Rep Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Rep Peter Meijer (R-MI) took a secret trip to Afghanistan to see for themselves the situation on the ground. This has gotten the Army, the Administration and the State Department’s knickers in an uproar. I can see why. Given the degree of the failure of the Biden Administration the last thing they want is for congress to have a clear idea of what is going out unfiltered by the administration.
There is a lot of talk about the clash between “moderates’ and “progressives” in the House over the hold up on the infrastructure and budget bills that the Biden Administration has been desperate to get passed.
The clash is not so much between “moderates” and progressives as it is between Democrats who don’t have to worry about being re-elected and Democrats who do and with the Biden Administration debacle in Afghanistan it’s going to be a lot harder to press those Democrats who aren’t anxious to be identified with the administration.
Charlie Baker through his education commissioner has reinstated a Mask mandate for schools at least until October. Charlie has made a few wrong turns on this but has generally been sane, but with an election coming up next year in a state that’s as blue as it comes I guess he’s not willing to make any fights that he doesn’t have to.
It was be nice if we had a Redder and more Trump like governor, but until we focus on educating the public in this state Mr. Baker is likely the best we can do.
The Supreme Court rejected the Biden Administration attempt to block a lower court can not block a lower court ruling re-instating the Trump “Return to Mexico” policy.
This is ironically the same method that was used to force the DACA policy on the Trump administration.
I think that the former ruling was a bad precedent as it makes laws without lawmaking however that’s not going to change until the left starts getting burned by it.
Reportedly she was warned that this was not a Memorial TO McCain but celebrating him being shot down but she reportedly overruled her advisers who warned her thus. Apparently she wanted to photo op.
I’d object but as she’s owned by people who are America’s enemies and is in fact on their side I’d just as soon she not pretend otherwise.
The United States’ worst week in my lifetime was the prior one. 9/11 was a horrific tragedy but after that attack Americans were united in a way, albeit briefly, that it probably hasn’t been since World War II and sadly, we probably won’t see such unity again.
While our leaving South Vietnam in 1975 after years of fighting there was a major blow to our psyche–the South Vietnamese military still hung on for over two years after America’s combat role ended.
Afghanistan fell to our enemy, the Taliban, last week, nearly a month before President Joe Biden’s withdrawal date, September 11–which was later changed to August 31. Americans, friendly Afghans, and our allies who want to leave Afghanistan are unable get to the Kabul Airport. And people at the airport are being killed by the Taliban.
The Soviet puppet state in Afghanistan managed to maintain power for three years after the USSR returned home.
The situation in Afghanistan is so awful that the mainstream media, CNN and the New York Times for instance, have slowly turned again Biden. They’re not as hostile as they were with Donald J. Trump. but it’s a start. I suspect they are holding Biden accountable only to protect what remaining credibility they have with the ten-percent of Americans who whole-heartedly believe their spin and lies.
When Biden began his third presidential run two years ago something was very evident. Let’s just say the spin was off of his fastball, that it appeared that “Good ole Joe” wasn’t “all there” anymore, even as he squinted at his teleprompter reading remarks written by someone else.
I’ll be returning to baseball a bit later.
Last week Biden, or more likely the president’s protectors among his family and this staff, chose the most sympathetic interviewer they know, former Bill Clinton senior staffer–and donor to the tainted Clinton Foundation–ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, to give the president the opportunity to explain why the Afghanistan defeat is not a debacle.
Notice that I didn’t call Stephanopoulos a journalist.
Even Biden’s dwindling number of apologists admit the ABC interview went poorly for him..
But the worst part of the ABC interview ended up on the cutting room floor, as Tucker Carlson pointed out on his show. When Stephanopolous questioned the chaotic nature of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden replied.
Look, that’s like askin’ my deceased son Beau, who spent six months in Kosovo and a year in Iraq as a Navy captain and then major– I mean, as an Army major. And, you know, I’m sure h– he had regrets comin’ out of Afganista– I mean, out of Iraq.
The Biden interview transcript with @GStephanopoulos is even worse than you imagined.
Amazing. Biden can’t immediately keep straight where his son served and with which branch. Beau Biden never served in Kosovo or Afghanistan. And Beau was in the Army. Not the Navy. Had Trump expressed such confusion some Democratic blowhard, probably Sen. Chuck Schumer, would be calling for the president to take a mental acuity test and suggest enacting the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
What else is on the cutting room floor of other Biden interviews, both as a candidate running from inside his “basement bunker” or as president? As a resident of the White House there isn’t much Biden material to work with. Since being sworn in as president Biden conducted only nine sit-down interviews. At the same point in their presidencies Barack Obama had done 113 and Trump 50. Someone is afraid of the media, a media that until this month was quite friendly to Biden.
By my count, Pres Biden today sat for his 9th news interview, his 2nd with @GStephanopoulos.
