Biden’s Saigon Impeachable Incompetence: There are no words to describe the unmitigated disaster the President and military leaders in the Pentagon “planned.”
Biden’s Afghanistan folly is the worst-handled foreign-policy crisis since the Bay of Pigs and the most devastating blow to American prestige since the fall of Saigon.
As Obama’s CIA Director said “this is Biden’s Bay of Pigs.”
A disgraceful retreat that worse, left BILLIONS of dollars’ worth of military equipment and arms for the Taliban and Iran. Iran loyalists immediately started shipping America’s latest technology found in advanced weaponry and equipment to Iran.
Which incompetent “intelligence assessment” did President Biden get that made him think he could just pull out without securing our allies, weapons, and intelligence???
How incompetent much President Biden’s team be to have allowed this to happen???
How competent and capable is President Biden to lead the free world given his apparent lack of basic common sense and intelligence assessment???
There was bipartisan support to leave Afghanistan. However, it was the execution of that withdrawal which has been an absolute disaster. Leaving friends and allies behind, arming the enemy, and staining America’s reputation abroad.
Make no mistake, there is one Commander-in-Chief.
One person who sits behind the Resolute Desk.
The buck stops with the President of the United States.
Not only am I mad, I’m disgusted, scared and afraid that the Biden Administration has just armed our worst enemies…with taxpayer funded incompetence.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- The ghosts of Saigon are seen in the stunning collapse of Afghanistan, Rand Paul attempts to tame the beast of federal spending, and Biden’s approval rating takes a major hit in a new opinion poll!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
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Biden’s Afghanistan Surrender
The President tries to duck responsibility for a calamitous withdrawal.
President Biden’s statement on Saturday washing his hands of Afghanistan deserves to go down as one of the most shameful in history by a Commander in Chief at such a moment of American retreat. As the Taliban closed in on Kabul, Mr. Biden sent a confirmation of U.S. abandonment that absolved himself of responsibility, deflected blame to his predecessor, and more or less invited the Taliban to take over the country.
With that statement of capitulation, the Afghan military’s last resistance collapsed. Taliban fighters captured Kabul, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country while the U.S. frantically tried to evacuate Americans. The jihadists the U.S. toppled 20 years ago for sheltering Osama bin Laden will now fly their flag over the U.S. Embassy building on the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Our goal all along has been to offer constructive advice to avoid this outcome. We criticized Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban and warned about the risks of his urge to withdraw in a rush, and we did the same for Mr. Biden. The President’s advisers offered an alternative, as did the Afghanistan Study Group. Mr. Biden, as always too assured of his own foreign-policy acumen, refused to listen.
Rep. Michael McCaul: Biden owns Afghanistan mess – he wasted time, ignored advice and now blames others
As the Biden administration faces yet another self-imposed crisis, they are once again falling on their favorite talking point: blame anyone but us.
It’s become a common refrain from the Biden administration. And one that usually has very little truth behind it. But here, when facing one of the worst international crises in years, those words are particularly pathetic and painful.
It’s been almost seven months since President Biden took office. In that time, he made quick work of reversing dozens of President Trump’s policies and positions, including Remain in Mexico, the asylum cooperation agreements with Central American countries, the Paris climate deal, and the Iran nuclear deal.
et he claimed to have no choice but to move forward with the withdrawal outlined in the U.S.-Taliban agreement despite the severely deteriorating situation on the ground. Despite the fact that the agreement was conditions-based – for a reason – and the Taliban had completely failed to hold up their side of the bargain.
‘This is Actually Happening’ resident Joe Biden and his inner circle were in an ebullient mood.
It was Wednesday morning, Aug. 11, and they were basking in the glow of back-to-back legislative wins. The day before, the Senate had passed a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. And in the early hours of Wednesday morning, they witnessed the advancement of a $3.5 trillion framework to finance Democrats’ social agenda.
Watching the Senate vote tally in front of a television screen in the president’s private dining room, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris pumped their fists in triumph. The linchpin of their domestic agenda had begun to fall into place.
Biden was looking forward to his summer vacation set to begin in a few days, including some downtime at Camp David and at his house near the beach in Delaware. Meanwhile, many senior and mid-level West Wing staffers were also prepping for some time off, setting their “out of office” email replies. “It’s a ghost town,” a White House official said, describing the scene in the West Wing before people were later called back.
