The upside of defeat in Afghanistan

 

Right now the nation is facing its second defeat in the last 50 years.  First, we were defeated in Viet Nam.  Now we are defeated in Afghanistan.  Tens of thousands of our citizens are trapped behind enemy lines.  The country is reeling from this disaster.  

But there's the upside.  This is a defeat, a disaster so blatant, so avoidable, so close to everyone in the country that it can't be covered up.  We're watching it live on TV.  Keep in mind that this disaster was brought to you by the same people who thought that this was a smart idea.  White House intern skipping around the office.

And that means it's an opportunity to change the direction of the country.

Conservatives - and I am persuaded that includes most of the people in this country - know in their bones that the country was headed in the wrong direction.  This country was rapidly being consumed by the Left.  The Left was triumphant everywhere you looked: culture, academia, government, law, medicine, churches, and especially the media were steering the country in the direction they wanted it to go.  And those who objected were canceled, destroyed, even imprisoned.  

Now suddenly, in the space of a few days, the Left crashed.  The political leaders of the Left: Biden, Loyd Austin, General Milley, Kamela Harris, Anthony Blinken the rest of the Biden administration, have crashed.  

The Afghanistan debacle was not the fault of the men who fought there, but the leaders who failed, and lied.  They failed and lied so spectacularly that even its handmaidens in the press are unable to spin their way out of this.   

Roger Kimball writes: 

The Rotten Edifice Revealed

In Afghanistan, the technocratic legitimacy of our administrative masters is being exploded.

 The problem is, of course, the wondrous world of instant communications. We have all seen these videos of the Taliban manhandling the crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden Administration by the British Parliament. And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. 

Afghanistan is becoming the largest hostage crisis in our history, making Jimmy Carter's hostage crisis in Iran disappear into irrelevance.  Where are we headed?   We are in for a reckoning.

For that we have the bumbling, mentally incontinent Joe Biden to thank, he and his clown car of self-absorbed spiritually adipose bureaucrats who prance about in a cloud of self-importance, shedding disaster like dandruff. 

But they're simply the end result of a nation that has killed tens of millions of its children in the womb, where actual educational institutions charge obscene sums to teach children to hate their parents, their religion, their country, and people with different skin colors.  Where inept government officials perform medical experiments on an entire world while lying that it's about science.

There is a God and he punishes sin.  And there has been a lot of sinning.  The Israel of the Bible learned this lesson numerous times.  But he forgives those who repent.  

Remember when TIME asked if Obama was "God the Father or God the Son?"

Trolling the press corps, Trump then referred to himself as “the Chosen One,” in an exchange about trade-warring with China during his impromptu presser on the way to Marine One. So if you were looking for reasons to calm down about Trump using language with a “Messiah complex” tone to it, you were out of luck.

Mark Steyn on Teddy Kennedy: "I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's"

Speaking Ill of the Ted ...

This is the 50th anniversary of the day that Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kopechne.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Senator Edward M Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At The Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by such a death panel?

Read the whole thing.

Ralph Northam Thinks Voters Are A Bunch Of Gullible Fools

At this point, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam should be chased from office for continuing to treat voters like they’re a bunch of credulous idiots.

If you had dressed up as a Klansman or put on blackface for a costume party when you were a 24-year-old student, would you remember the incident? Smearing black makeup all over your face to look like Michael Jackson or draping yourself in a white sheet to cosplay a racist cross-burner—even way back in 1984 Virginia—wasn’t just another Saturday night out drinking with friends. It would take a bit of effort. It might be noticed. It might even make the yearbook.

If someone accused me of attending a costume party dressed as a member of the Schutzstaffel, I would be exceptionally confident in my answer. Yet Northam couldn’t initially recall if he was the one wearing blackface or the one wearing the KKK robe in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook photo with his name attached—which is definitely a weird thing to be unsure about....

One also imagines that people like CNN’s Chris Cuomo wouldn’t be “okay” with moving on if a conservative governor had been seen wearing blackface. “If you hold on to your guns, and you wait,” he told Anderson Cooper yesterday, “there is a good chance that if the media can’t make it happen soon, they will go away.” A skeptic may note that the way the Northam stories have been covered tells us that the media doesn’t want it to happen....

In a decent world, Northam would have stepped down after casually describing and defending legal infanticide while discussing a Democratic Party bill that would have allowed abortion until the very moment of birth without any restrictions. But don’t worry, you survived, governor. You can stop treating everyone like a bunch of gullible fools.

Seattle’s Revolt of the Elites

Since the release of Eric Johnson’s documentary Seattle Is Dying, which depicts an epidemic of street homelessness, addiction, crime, and disorder, city elites have launched a coordinated information campaign targeted at voters frustrated with the city’s response to homelessness. Earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.

Virginia's Northam cancels fundraiser appearance as protesters gathered

The sympathetic press is happy to forget, but maybe not everyone feels the same way.

Northam's scheduled appearance drew about 60 people from the NAACP and another 30 from the state's Republican Party, with the two groups assembling on either side of an asphalt walkway on a muggy and gray afternoon. Both groups took Northam to task for his admission to wearing blackface, but Republicans also protested his pro-abortion rights stance....Republicans have seized on comments he made during a January radio interview about a bill that would have reduced restrictions on late-term abortions, arguing that he suggested killing live babies. Northam has called the notion that he had endorsed infanticide "disgusting," but he has refused to clarify his comments. Abortion dominated many of the signs Sunday.

