"Prudence" might as well be an Arabic word to Trump. He knows nothing, and is incapable of knowing. He is a foolish, destructive spendthrift, who would have pulled entirely out of Afghanistan, same as Joe Biden.
There is no final difference between the two men.
U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.
More.
There is a difference between peace and retreat. The Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban represents a full retreat. It’s an agreement that most Republicans would deplore if a Democrat president made the deal, and they’d be right to be angry.
More.
The country wasn't paying attention, however. The pandemic was all anyone could talk about.
This is simply false.
Under the terms of the agreement, the US agreed to withdraw initially from 5 bases, and then from "all remaining bases".
There is no such provision as claimed by Hannity.
Trump would have presided over a complete withdrawal of all US and Coalition forces from Afghanistan had he been re-elected.
Conservative talk radio has been pretending for a week that Donald Trump intended a different outcome than a complete withdrawal.
It's just not true.
Trump not only committed the sin of negotiating with terrorists, he tried to pass them off as new partners in the war on terror, making our continued presence moot, which is utterly absurd.
Ever had Trump Wine? A Trump Steak? A degree from Trump University?
Donald Trump is responsible for the framework leading to the debacle we are witnessing in Afghanistan under Joe Biden.
They are a pair of Pontius Pilates, washing their hands of the country.
The whole thing is worth reading, here:
The US troop withdrawal also seems to have reflected a failure on the part of Biden – although not the US military — to appreciate how destructive the February 2020 agreement had been to the effectiveness of the Afghan military.
Last week, the Taliban said they now control 85% of Afghanistan’s territory — a claim that is impossible to verify but that was considerably higher than previous Taliban statements that more than a third of the country’s 421 districts and district centers were in their control.
More.
Or is it the other way around?
In any event, the Taliban is already taking control of the Afghan countryside while the US Taliban of Commerce is celebrating victory here at home.
Reported here:
As U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan, Taliban militants seize
military outposts by threatening security forces until they agree to
surrender, The New York Times reported Thursday. ...
At least 26 outposts have surrendered to the Taliban since May 1, according to government officials and village elders, the Times reported. The Taliban have seized four district centers and displaced governors, police officers and intelligence officials.
...
“She ties with a couple other Republicans for the worst career voting record on immigration in New York,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the anti-immigration Center on Immigration Studies, ticking off a few of her previous positions: a yes on H-2B visas, the Farm Workers Modernization Act, and the Hong Kong Refugee bill, and a no on Trump’s child border separation policies.
“Obviously, Republicans in New York are likely to be more liberal, just because that's the environment they're in,” Krikorian said. “I think everybody understands that. But even by the standards of New York state Republicans, she's bad on immigration.” ...
Krikorian, whose institute is not weighing in on the conference chair election, noted that while Cheney’s downfall was sparked by her criticism of Trump, what had truly tanked her was her ideology, bolstered by her family name: The Wyoming congresswoman’s neoconservative beliefs have no place in today’s GOP.
Stefanik’s positions weren’t much more palatable to the party base, in Krikorian’s view.
“Trump, in his gut, does think we should get out of Afghanistan, he does think there's too many illegal aliens coming over the border,” he observed. “It's not that he doesn't believe any of that stuff. It's just that he's kind of a narcissistic guy. And if people flatter him, he's for them, regardless of what they believe. And so the question is: Do you go for Trumpism? Or do you go for Trump?”
The system which protects us from tyrants has done so only because we are, when all is said and done, still loyal to it. There was never any danger of a tyranny from Trump, who was easily the weakest president in living memory.
But Trump's character is clearly of the sort Aristotle warned us about. The thing is, we do little worrying about the proliferation of wretches like Stefanik who eventually make the rise of actual tyrants, dangerous men of strong, determined, and ruthless character, more likely.
"And for this reason tyrants always love the worst of wretches, for they rejoice in being flattered, which no man of a liberal spirit will submit to; for they love the virtuous, but flatter none."
Here, apparently because some people doubt it. He did, after all, bail out of West Point and will forever live with the stigma.
Read the whole thing and you'll see the freshman congressman is already psychoanalyzing his colleagues while admitting to the need for some himself.
Unbelievable. This is what we elect to Congress. A rich kid trying to be somebody.
There's a lot of things I respect about Rep. Amash. At the end of the day, you're going to be your own person. I think much of my approach is guided by my experiences overseas. I was fully uniformed, a through-and-through combatant in Iraq; I'd do intelligence operations. That gave me one vantage point. When I was working in disaster response efforts around the world, you—not literally, but kind of—parachute into an area, whether it was the Philippines or South Sudan, domestic response for tornadoes and hurricanes. You have to make a little bit of order out of the chaos. And then when I was in Afghanistan later for a couple of years, as a conflict analyst for the humanitarian aid community, that was a very different perspective, too. But I saw a sense of, how do things fall apart and how can they be rebuilt? ...
We've inserted ourselves into the middle of civil wars; we've taken sides. Sometimes those sides switch. In Iraq, we're backing the Sunnis one time, we're backing the Shia the other. In Afghanistan, it becomes a shifting set of alliances.
Ultimately I think that erodes something at the core of our national soul that we kind of paper over. That's something that I'll have to sit on a therapist's couch to better understand.
Did Trump say Afghanistan was "better than the US" as Drudge claims? Nope. Trump said their elections were better run than the US election in 2020.
Was a "White House" counselor's brother recently hired by Amazon as a lobbyist? Depends on which "White House" you mean. Certainly not the current one. The "White House" counselor is Joe Biden's counselor, and his brother conveniently was just recently hired by Amazon to lobby for it.
When I don't have Rush Limbaugh to kick around anymore, I'll always have Drudge.
