—maybe it was! Remember the little dust-up over the Hunter Biden laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop? Remember his emails outlining his deal with a Chinese-funded company that included “10 held by H for the big guy,” the “big guy” being then-vice president Joe Biden?

The Biden criminal family is owned by the Chinese. And guess who benefits from the collapse of American support in Afghanistan?

Gropey Joe pulled out of Afghanistan after 20 years, zillions of dollars, and thousands of lives were lost. China stands to gain a great deal from this evacuation. The same China that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to Hunter Biden since 2009, and really kicked things into high gear in 2015 when Gropey Joe was vice president. Coincidence? You decide! You’ll have to do so without asking any questions because Biden, VP Harris, and Jen Psaki are all mysteriously AWOL.

The reason the Chinese are first in line as America exits is that they are pursuing world domination through their “Belt and Road” initiative, a program that has to run straight through Afghanistan, where there lies “an estimated trillion dollars worth of rare-earth minerals under its soil.

Either China has Biden by the short-hairs, or he’s a incompetent moron. Or both.

But at least the tweets are nice, right? We all good with that?

Give me so-called mean tweets, gas for $1.96, and a strong military over this milquetoast pretender any day. I truly wonder if we’ll survive until mid-terms in 2022.

Daily Broadside | The Children Running Things Have Made the World Less Safe

Daily Verse | Jeremiah 12:1b
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all the faithless live at ease?

It’s Wednesday and we’ve crested the bell curve for the week. True story: I’ve landed in an airplane one time less than I’ve taken off in one.

The more I read about the train wreck of a dumpster fire in Afghanistan the more livid I become. I’m sad, yes, over the tragedy and what it means for the men, women and children who are not the Taliban, but I’m more angry than sad about it by a factor of, oh, 100. And the group I’m angry with are the insipid clowns who have caused the disgraceful debacle in Afghanistan.

They’re like small children playing with dollhouses and toy cars, zooming along in their imaginations but totally clueless about how life works in reality. Resident Moonbeam blamed and deflected with a defiant tone during his ten minute explainer on Monday, just like a toddler who has been told to turn off the TV and get ready for dinner. These people are buffoons and idiots who lie for a living because reality doesn’t — and can’t — match their utopian fantasies.

You think I’m making this up? Here’s a transcript of Joey 39 Flavors contradicting his own intelligence services.

But Dementia Joe had a plan, a perfectly “careful and thought-out plan,” according to Chuck Schumer, the useless anti-American majority leader in the Senate, talking to CNN’s John Berman on April 14:

I think President Biden has come up with a careful and thought-out plan. Look, John, the president doesn’t want endless wars. I don’t want endless wars. And neither do the American people. And it’s refreshing to have a thought-out plan with a set timetable instead of the president waking up one morning, getting out of bed and saying what just pops into his head and then the generals having walked it back. So I think this is a careful, thought-out plan.

Maybe Chuck sincerely thought it was a careful and thought-out plan. But if he did, he was spectacularly wrong. If he didn’t, he’s a liar. Either way, Chuck Schumer’s a joker.

How about Secretary of State Antony Blinken just four days ago?

“Remember, this is not Saigon,” Blinken told CNN, referring to the fall of Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11 – and we have succeeded in that mission.”

Sure, we didn’t “win” in Vietnam, but can you call it a “win” in Afghanistan? And why was there an urgent need to destroy documents and the scramble to evacuate our diplomats? Prevaricator.

Then there’s General Millie Vanillie who is fabulously woke, but who just wrecked all the work we did in Afghanistan:

The same month – since when the Taleban’s lightning offensive has surprised many US military officials – the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, also rejected comparisons to the desperate exit from Saigon.

“I do not see that unfolding,” Gen Milley said. “I may be wrong, who knows, you can’t predict the future, but I don’t see Saigon 1975 in Afghanistan. The Taleban (forces) just aren’t the North Vietnamese Army. It’s not that kind of situation.”

Got that? He did not “see that unfolding.” Oh, really? What did he see then, Afghans holding hands and singing us out of the country? How the hell does that man still have a job? Maybe instead of pushing CRT and chasing phantom terrorists among Normal Americans, he should have been studying the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.

Finally, there’s the wicked witch of the West, San Fran Nan:

In her full statement, she again emphasized Joey Fudge Chunk’s sensational planning: “Once again, I want to acknowledge the clarity of purpose of [alleged] President Biden’s statement and the wisdom of his actions.”

Yeah, Nancy? Tell that to Barack Hussein Obama, who told us not to “underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” I’m no fan of Obama, but at least he had Biden dead to rights on that count.

And don’t forget Circle Back Psaki believing that the plan is so wonderful they can’t guarantee that the 11,000 American citizens and 30,000 Afghan nationals who aided the U.S. efforts will get out safely.

Not to mention the “fair amount” of weapons the US left in Afghanistan are in the possession of the Taliban and won’t be returned to us.

Oh, and the terrorists coming across our southern border.

Oh also, the dolt Senator John Cornyn who tweeted “the number of US troops stationed in South Korea, Germany, Japan, China’s Taiwan and on the African continent to show how the number of US soldiers has dwindled in Afghanistan. But in the process, Cornyn revealed the shocking news that there are 30,000 US troops on China’s Taiwan island.” Now China has cause to go to war on Taiwan.

And China is wasting no time in threatening Taiwan.

Oh, and almost forgot, “Iran has accelerated its enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade” because, Biden!

At least the tweets are nice now. Joey Vanilla Bean is restoring our norms, everybody!

Steven Hayward rants about our national humiliation.

Taxpayers should be furious not just about the profligate waste and extravagance of such an establishment, but at the bottomless idiocy of a class of credentialled people who think that the answer to every foreign problem is to spend absurd amounts of money, hire endless case officers and private contractors/consultants, outreach coordinators to tweet out rainbow flag celebrations, issue endless white papers analyzing the situation that bear little or no relation to reality, and an apparatus that has proven unable to process visas for the Afghans who worked for us, let alone have a plan for evacuating Americans. Despite Biden’s pathetic defense of the outcome, he ought to be furious with the whole upper echelon of our military-diplomatic complex. There ought to be mass firings. Of course, we all know that no one will be fired, and no senior person in this apparatus of disaster will have the honor to resign.

Again, these people are fundamentally unserious and they have just made the world a lot less safe; like, significantly unsafe. Not just in the Middle East, but in America. They have no business being on the operational side of the power they wield.

Anyone who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 owns this abject disgrace. They own our decimated economy, our lawless open border, the spiraling inflation, the expensive gasoline, the terrorist threats that now exist — they own it all. Trump had made us strong again, but they gave half of America the finger based on lies from the Deep State amplified by the Democrat-Media Complex, and now we all live with the consequences of their sanctimonious high-school hissy fit.

If there’s even a sliver of a silver lining in all of this — and that’s a very big “if” — it’s that everybody, including the cultural Marxists, just got hit upside the head with the real-world consequences of having Joseph Robinette Biden and his mob of junior commies in charge.

You can’t deny that he and his crew have screwed up royally. Everybody and their mother is pointing it out.

But it won’t change anything, guaranteed.

If it were up to me, I’d throw every last one of the Democrats — and a fair number of Republicans — out of their cushy office chairs paid for with my taxes. Washington needs to be torn down, salted over and rebuilt the way our Founders first did it — with truly wise men.