Showing posts with label Donald Trump 2021. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donald Trump 2021. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Sean Hannity told a whopper today just after 4pm Eastern: He said Trump's agreement with the Taliban let the US keep Bagram Airfield

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.

Read it for yourself.

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.


Mike Pompeo pretends it was smart diplomacy to negotiate with terrorists in the first place, and to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan

The Taliban’s threat has been a constant for years; it was a very real threat during President Donald Trump’s administration.  We met that threat with American strength and smart diplomacy. ... The Trump administration’s Afghanistan strategy utilized a combination of deterrence and negotiated agreements based on conditions in the country to keep the Taliban in check while we withdrew our forces. This kept Americans who were still there safe while reducing our military footprint in the region.  




Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Even Peter Bergen recognizes Biden made a huge mistake abiding by Trump's insane handover of the war on terror in Afghanistan to the Taliban

 The whole thing is worth reading, here:

Biden could have easily said the Taliban had reneged on their agreement with the United States so he could continue to keep a relatively small US military force in Afghanistan to advise and assist the Afghan Army and to support the Afghan Air Force to thwart Taliban advances.
 
... the American presence in Afghanistan had shrunk to only 2,500 troops -- particularly few for a force of 1.3 million active-duty US service personnel. That small force helped to sustain the Afghan military physically and psychologically, not least with close air support.

Now, the Biden administration unilaterally has pulled the plug on the US troop presence in Afghanistan, which cratered morale among the Afghan military and population. It also precipitated thousands of Western-allied soldiers to head for the exits, as well as the many thousands of contractors in Afghanistan that were, among other things, keeping the Afghan Air Force aloft.
 
And now the white flags of the Taliban flutter all over Afghanistan. It did not need to be this way.

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

The Orwellian situation in Kabul right now began Feb 29, 2020 when Trump announced that the Taliban would be taking over the war on terror

 You read that right, the Taliban.

How did we not understand this 100% crackpottery for what it was at the time?

Down is up, evil is good, enemy is friend.

Starting at about the 3:15 mark.



The Afghanistan debacle is of Trump's design, but occurred only because Biden decided to implement it and withdrew the air cover necessary to the Afghan army's mission

The 2020 US-Taliban deal created deep and widespread apprehension about what the future might hold. Then, it only took a few localised failures to sap the confidence of all sorts of actors, both military and civilian, in the survival of the government. Side-switching became a rational strategy, then spun out of control.

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.

In requiring the withdrawal not just of US troops but US maintenance contractors, it compromised the ongoing capabilities of key assets in the inventory of the Afghan National Army, as well as depriving the army of critical air cover.
 
As an insightful analysis put it,
 
in the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the US pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.


 
William Maley, March 3, 2020
 
A Chance for Peace or a Rush to the Exit?:
 
The text provides for a reduction of US troop numbers within 135 days to 8,600, to be followed by “withdrawal of all remaining forces from Afghanistan within the remaining nine and a half (9.5) months.” It also purports to bind not just the US but also its allies, including Australia, even though they were not parties to the agreement; and it includes “all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel.” ... the agreement is better seen as a “withdrawal agreement” than a “peace agreement.” It is no wonder that the Taliban are painting it as a victory.
 
 
We were all consumed with COVID-19 in February 2020, and completely ignored this.
 
People who say now that the rapid fall of Afghanistan would not have happened under a second Trump term don't know what they are talking about.
 
Trump designed this outcome, and Biden was only too happy to implement it.
 
Biden gets to say he ended the war, pleases the progressives on his left, and blames Trump for it, all at the same time.
 
And the GOP alone gets to be The Stupid Party yet once more, unless of course the thousands of Americans trapped in Kabul this morning because Biden failed to get them out ahead of time are not permitted to leave, or are taken hostage.
 
Their fate, and Biden's reputation, are in the Taliban's hands, and that, when all is said and done, is the Democrats' disgrace.

Monday, August 9, 2021

Frank Meyer knew better but had it exactly backwards

Seen here:

The political questions are not unimportant, but they pale in comparison to the importance of the moral and religious aspect of our lives. As Frank Meyer put it in his book In Defense of Freedom, “in the moral realm freedom is only a means whereby men can pursue their proper end, which is virtue.”