Note the lie in this paper's story. Northam specifically said that after a baby is born, it should be made comfortable until the doctor and mother decided what to do with it. That advocates killing a live baby in a post-birth abortion.  Period. Full stop.

Mark Steyn on Clinton and the media

To reiterate: Trump became the GOP nominee because the boy scouts like Mitt all got trashed as monsters anyway. So the base grasped something that the donors, throwing their money away on Jeb, didn't - that the playing field is hopelessly tilted. The Democrats were crowning the kleptocrat enabler of a credibly accused rapist running a pay-for-play charity fraud whose only purpose was to enable them to live like heads of state in the interregnum between their first reign and the impending restoration. And the press had not a word to say about this.

12 Pieces Of Proof: The MSM Knew Obama Spied On Trump and LIED To Cover It Up

What I am about to present to you is what really happened. All the proof is linked below, but what I'm about to do is what I call "Revealing the Matrix," showing you the truth backed by incontrovertible fact and the media's own words. Not my words. Not President Trump's words. The media's words.

We're gunna cut through all the code, all the spin, all the fog, all the lies, and all the Coordinated Narratives used by our media to obscure Truth.

Our national media has known for months that the Obama administration spied on Team Trump. This was not only common knowledge within the media community, it was no secret. In fact, as you'll see below, for two big reasons, the media was overjoyed that this spying had occurred: (1) they got scoops damaging to Trump, and (2) in their provincial and cultish minds, the very fact that the oh-so pure Obama administration felt the need to spy, could only mean Trump was in bed with Putin.

In fact, the media was actually having a big public party using Obama's spying. Hoo-hah here's a scoop! Whee-hee Flynn said this! Woo-woo palace intrigue! Ha-haaah here's what so-and-so said! Tra-la-la here's what so-and-so did!

And then on March 4, in a series of tweets that had the exact same effect as political nukes, Trump himself confirmed what the media had already told us, that the Obama administration had spied on him and his team. Trump's brilliance was focusing on the sleazy and illegal act of the actual spying. And this is when the media realized that all their ha-has and tra-la-las were about to backfire. Their Precious Barry was now at risk, and so the shameless cover up and lying began …

Suddenly, right around 8 a.m. on Saturday, March 4, the conventional wisdom and public knowledge that the Obama administration had spied on Trump, was surrounded by the media's semantic wagons which were manned by lying journalists armed with hair-splitting. I don't want to go through all that again, so you can read why Trump told the 100% truth in the first section of this piece. The bottom line, though, is this …

Trump accused Obama of spying on him.

Obama did spy on Trump.

The media knew Obama spied on Trump.

The media lied and covered up the fact that Obama spied on Trump.

We know this with absolute certainty because the media itself told us so. And here is all the proof you will ever need to make that case … [emphasis mine throughout]

1. Heat Street - November 7, 2016

EXCLUSIVE: FBI ‘Granted FISA Warrant’ Covering Trump Camp’s Ties To Russia

Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.

So let's stop for a moment to make a couple of things clear. The FBI reports to the Department of Justice, which at the time was run by Obama's highly politicized Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. The author of this piece, Louise Mensch, despises Trump, and if you'll look at the publication date, she dropped this supposed bombshell the night before the election, and did so for reasons I should not have to explain.

You are now asking yourselves: Who the hell is Heat Street and how does this prove anything? That's a fair question, let me answer it this way: As you'll see below, this report of the Obama administration asking for and receiving a surveillance warrant to monitor Team Trump is confirmed by a number of other MSM sources.

Moreover, no less than The New York Times re-published this information as recently as last weekend.

Read the whole thing.

WATCH THE ‘SYCOPHANTIC’ W.H. PRESS CORPS SHOWER OBAMA WITH ADULATION IN FINAL PRESSER

President Obama began his final press conference on a surprising note. Despite “not liking all of the stories you’ve filed,” he told the gathered White House press corps, it’s you’re duty to ask “tough questions” and not be “sycophants.”

Too bad reporters were apparently not paying attention.

What followed was one softball after another, with rhetorical foot massages sandwiched between.

“Thank you, Mr. President” each reporter began.

“It’s been an honor,” said another, before literally making the "call me" expression while pointing at her cellphone.

A reporter for The Blade, Chris Johnson, used his opportunity to ask the president a question to instead list a series of LGBT “accomplishments” Obama enjoyed during his tenure — before setting the president up to attack Trump.

“On LGBT rights, we have seen a lot of achievements over the past 8 years, including signing hate crime protection legislation, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ repeal, marriage equality nationwide and ensuring transgender people feel visible and respected,” Johnson began. “How do you think LGBT rights will rank in terms of your accomplishments and your legacy? And how confident are you that Congress will endure or continue under the President-elect?”

“Are you fearful for the status of those DREAMers” under Trump, another reporter asked suggestively.

“Under your watch, people have said, you have expanded the rubber band of inclusion," another reporter began. "And with the election and the incoming administration, people are saying, the rubber band has recoiled and maybe even is broken. And I’m thinking back to a time on Air Force One going to Selma, Ala., when you said your job was to close the gaps the remain."

"What gaps still remain?" she asked. "And also, what part will you play in fixing those gaps in your new life?”

With questions like these, it's no wonder Obama doesn't want to stray too far from Washington.

Go to the link for the video.

Of course this is nothing new, here's the boot-licking press a few years ago.