But as the White House was taking a giant victory lap over its domestic accomplishments, a disaster was looming on the other side of the world in Afghanistan.
This account of five chaotic days in the middle of August is based on interviews with 33 U.S. officials and lawmakers, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.
By Wednesday morning — dusk in Central Asia — the Afghan government’s already brittle control of the war-torn country was quickly unraveling in the face of a swift Taliban offensive coinciding with the nearly complete withdrawal of U.S. troops that Biden ordered in April.
The biggest lesson from Afghanistan we learned 20 years ago
The biggest lessons we should learn from Afghanistan happened 20 years ago…
…The shift in U.S. strategy to impose a federal government in Afghanistan was a failure from its commencement, and it is now a tragically unfolding disaster before our eyes.
The military lesson of Afghanistan is how successful small units can be in bringing American military power to bear in unconventional ways. And we must abandon what appears to be a near-instinctual desire in the U.S. military (and among the neoconservatives of both parties) to enter every national-level fray with numerically overwhelming military forces of our own.
Afghanistan is not our country. We succeeded when we helped willing Afghans fight for their country by supporting those willing to fight against our shared enemy, the Taliban.
The broader strategic lesson of international relations is that we should give up a significant degree of control of the overall situation in a country such as Afghanistan and instead partner with those who can be convinced to partner with us to pursue shared goals, such as defeating the Taliban.
And that’s it.
No trillion-dollar nation-building. Minimize our exposure to loss of American life and of overcommitment. And avoid never-ending wars with no real exit strategy, all of which must eventually come to an end, as we are seeing so tragically in Kabul.
If ever faced with a similar situation in the future, America should stay with the straightforward and proven plan that brought such success in the first three months in Afghanistan, not the endless plan that followed that brought us almost 20 years of failure, death, and debt.
CIA’s Former Counterterrorism Chief for the Region: Afghanistan, Not An Intelligence Failure — Something Much Worse
While it’s certainly convenient to depict the shock and miscalculation U.S. officials claim over Afghanistan’s tragic, rapid fall to the Taliban as an intelligence failure, the reality is far worse. It’s a convenient deflection of responsibility for decisions taken owing to political and ideological considerations and provides a scapegoat for a policy decision that’s otherwise unable to offer a persuasive defense.
As CIA’s Counterterrorism Chief for South and Southwest Asia before my 2019 retirement, I was responsible for assessments concerning Afghanistan prepared for former President Donald Trump. And as a volunteer with candidate Joe Biden’s counterterrorism working group, I consulted on these same issues. The decision Trump made, and Biden ratified, to rapidly withdraw U.S. forces came despite warnings projecting the outcome we’re now witnessing. And it was a path to which Trump and Biden allowed themselves to be held captive owing to the “ending Forever Wars” slogan they both embraced.
The U.S. Intelligence Community assessed Afghanistan’s fortunes according to various scenarios and conditions and depending on the multiple policy alternatives from which the president could choose. So, was it 30 days from withdrawal to collapse? 60? 18 months? Actually, it was all of the above, the projections aligning with the various “what ifs.” Ultimately, it was assessed, Afghan forces might capitulate within days under the circumstances we witnessed, in projections highlighted to Trump officials and future Biden officials alike.
Mike Pence: Biden Broke Our Deal With the Taliban
The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is a foreign-policy humiliation unlike anything our country has endured since the Iran hostage crisis.
It has embarrassed America on the world stage, caused allies to doubt our dependability, and emboldened enemies to test our resolve. Worst of all, it has dishonored the memory of the heroic Americans who helped bring terrorists to justice after 9/11, and all who served in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.
In February 2020, the Trump administration reached an agreement that required the Taliban to end all attacks on U.S. military personnel, to refuse terrorists safe harbor, and to negotiate with Afghan leaders on creating a new government. As long as these conditions were met, the U.S. would conduct a gradual and orderly withdrawal of military forces.
Unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council, the agreement immediately brought to Afghanistan a stability unseen in decades. In the past 18 months, the U.S. has not suffered a single combat casualty there.