Compares with predecessors at same point in presidency:
In the sad later years of Connie Mack’s unprecedented 50-year tenure as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, he often couldn’t remember the names of his current players but he’d call for substitutions with players who hadn’t played for the A’s in decades. Imagine Chicago White Sox manager Tony LaRussa, who used to manage the Athletics, calling for pinch hitting Jose Abreu with Mark McGwire.
Are there moments like that with Biden? Does the media know? Do they have videotape of it? Stephanopolous of course has the recording of Biden confusing his son’s miltary service. What about prior Stephanopolous interviews of Biden? Those should be made public in their entirety immediately by ABC News.
Mack owned the Athletics so firing him was problematic–but he was eventually forced out by his sons in 1950 when he was 87.
If we have not just a confused but also a senile man as president then removing him from office is the duty of Congress. And the rest of media, if they have evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline, then they need to cough it up now.
And that goes for Biden’s staff as well. When Mack made his non-sensical calls as manager of the Athletics, his coaches would calmly overrule “the Grand Old Man of Baseball.” Is Biden’s staff stepping in and overruling their old man?
Who is in charge? Or as Chris Wallace this morning asked of Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, “Does the president not know what’s going on?” Note how Blinken doesn’t answer Wallace’s question in this clip.
Mack ran the Athletics into the ground after many great years at the helm, leading his team to nine American League pennants. Biden never had any great years. Mack’s A’s were just a baseball team. America of course is so much more–not just here at home but to the rest of the world.
Afghanistan is not the only failure of the Biden presidency. There is the border crisis and his inconsistent policy on COVID-19. Are these flops the work of a man who is mentally adrift?
And has Biden’s open borders policy with Mexico made the COVID resurgence worse? Failure seems to be piling upon failure–and we are just seven months into Biden’s term.
At Don Surber’s site in a piece titled Taliban may take down Biden he notes an interesting change in terms of the coverage of the Biden Administration:
There is no way to spin Biden’s desertion of 38 million people in Afghanistan, including 15,000 Americans. We left billions in weaponry and vehicles to terrorists.
But it is the images of helpless people trying to flee Afghanistan that sticks in the public’s mind. 640 people wall-to-wall in a C-17 shows just how awful this abandonment of Afghanistan is.
For once, the press is actually doing its job.
Emphasis mine
Noting that the press is doing it’s job is to me the key line to Surber’s piece which like all his pieces is worth reading. However the what said piece doesn’t address is the key question that is raised by it namely: Why is the press actually doing it’s job?
After all they had no problem covering for him during the steal of the election, during the border crisis, during the spike in inflation, skyrocketing gas and food prices, the move to make us more dependent on foreign energy and kowtowing to China and Russia. and from racial division. Why would Afghanistan suddenly be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
The answer comes from something at Instapundit that was sent to Glenn Reynolds from an acquaintance of his with as he puts it: “experience and connections”:
Biden’s statement that he has seen ‘no question of our credibility from our allies’ has said allies furious. Every NATO country has people trapped in Afghanistan and they tend to be trust fund babies or friends of trust fund babies. Every prime minister’s phone is blowing up with VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE asking how they’re going to get their kids or their kids’ friends out of Afghanistan and every ally is blowing up the phones of the White House and State Department and getting jack shit from them.
And they’re all blaming ‘America’ but they also know it’s on Biden.
actually it’s on whoever is actually running the show a 2nd friend of Glenn mentions the press:
Reporters are only calling BS re the airport because their own ox is being gored. I call BS on their belated, situational flailing at accountability. Now they’re indignant, how many lies later?
You see for the pols and the connected and the sons and daughters of the connected and the friends of the sons and daughters of the connected things like CRT or Inflation or gas prices or Urban Crime or Race issues in schools or mask mandates don’t affect then. They are not going to public schools, living in inner cities or needing to worry about their personal budget. They send their kids to private exclusive schools and don’t seem to have mask mandates applied to them.
This attitude includes the elite press who long ago abandoned this good advice:
The people we cover, we move in their world, but it is their world. You can’t live like them. You’ll never keep up.
The Paper 1994
Those elite press members and the younger reporters who have ambitions of being members of the elite press who are allowed entry to said world for the price of the right coverage. As for those problems of race, inflation, violence etc..all those are for lesser folk to wit:
“I — I couldn’t take a blow, sir. I suppose I’ve been too long with gentlemen”
Among gentlemen a blow could be wiped out only in blood; among the lower orders a blow was something to be received without even a word.
C. S. Forester: Hornblower and the Hotspur 1962 p 301
To all of them it’s still 1805 and we’re the lower orders who are to take these blows without complaint.
Alas Afghanistan is a different matter:
You see hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in Afghanistan and not just on the military. There have been all kinds of programs going on there, many of them very high paying and carrying a lot of prestige and those positions have been filled by elites, family of elites and friends of families of elites who saw it as a stepping stone to higher positions back home and resume enhancers.
