1. NY Post: Biden’s Sick Attempt to Claim Credit for a Disastrous Afghan Evacuation
Talk about a catastrophic success.
The Biden administration wants credit for the Afghanistan evacuation. This is akin to the neighborhood arsonist bragging about how many fires he has put out.
2. Those with memories that stretch past a couple of weeks ago will recall the halcyon days when a mass evacuation at a civilian airport exposed to Islamic State suicide bombers and other attackers wasn’t, according to Joe Biden, even conceivable.
3. That American forces flew out more than 115,000 people out of Kabul is a testament to the awesome capabilities of the United States military. It is not in any way a vindication of Biden’s exit.
4. We failed by the most important metric. We left hundreds of Americans behind who wanted to leave — a squalid betrayal that was unfathomable before the Biden team began to try to prepare the public for it a week or so ago.
5. It’s hard to imagine any prior American commander-in-chief, perhaps with the exception of Jimmy Carter, abandoning Americans behind enemy lines. Theodore Roosevelt mustered the naval might of the United States to save one American who had been kidnapped in Morocco in 1904.
6. Even Biden felt the impulse to get every last American out. He pledged to do it in his interview with George Stephanopoulos. In order to keep his promise to the Taliban to get out by Aug. 31, though, he broke his promise to his countrymen.
7. We still don’t know how many US green-card holders, to whom we should also feel an obligation, have been left behind. And the Taliban were blocking our most deserving Afghan allies from getting to the airport, so the Afghans we got out weren’t necessarily the most endangered.
8. Even if the evacuation had been flawless and complete, the underlying situation speaks of an abysmal failure. After 20 years, we lost a war to a Taliban that now controls more territory than it did on September 11, 2001.
9. Biden’s supporters have resorted to the defense that almost all of this was inevitable. Yet for years, the Afghan army fought and bled after we had stepped back into a support role, suggesting an unsatisfactory stalemate was achievable at a relatively low cost.
10. Biden rejected that option. Instead, he chose defeat and disgrace. All the exertions to rescue people from the wreckage over the last two weeks can’t change that.
1. The Fearsome Tabulator
The ballot tabulator in mail-in vote processing centers in America is the most fearsome machine invented by man, as it determines the winner of the highest office in the most powerful nation in the world. Allow me to explain.
2. Imagine what happens to a mail-in ballot in a vote processing center. Allow me to illustrate the journey of a mail-in ballot envelope inside a vote processing center. The first key step is to open the envelope and log it.
3. On the outer envelope there is name and address of the voter who mailed the ballot. So the log will indicate that a ballot was received from an identifiable voter (identified by a name and address).
Closing of American Mind
The university has made intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs are race, gender, victimhood and whose only outputs are grievance & division. bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-universit…
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions.
Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions.
For the vaccinated, Covid resembles the flu and usually a mild one. Society does not ground to a halt over the flu. nytimes.com/2021/09/07/bri…
2. One in 5,000
How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.
3. Or maybe one in 10,000
The chances are surely higher in places with the worst Covid outbreaks (e.g. Southeast). But in places with fewer cases — like the Northeast, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco areas — the chances are even lower, probably less than 1 in 10,000.
Putin and his cartel reject a White House request.
Despite very favorable policies from the White House, Russian President Vladimir Putin still doesn’t feel like doing U.S. President Joe Biden a solid. 1/
You may recall the bizarre episode last month when Mr. Biden, who is pushing expensive taxpayer-funded policies to reduce oil production, suddenly urged Russia and its allies in the international energy cartel to increase oil production. 2/
The news then was that Biden didn’t believe in forecasts of climate doom enough to run the political risk of high gasoline prices. The news now is that cartel members don’t seem that eager to collude with him. 3/
WSJ: President ‘Perception’
Sometimes survival requires more than PR.
Historians may spend years trying to understand how President Biden could have so mismanaged the exit from Afghanistan. A new report suggests Biden was focused on appearances rather than reality. 1/
Reuters has published what it calls excerpts from a July phone call between President Joe Biden and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani. According to the Reuters transcript, Mr. Biden said: 2/
What good did it do to present a false picture of success? Mr. Biden was publicly presenting such a false picture in July and it seems to have served only to deceive American civilians and our Afghan allies into thinking they had more time before they had to flee. 3/
1. Covid's Mysterious Two Month Cycle
Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall.
2. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has also followed this two-month pattern.
After Delta took hold last winter in India, caseloads there rose sharply for slightly more than two months before plummeting at a nearly identical rate.
3. In Britain, caseloads rose for almost exactly two months before peaking in July. In Indonesia, Thailand, France, Spain and several other countries, the Delta surge also lasted somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 months.