By the time we left office, the Afghan government and the Taliban each controlled their respective territories, neither was mounting major offensives, and America had only 2,500 U.S. troops in the country—the smallest military presence since the war began in 2001.
America’s endless war was coming to a dignified end, and Bagram Air Base ensured we could conduct counterterrorism missions through the war’s conclusion.
The progress our administration made toward ending the war was possible because Taliban leaders understood that the consequences of violating the deal would be swift and severe. After our military took out Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, and U.S. Special Forces killed the leader of ISIS, the Taliban had no doubt we would keep our promise.
But when Mr. Biden became president, he quickly announced that U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for an additional four months without a clear reason for doing so. There was no plan to transport the billions of dollars worth of American equipment recently captured by the Taliban, or evacuate the thousands of Americans now scrambling to escape Kabul, or facilitate the regional resettlement of the thousands of Afghan refugees who will now be seeking asylum in the U.S. with little or no vetting. Rather, it seems that the president simply didn’t want to appear to be abiding by the terms of a deal negotiated by his predecessor.
Biden’s Chamberlain Moment in Afghanistan
‘You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Winston Churchill’s words to Neville Chamberlain following the Munich agreement echo grimly across Washington this week as the Biden administration reckons with the consequences of the worst-handled foreign-policy crisis since the Bay of Pigs and the most devastating blow to American prestige since the fall of Saigon.
Joe Biden believed three things about Afghanistan. First, that he could stage a dignified and orderly withdrawal from America’s longest war. Second, that a Taliban win in Afghanistan would not seriously affect U.S. power and prestige world-wide. Third, that Americans were eager enough to put the Afghan war behind them that voters wouldn’t punish him even if the withdrawal went pear-shaped. He was utterly and unspinnably wrong about the first. One fears he was equally wrong about the second. We shall see about the third, and his Monday afternoon speech staunchly defending the pullout indicates that he believes he can carry the country with him.
The bipartisan scuttle caucus of which President Biden is a founding member—and former President Trump an eager recruit—argued that withdrawal would enhance rather than undermine American credibility. Ending a war in a remote country of little intrinsic interest to the U.S. does not, one can argue, make America look weak. If anything, the two-decade U.S. intervention testifies to an American doggedness that should reassure our allies about our will. At the same time, cutting our losses after 20 years of failing to build a solid government and military in Afghanistan demonstrates a realism and wisdom that should reassure allies about Washington’s judgment.
No, Biden Can’t Blame Trump For The Afghanistan Withdrawal Disaster
Under Biden’s direct command, the Taliban reportedly seized hundreds of U.S. Humvees, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and several million-dollar U.S. drones.
While the Biden administration has already attempted to shift blame to Donald Trump for the scenes coming out of Afghanistan, Biden owns both the decision to leave and the catastrophic withdrawal he oversaw as commander-in-chief.
“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. forces,” Biden said in a statement released Saturday.
“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice — follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict,” President Biden maintained in the written statement.
Bunk. President Biden was no more bound by former President Trump’s agreement with the Taliban than Trump was required to abide by former President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, known formerly as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Neither agreement bound future presidents because neither deal was presented to the Senate for ratification.
As the current commander-in-chief, Biden holds power to decide every aspect of the withdrawal decision. Biden already extended Trump’s May 1, 2021 deadline to September, and if he believed the Taliban too strong, the Afghanistan government too weak, or the withdrawal decision entirely misplaced, the current president could have changed course.
He didn’t because he didn’t want to.
Billions in US weaponry seized by Taliban
Billions of dollars of U.S. weapons are now in the hands of the Taliban following the quick collapse of Afghan security forces that were trained to use the military equipment.
Among the items seized by the Taliban are Black Hawk helicopters and A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft.
Photos have also circulated of Taliban fighters clutching U.S.-made M4 carbines and M16 rifles instead of their iconic AK-47s. And the militants have been spotted with U.S. humvees and mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles.
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While it’s virtually impossible to operate advanced aircraft without training, seizing the hardware gives the militants a propaganda boost and underscores the amount of wasted funds on U.S. military efforts in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.
“When an armed group gets their hands on American-made weaponry, it’s sort of a status symbol. It’s a psychological win,” said Elias Yousif, deputy director of the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor.
