Daily Verse | Ezekiel 11:19
“I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them;
I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.”
September 1 and the work roller coaster has hit the apex of mid-week and is ready to race down through Thursday and Friday to the weekend. Thanks for joining me again this morning.
We’re out. The last American flight left Afghanistan 24 hours before Joey B’s self-imposed deadline of August 31, as though he was over-delivering for the American people. Too bad he didn’t take those additional 24 hours to get the rest of our citizens out as he promised.
Nearly 500 or 600 Americans (not 100-200) are stranded abandoned in that hellacious country, although we’re assured that “the military phase is over, but our desire to bring these people out remains as intense as it was before. The weapons have just shifted, if you will, from the military realm to the diplomatic realm.” I don’t know about you, but the orderly and disciplined withdrawal that we’ve witnessed over the last couple of weeks has my confidence in this administration’s capability at an all-time high.
Yeah no.
Some associated news accompanying the end of our mission there:
An Afghan interpreter who helped save then-Senator Joe Biden’s life in 2008 after the helicopter that he, Senator John Kerry and Senator Chuck Hagel were riding in was forced to land in a snowstorm in a remote part of the country. Now the interpreter, known only as Mohammed, is pleading with Biden to get him and his family out of Afghanistan.
Mohammed’s attempt to get into the U.S. has been held up for months by red tape. Veterans, who served with the interpreter on the more than “100 firefights,” made appeal after appeal to to get him out. He got to the Kabul airport, but when he was told his wife and children would not be able to come with him, he left and went into hiding.
Now Mohammed is begging Biden to get them all out: “Hello Mr. President: Save me and my family. Don’t forget me here.”
Good luck, Mohammed. Sugar Cone Joey didn’t even care enough to get all American citizens out.
Did you know that this administration is importing Afghans to America by the hundreds of thousands?
And now, just like thirteen years ago, our rulers want to use a crisis they created as justification to ram through what they always wanted to do anyway. Which, in this case, is to resettle a hundred or two hundred thousand (the number varies depending on who’s speaking) foreigners with no tradition of liberty—who are indeed from a culture deeply alien, even hostile to, Western civilizational norms—in your communities.
The justification for this is already being trumpeted: we must save our “allies,” translators and such, who helped us throughout our twenty-year failed experiment. This argument, though offered in bad faith, is effective because the vast majority of American consider abandoning an ally to a deadly enemy dishonorable.
But does anyone really believe that America has, or ever had—even over the duration of two decades—200,000 “allies” in Afghanistan? That we ever employed even a fraction of that number as translators? The claim is risible on its face.
The regime has in any case already admitted that, of the roughly 111,600 Afghans (as compared to 5,400 American citizens) already evacuated, it has no idea who the vast majority of them are. Our masters tell us that we must save “allies” and “translators”—and then in the next breath admit that they’re indiscriminately taking anyone. People who act and speak this brazenly do so out of a deep reservoir of contempt and hatred. The message is “We can do and say whatever we want; we can lie and contradict ourselves within the same sentence, and there’s nothing you can do about it. In fact, if you object, or even notice, we will use our power to crush you.”
As a believer, I welcome the opportunity to share the love of Christ with an Afghani. As an American citizen, however, I don’t trust the government rulers who are obviously seeking to overthrow the American experiment in freedom by dividing and conquering. Bringing Afghans here where it is unlikely the majority will assimilate but isolate themselves in communities closed to outsiders will continue to fracture our society. American culture is going the way of the dodo.
So now that our 20-year “war” in Afghanistan is over, what happens now? Nearly 90 retired generals and admirals signed a letter urging Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley should resign. Their reasoning is that the catastrophic failure in Afghanistan has enormous consequences “‘and will reverberate for decades beginning with the safety of Americans and Afghans’ left behind under Taliban rule.”
They argued that upon learning about President Joe Biden’s plan to close the Bagram Air Base, both Milley and Austin should have “recommended against this dangerous withdrawal in the strongest possible terms.” If the president went forward with it against their advice, they should have “resigned in protest as a matter of conscience and public statement.”
[…]
When Biden decided to hold firm with the Aug. 31 withdrawal date, the senior military leaders “had a choice” to make, Arbuckle added.
“They could either salute and go try to execute the orders as best as they can,” or they could’ve resigned and told Biden, “I cannot in all good conscience follow that order because I understand the serious implications coming from it.”
“We need to make it clear that the ultimate decision making in anything that has to do with conflicts of warfare is the president of the United States,” he continued. “He decides … all matters regarding warfare. So it all comes back to the political side.”
You know that your tax dollars and mine funded the 20-year war. Did you know the government gave billions to contractors?
Over the last 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the U.S. spent $89 billion in taxpayer dollars to fund the building and training of the Afghan National Army with an estimated $2.26 trillion in total operating costs funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Reminder: government doesn’t produce anything to collect its receipts, which it calls “revenue” — as though it were a business conducting transactions with the public. It simply decrees that it is allowed to take obscene amounts of money from you and me and then does it. I believe we fought a war of independence over excessive taxation.
Seven buses of “orphans, Christians and 25 American citizens” were turned away at the Kabul airport after former Recon Marine Chad Robichaux coordinated the rescue efforts. Here’s what he wrote to a friend:
“Our two guys on the ground spent all night rescuing 7 buses loads of people: 300 orphans, 100 Christians, 25 Americans,” the message read. “The families of the pilots that have been shuttling our flights.”
“After getting them on the airport and into a holding area, the Colonel over the 82nd had the whole group kicked off the airport and into the hands of the Taliban because he didn’t like the fact that we were out there rescuing people,” Robichaux claimed. “Essentially murdered them.”
An “update” from Robichaux said, “We have unofficial intel that they ended up in the hands of the Taliban.”
Finally, while some military working dogs have been evacuated from Afghanistan, a few dozen service dogs have been abandoned to the Taliban.
“As the country’s first national humane organization and largest certifier of animal welfare in the world, it sickens us to sit idly by and watch these brave dogs who valiantly served our country be put to death or worse,” Ganzert said.
Another group, Veteran Sheepdogs of America, said on Monday it was attempting to get 51 working dogs out of Kabul. On Tuesday, the group said it was able to raise $1.67 million to charter a 737 plane to evacuate the animals, but needed another $500,000 to replace an animal rescue operation that “fell through.”
It’s all so pathetic and humiliating. But leave it to president 45 to bring a sane American message to America.