When the Biden administration decided to let things collapse without warning suddenly it wasn’t a problem that affected the common people back home, in fact most ordinary Americans, other than the families of troops there are likely not affected by it at all except for the increased threat of terrorist down the line,
However it DID effect all of those elites in all of those nations and all of those NGO’s that have been feeding off the American Taxpayer while in Afghanistan putting in their time and it of course affects all of those reporters who are stationed there and find themselves in danger of their lives (There’s a reason why western women reporters have suddenly discovered the joy of head coverings.)
It’s sort of like this scene from the Movie Casino where Sam Rothstein (Robert DiNero) meets with Pat Webb (LQ Jones) whose brother in law he has just fired :
As long as his own were being taken care of Webb (Jones) didn’t care what was going on in the Casino, but once his own ox was being gored things changed…
Pat Webb: Has that man even filed for his license yet?
Board Investigator: I don’t know. We’ll have to check the files.
Pat Webb: Well, without gettin’ your shorts in a knot, would you do that? And kinda check closely, ’cause we may have to kick a kike’s ass out of town.
From that moment in the movie the downfall of Rothstein and company began.
As long as the Biden administration’s moves only hurt the common voter and the elites were taken care of the elites didn’t care about what was done, but now their incompetence is affecting them and theirs it can’t be allow to stand.
That’s why the Media has suddenly started doing it job and is why the plan to replace Biden with Harris might be accelerated before January of 2023.
Unexpectedly of course.
Closing note: If it happens It won’t change who is in charge, it will just change the figurehead for those who stole the last election.
This summer Netflix debuted the Icelandic series Katla. The actual Katla is a subglacial volcano, which last erupted in 1918.
Whereas for the series, which is centered on the village of Vík, Katla erupted one year earlier, forcing the evacuation of most of the town, save for some essential workers and their families.
Then a Swedish woman covered in ash, Gunhild (Aliette Opheim), not seen in Vík for twenty years, appears mysteriously, having not aged at all.
Others then emerge in the same manner.
To explain the setting and mood of the Katla, I need to make a diversion. Stick with me. Although this bit is quite fascinating.
According to Icelandic folklore much of the country, particularly rocks and boulders, are inhabited by the huldufólk, the hidden people.
Iceland is unique. In the fifth episode of his long running podcast Lore, “Under Construction,” host Aaron Mahnke describes the island nation this way: “Now you have to understand something about Iceland, much of the region is a vast expanse of sparse grass and large volcanic rock formations,” adding, “the ground boils with geysers and springs and the sky seems to be eternally gray and cloudy.”
Nature is particularly harsh in Iceland. Earthquakes are common, it has a chilly subpolar oceanic climate, long winter nights, and of course there are those volcanoes, nearly thirty of them are active.
The use of folklore is a common method to explain the world and with so much of Iceland being a seemingly blank canvas–the “vast expanse of sparse grass” that Mahnke described, as well as its unpredictable volcanoes, it is understandable that folklore’s roots are deep there.
Mahnke in his podcast mentions a couple of road projects in Iceland–one just six years ago–that were altered to assuage fears that the huldufólk would not be disturbed. Click here to find other projects that were changed for the sake of the huldufólk.
In a 1998 survey slightly more than half of Icelanders said they believe in the hidden people. In the minds of many Icelanders the huldufólk are quite real. They are certainly part of the psyche of this Nordic nation.
Huldufólk take on many incantations within Icelandic folklore, among these are as changelings.
Katla is an eight-episode series that is the work of Sigurjón Kjartansson and Baltasar Kormákur. The duo was also responsible for the series Trapped, Kormákur directed the movie Everest.
It appears Kormákur and Kjartansson’s primary audience for Katla is Icelanders and other Scandanavians. The former and probably the latter have a basic understanding of the huldufólk, whereas the primary audience of this blog does not. Hence my diversion because the huldufólk legends aren’t discussed at all in Katla except briefly midway in the series, but that part is featured in the Netflix trailer.
After the emergence of the young Gunhild, the “other” one–twenty years older of course–is discovered in Sweden. Next to come from the ash is Ása (Íris Tanja Flygenring), whose return puzzles her sister Gríma (Guðrún Eyfjörð), a rescue worker in an unhappy marriage with a dairy farmer, Kjartan (Baltasar Breki Samper). Ása and Gríma find themselves entangled in the complicated life of Gunhild and an old relationship of his.
In Katla we also find a deeply religious man, police chief Gísli (Þorsteinn Bachmann) and a scientist Darri (Björn Thors), whose lives are dramatically altered by the new arrivals.
Katla is part science fiction and part psychological drama. It’s worth your time.
The show’s directors make the most of the stark scenery–the cinematography is breathtaking. And the acting is compelling.
Katla is rated TV-MA for violence, scenes of suicide, brief nudity, and strong language. It is available in English, in Icelandic with subtitles, and in English with subtitles. I recommend watching the Icelandic with subtitles version, as there are passages in English and Swedish–and that method of viewing fills out the storyline a little better.
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