“Clearly, this is an indictment of the U.S. security cooperation enterprise broadly,” he added. “It really should raise a lot of concerns about what is the wider enterprise that is going on every single day, whether that’s in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia.”
The United States spent an estimated $83 billion training and equipping Afghan security forces over the last two decades.
How the Taliban Overran the Afghan Army, Built by the U.S. Over 20 Years
The Afghan government outpost in Imam Sahib, a district of northern Kunduz province, held out for two months after being surrounded by the Taliban. At first, elite commando units would come once a week on a resupply run. Then, these runs became more scarce, as did the supplies.
“In the last days, there was no food, no water and no weapons,” said trooper Taj Mohammad, 38. Fleeing in one armored personnel carrier and one Ford Ranger, the remaining men finally made a run to the relative safety of the provincial capital, which collapsed weeks later. They left behind another 11 APCs to the Taliban.
As district after district fell in this summer’s Taliban offensive, without much visible support from the Afghan national army and police forces, other soldiers simply made the calculation that it wasn’t worth fighting anymore—especially if the Taliban offered them safe passage home, as they usually did.
“Everyone just surrendered their guns and ran away,” said Rahimullah, a 25-year soldier who joined the army a year ago and served in the Shahr-e-Bozorg district of northeastern Badakhshan province. “We didn’t receive any help from the central government, and so the district fell without any fighting.”
Worse Than Saigon
In yielding Afghanistan to the Taliban, Joe Biden has engineered the worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation.
While President Joe Biden cowers at Camp David, the Taliban are humiliating America. The retreat from Afghanistan is our worst foreign-policy disaster in a generation. As the Taliban marches into Kabul, they’re murdering civilians, reimposing their vicious Islamist law, and preparing to turn Afghanistan back into a bandit regime. The U.S. embassy has told Americans to shelter in place. Refugees are fleeing to the airport, begging to escape the coming bloodbath. None of this had to happen.
America is the world’s greatest superpower. We ought to act like it. But President Biden and his national-security team have failed to protect even the American embassy in Kabul. They have broken America’s promises to the men and women who long for freedom — especially those thousands of Afghans who served alongside our military and intelligence services. They are turning their backs on the women and children who are desperate for space on the remaining flights out of hell.
Gross incompetence has given the Taliban a terrible opportunity to slaughter our allies. Eighty-eight thousand of our Afghan allies have applied for visas to get out of the country, but this administration has approved just 1,200 so far. I’ve been among a bipartisan group of senators that has pushed Biden to expedite this process, but to no avail. At this point, it’s not clear how many we’ll be able to get out. Every translator and ally who stood by us is now at risk.
This bloodshed wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. For months, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned the Biden administration that this would happen. Now the administration is acting like this is a surprise. It’s shameful, dishonest spin…
…Our troops didn’t lose this war. Politicians chose defeat. We never had to let the Taliban win, but a bipartisan doctrine of weakness has humiliated the world’s greatest superpower and handed Afghanistan to butchers. In the next few weeks, the situation in Afghanistan will get much worse. Americans need to pray for that troubled country. President Biden needs to man up, come out of hiding, and take charge of the mess he created. Secure the airfields and get as many souls out as possible. Time is short.
Disaster in Afghanistan Will Follow Us Home
U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan could create a haven for terrorist groups, experts warn.
During the 2020 political campaign, President Biden presented himself as a globe-trotting leader who had helmed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as President Barack Obama’s point man on complex international issues and who was determined to bring a steady hand to national security.
Yet the turmoil that has engulfed Afghanistan, which has led Mr. Biden to send 5,000 troops back to the country, roughly doubling the force he decided in April to take out, has confronted the White House with a crisis that could have lasting humanitarian and national-security consequences, former officials say.
“We are not at the worst point yet,” said Carter Malkasian, the author of a comprehensive history of the Afghan conflict who served as an adviser to former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford. “Now that the Taliban are moving into Kabul and overturning the democratic government we have been supporting for 20 years, it is highly likely they will seek to punish, and perhaps even execute, the Afghans who worked with us.”
Mr. Biden has resolutely defended his troop withdrawal decision, saying that Washington had accomplished its mission in the region by killing Osama bin Laden and depriving al Qaeda of its sanctuary in Afghanistan, and had nothing to gain by perpetuating its military deployments in the country.
“One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” Mr. Biden said in a statement Saturday. “And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken ramped up the Biden administration’s effort to deflect criticism by alleging that former President Trump had allowed the Taliban threat to grow on his watch while boxing in his successor with his Afghan diplomacy.
“The Taliban was at its strongest position in terms of its strength since 2001 when we came into office,” Mr. Blinken said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Some former officials, however, say Mr. Biden’s troop withdrawal was a blunder and that the fallout could have lasting repercussions. The cratering security, which has put the Biden administration in a race to evacuate thousands of Afghan allies, may threaten the rights of women and could provide terrorist groups with an opportunity to move into Afghanistan’s ungoverned spaces.
The whole world is watching
During the Vietnam era, anti-war protesters responded to the club-swinging tactics of police with a chant: “The whole world is watching!”
Now that a different war is following a similar arc — long, blood-soaked years of U.S. military involvement ending with the enemy’s swift sacking of the capital — that taunting phrase aptly captures President Joe Biden’s new problem.
The fall of Afghanistan has painful implications for a new administration — and for perceptions of the efficacy of U.S. power and the judgment of the leader who wields it — across the globe, from Washington to Beijing, to Moscow, to the capitals of Europe.
Biden told the nation Monday “I stand squarely behind my decision,” but it is hard to imagine events that could more vividly underscore the gap between American aims and ability to achieve its aims than the breathtakingly rapid fall of Kabul after two decades of U.S. military combat and diplomatic toil, coming just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that began the enterprise.
It is clear that echo is carrying widely. In Europe, the original euphoria among most traditional allies about the departure of Donald Trump from the White House is now commonly tempered by concern about whether his successor is sufficiently commanding and reliable to restore the United States to being a constructive force in a chaotic and interdependent world.
Afghanistan Illustrates Biden’s Disastrous Foreign-Policy Instincts
He’s usually wrong, and he’s never called to account for his policy flip-flops.
The unfolding disaster in Afghanistan is a bipartisan, trans-administrational failure. It is a humiliation.
Whatever your position is on the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the fact is that after 20 years, after thousands of lives and hundreds of billions spent on the military, police, training, infrastructure and education, the country is likely to fall to radicals in less than 20 days. As of this writing, the Taliban are routing Afghan troops with seeming ease, taking Kandahar, Herat, and closing in on Kabul. The United States has been forced to send 3,000 troops to evacuate Americans to avoid another Fall of Saigon moment.
And for the past 20 years, Joe Biden has been on every side of nearly every position on Afghanistan — usually the wrong one at the wrong time. It’s surreal that a person so uncannily incompetent, so tenaciously wrong on foreign policy, could rise to the presidency, but here we are.
Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy
Our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, and staked their lives on us is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided.
There’s plenty of blame to go around for the 20-year debacle in Afghanistan—enough to fill a library of books. Perhaps the effort to rebuild the country was doomed from the start. But our abandonment of the Afghans who helped us, counted on us, staked their lives on us, is a final, gratuitous shame that we could have avoided. The Biden administration failed to heed the warnings on Afghanistan, failed to act with urgency—and its failure has left tens of thousands of Afghans to a terrible fate. This betrayal will live in infamy. The burden of shame falls on President Joe Biden.
Khan, an Afghan interpreter I first wrote about in March, is on the verge of escaping from Afghanistan with his wife and small son. Three clocks are ticking. The first is his wife’s pregnancy. She’s at 34 weeks—two more weeks and she’ll no longer be allowed to board a flight out of Afghanistan. The second clock is the availability of a visa to the United States and an air ticket. After years of waiting, yesterday Khan finally received his Special Immigrant Visa as one among thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. military. By then, amid the general panic of Afghans trying to get out of the country, ticket prices to Europe and the U.S. had doubled, from $800 to $1,600, and seats were going fast. A travel agent told Khan that none were available until the end of August, but yesterday morning, Khan’s pro bono lawyer, Julie Kornfeld of the International Refugee Assistance Project, managed to book him seats on a Turkish Airlines flight on Tuesday.
The third clock is the Taliban. In the past week, every city except Kabul fell to the insurgents. A few days ago, U.S. intelligence sources predicted that Kabul could go as soon as next month. This morning, the Taliban are at the city gates, preparing to enter the capital and seize total power. “I think when they enter Kabul, first they will block the airport, because they do not want us to escape,” Khan told me by phone from Kabul. Just as he seems to have obtained everything he needs to save himself and his family, it might be too late.
In recent days Kabul became the last point of escape for Afghans who fear for their lives under the return of the Taliban. Every provincial capital has fallen to the insurgent offensive; regional airports have closed; roads to Kabul and the borders are being controlled by Taliban checkpoints; government-security forces are in a state of collapse across the country. The U.S. has sent several thousand Marines to assist with the evacuation of embassy personnel, even as those officials deal with the flood of visa applications and entreaties from interpreters and others with American connections. Today, the U.S. government is more focused on saving our own than on saving the Afghans who counted on us. For many of them, time is running out. For some, it already has.
The Taliban won. Here’s what that could mean
Now that the Taliban has regained power after nearly two decades in the Afghan hinterlands, the average Afghan will face a radically different government, and lifestyle, than the one they have known since the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.
How will the Taliban rule? Have they changed?
When the Islamist insurgent group first came to power in 1996, they billed themselves as a corrective movement in a society mired in the lawlessness of years of civil warfare.
Under their harsh interpretation of religious jurisprudence, women and girls were pushed almost completely out of public life and forbidden from employment and schooling. The Taliban imposed sartorial injunctions on both sexes, and mandated such brutal punishment as hand-chopping and execution by stoning — for infractions of their brand of Islamic law. They also banned television and music.
Lately, the militant group has sought to present a more benevolent image.
“We will respect rights of women,” said Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen in an interview with the BBC. “Our policy is that women will have access to education and work.”
But they will also have “to wear the hijab,” he added, referring to the Islamic head covering for women.
Other statements from the Taliban have sought to reassure Afghans and others that insurgents would not engage in looting or revenge killings against members of the former government, and that embassies, international missions and charities would be allowed to continue their work unperturbed. Even international journalists, the group said, could operate after registering with authorities.
Taliban accumulate massive amounts of U.S.-supplied firepower
The Taliban accumulated an enormous amount of U.S.-supplied guns, ammunition, helicopters, combat aircraft and more after Afghan security forces collapsed this weekend, AP reports.
Why it matters: The U.S. spent billions of dollars over two decades to train and support the Afghan security forces, but the Taliban was the ultimate beneficiary of the decades-long investments.
Asked Monday if the U.S. is taking any steps to ensure military equipment does not fall into the hands of the Taliban, Pentagon logistics specialist Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor told reporters: “I don’t have the answer to that question.”
Driving the news: The Taliban captured modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces across the country.
The Taliban accumulated firepower — including guns, ammunition and helicopters — from district centers.
They experienced bigger gains, including acquiring combat aircraft, when they toppled provincial capitals and military bases.
Biden has set the inflation time bomb
Although little noticed by the media, a research report by Wall Street economists predicts a significant burst of inflation fueled by the “epic proportion of monetary and fiscal stimulus.” It warns that global economies are “sitting on a time bomb.”
The report is a stark warning that President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion tax and spending plan could return our economy to the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. And surely, also, the economic disruption that followed.
Washington’s massive stimulus and debt was driving higher inflation and threatening economic growth. According to the report, the dramatic shift in macroeconomic policy taking place in Washington is “scary,” with inflation being downplayed while massive fiscal and monetary stimulus is being “coordinated in ways the world has never seen before.”
The report points out that “never before have we seen such expansionary fiscal and monetary policy” and that the “explosive growth in debt” will lead to higher inflation, leaving “global economies sitting on a time bomb.” When the Federal Reserve is finally forced to act, the tighter monetary policy “will be highly disruptive to the markets and the economy,” leading to a significant recession and “setting off a chain of financial distress around the world.”
This is the economic road map to ruin. Biden has set the fuse on a time bomb of inflation, debt, and financial disruption.
Biden’s Plan To Outsource The U.S. Oil And Gas Industry
It is not a revelation to discover that the Biden administration intends to phase out the U.S. oil and gas industry. But it is astonishing to see how quickly it is moving to accomplish this, while sending production abroad to producers in Russia and Middle Eastern nations whose commitment to reduce greenhouse gases is at best questionable.
The most recent action, revealed on August 11, was to implore OPEC and fellow traveler Russia to increase their production as demand in fast recovering economies makes up the shortfalls caused by the pandemic. Polling data in the U.S. about inflation caused in no small part by rising gasoline prices undoubtedly is a prime mover behind the administration request. These are the same producers who just a few short months ago (in early 2020) flooded declining markets in an effort to destroy the economics of U.S. shale oil production. The Biden team also has given a boost to Russian gas production by backing off on attempts to derail the Nord Stream pipeline into Germany, which increases European dependence on the heavily polluting Russian extraction industry. U.S. liquified natural gas producers had hope and reasonable expectations of building capacity to supply European absent the deal with Russia.
The Biden team got off to a fast start in its assault on U.S. and North American oil production by blocking the Keystone XL Pipeline project, which would have contributed to jobs in the construction, refining and transportation sectors in the United States. The administration also has put any new Alaskan production on permanent hold and frozen any new exploration and development auctions in the lower 48 states and offshore.
Forty years later, what would Reagan think?
Forty years ago, on Aug. 13, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act, ushering in the longest era of economic prosperity in American history. On a foggy day outside his beloved Rancho del Cielo, Reagan’s tax cuts delivered on his promises of prosperity, limited government, and a much-needed economic turnaround.
To borrow from his well-known phrase, “Are we better off today than we were 40 years ago?”
Inflation is skyrocketing, spending is out of control, wages are stagnant, and our economy’s post-pandemic recovery has slowed so dramatically that the small business community is crying out in desperate need for workers they cannot afford.
Despite mounting evidence that his economic policies are not working, and his own top economists forecasting a dim future, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are hell-bent on dismantling Republican tax reform and imposing crippling new tax hikes on working families and small businesses across the country.
In fact, despite Biden’s promises to the contrary, even the left-leaning Tax Policy Center found that Biden’s tax proposals would raise taxes on 75% of middle-class families next year, with that number jumping up to 95% by 2031.
In 2017, we passed the most comprehensive overhaul of our tax code since the Reagan administration. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced taxes on middle-class families and small businesses across the country and created nearly 5 million jobs in the two years following its passage. It also delivered the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years (3.5%), all-time low unemployment for African American and Hispanic workers, and the fastest wage growth in a decade.
Joe Biden’s Haunted Legacy in Iraq
Biden’s long and contentious record in the country opens a window onto his foreign policy—and an identity crisis in the Democratic Party. This is the definitive history.
If joe biden wins the 2020 presidential election, he will be haunted by an old problem: the U.S. war in Iraq.
It’s an issue he has struggled with since 2002, when he cast a Senate vote that led to the U.S. invasion, and throughout his time as vice president—and one at the heart of an identity crisis engulfing the Democratic Party on foreign policy.
Uncertainty over how and when the U.S. should engage overseas defined the Obama administration’s failures in new wars in Syria and Libya, as well as in old ones in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that uncertainty persists in the confused and often evasive rhetoric various Democratic-primary candidates use as they wrestle with articulating a coherent vision of America’s role in the world.
Biden stands out from the crowd for his long record on foreign affairs and on Iraq in particular, where he has played a defining role not just in the war itself but in its chaotic aftermath, which enabled the rise of the Islamic State. While Biden touts his foreign-policy experience as one of his qualifications for office, his rivals bill Iraq as a prime example of his bad judgment.
The criticism tends to focus on Biden’s Senate vote for a resolution authorizing military force in Iraq, which George W. Bush used to justify his invasion. But his time leading Iraq policy during Barack Obama’s first term is more relevant to the present moment. Whoever wins the presidency in 2020 likely will confront a similar dilemma to the one Biden then faced: a lingering U.S. troop presence, a war-weary U.S. public, and an enemy that is down but not yet defeated.
This story begins in early 2009, after Obama swept into office promising to end the deeply unpopular war in Iraq. There were still 150,000 American soldiers in the country. The newly inaugurated president turned to his vice president and told him to bring the troops home. “We were sitting in the Oval Office one day and talking about [the troop presence], and Obama looked at Biden and said, ‘Joe, I think you should do this. We need sustained focus from the White House. You know Iraq better than anyone,’” Antony Blinken, Biden’s national security adviser, told me. “It was as simple as that.”
Dems shudder at ‘Kamala 2024’
It was one year ago Wednesday that Kamala Harris was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate. That auspicious moment catapulted the stone-cold loser of the Democratic presidential contest into prime time, a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
With the convenient defenestration of her main rival, handsy, outgoing Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the ambitious 56-year-old vice president is another step closer to the 2024 nomination — or 2028, if you believe Biden.
The problem for the Democrats is that she is unelectable. It’s the fake laughter, the handmaidenly comportment around Biden, the car-crash interviews and the complete inability to succeed at any of the tasks she has been handed, from immigration to vaccination.
Not for nothing was Harris billed the “most unpopular vice president in 50 years” by UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph.
She’s so unpopular that Hillary Clinton staffers, of all people, reportedly have been consulted for likability lessons.
Naturally, they blamed “sexism” for Harris’ troubles.
The truth is, if she’s not annoying, Harris is boring. Someone tried to get “#VPAppreciationDay trending Wednesday, but, of 30 or so tweets posted, not one made it into triple figures for likes or retweets.
If you had a strong president, of course, none of this would matter outside a little Beltway gaggle of ladies who lunch.
But Biden isn’t getting any younger. When he showed up to work for the first time this week, after lunch Tuesday, he was filmed wandering across the White House lawn in search of the entrance to his office.
Pay Attention: Conspiracy theories aside, there is something fishy about the Great Reset
‘The Great Reset’ conspiracy theories don’t seem to want to die. The theories were triggered by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) summit last year, which had the theme ‘The Great Reset’ and argued that the COVID crisis was an opportunity to address the burning issues facing the world. According to the BBC, the term ‘Great Reset’ has received more than eight million interactions on Facebook and has been shared almost two million times on Twitter since the WEF initiative was launched…
…The magic words are ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a concept that WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has been hammering for decades and which occupies pride of place in the WEF’s Great Reset plan from June 2020. The idea is that global capitalism should be transformed so that corporations no longer focus solely on serving shareholders but become custodians of society by creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and other ‘stakeholders’. The way the WEF sees stakeholder capitalism being carried out is through a range of ‘multi-stakeholder partnerships’ bringing together the private sector, governments and civil society across all areas of global governance.
The idea of stakeholder capitalism and multi-stakeholder partnerships might sound warm and fuzzy, until we dig deeper and realise that this actually means giving corporations more power over society, and democratic institutions less.
The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, “the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.” Governments would be just one stakeholder in a multi-stakeholder model of global governance. Harris Gleckman, senior fellow at the University of Massachusetts, describes the report as “the most comprehensive proposal for re-designing global governance since the formulation of the United Nations during World War II.”
Retirement Fund Balances Hit All Time High – Creating a Target for the Tax Hiker
The economic rebound that began as the pandemic-related lockdowns started to end in the states is producing strong results throughout the United States despite the considerable rise in inflation. While higher prices are wiping out the income gains workers made during the pre-COVID boom, the surging stock market helped the amount of money held in private retirement accounts reach some of the highest levels on record.
The number of 401(k) and IRA millionaires have hit all-time records, CNBC’s Jessica Dickler reported Thursday, suggesting good times may still be ahead even though the perception is growing that President Joe Biden and his economic team are mismanaging the economy. In the most recent IPSOS poll, 55 percent of those surveyed said they were “pessimistic” about the direction of the country, an increase of 20 points over late April when the question was last posed. Pessimism, the polling firm said, was rising across all age groups and income levels and was even down among Democrats.
The Biden economic plan includes higher taxes and increased spending despite the recurrence of notable inflation. If it passes, it would likely cause a contraction in an economy that has appeared to be growing again since people started going back to work after many of the nation’s governors – mostly from the so-called “Red States” – stopped the pandemic-induced unemployment emergency bonus payments that more than one prominent economist identified as a significant disincentive for people to get back on the job.