This is a defect of that poor thing, the libertarian mind, which compartmentalizes reality into aspects, repudiating, with the rest of modernity, the pre-Englightenment understanding that the moral realm is the only meaningful realm inhabited by humanity.

Perhaps the more important defect of this libertarian mind is viewing freedom as a means or instrumentality, rather than as a result of virtue.

In truth, freedom is a condition, a by-product, a sign. It is subsidiary and not the main show. You can't wrangle enough of it and produce virtue with it. That's putting the cart before the horse, as we used to say. In fact quite the opposite. An excess of freedom makes a monster, because men are first and foremost not angels. The excess of freedom in the United States is the precondition for its licentiousness, making it the world capital for obesity, indolence, drug abuse, empty celebrity, sexual perversion, immorality, violence, entertainment, self-loathing, and a host of other ills. Eventually such a people tyrannized by themselves will require an actual tyrant to rule them.

You will not have a good society without good people, as Meyer did recognize as parents in the 1960s gave up being good and expected "institutions" such as schools and churches to take over their responsibility to be so.

This failure of nerve already had the country firmly in its grip by Meyer's time. Today we see the same shirking phenomenon but now writ even larger, as we expect a Trump, a political party, the Conservative Movement Inc., the Federalist Society, the rule of law, the police, the courts, or constitutional parchment to fix what only the individual can fix.

Only you can fix what is wrong. You must, as Bill Buckley once famously said, "Cancel your own goddam subscription". You can. You must. Or it's over.

If you don't the woke will fix it for you. The current rage for and of "woke" is nothing if not a response of the young "nones" to this libertarian misunderstanding. Their chief enemy is freedom. The woke see all too clearly that American culture is incapable of saying No, which is the only true mark of the free man. Instead we think being free means saying Yes, to everything.

And if history is any guide, we'll say Yes to that, too, to the new tyranny of woke. 


Monday, July 26, 2021

You idiots who attend the Vaccine Church have just helped mint 9 new pharma-billionaires

Pandemic sweeps the nation.

Fascist America under Trump mobilizes pharmaceutical industry to rush vaccines into development, investing billions of dollars in the efforts.

Industry resurrects a discredited drug delivery mechanism and calls it a vaccine. Smelling $$$, it prepares for mass vaccination but doesn't run trials proportionate to that effort, and then cuts off the placebo arm prematurely, making a complete hash of it.

Government gives Emergency Use Authorization, not FDA Approval, to permit these corporations to experiment on the US population during an "emergency".

The corporations, and the government, are exempted from liability.

A fearful population whipped into a hysteria by propaganda paid for with borrowed dollars lines up like sheep to take the vaccine under a new administration but the same old fascism.

Presto! 9 new billionaires:

The 9 new vaccine billionaires, in order of their net worth are: 

  1. Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO (worth $4.3 billion)
  2. Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech (worth $4 billion)
  3. Timothy Springer, an immunologist and founding investor of Moderna (worth $2.2bn)
  4. Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s Chairman (worth $1.9 billion)
  5. Juan Lopez-Belmonte, Chairman of ROVI, a company with a deal to manufacture and package the Moderna vaccine (worth $1.8 billion)
  6. Robert Langer, a scientist and founding investor in Moderna (worth $1.6 billion)
  7. Zhu Tao, co-founder and chief scientific officer at CanSino Biologics (worth $1.3 billion)
  8. Qiu Dongxu, co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics (worth $1.2)
  9. Mao Huihua, also co-founder and senior vice president at CanSino Biologics (worth $1 billion)



The 8 vaccine billionaires who saw their wealth increase are:
Name Role/description $ billions 2021 $ billions 2020
Jiang Rensheng & family Chair, Zhifei Biological products $ 24.40 $ 7.60
Cyrus Poonawalla Founder, Serum Institute of India $ 12.70 $ 8.20
Tse Ping Sinopharm $ 8.90 $ 7.30
Wu Guanjiang Co-founder, Zhifei Biological products $ 5.10 $ 1.80
Thomas Struengmann & family Portfolio includes Germany's BioNTech and Uruguay's Mega Pharma $ 11.00 $ 9.60
Andreas Struengmann & family Portfolio includes Germany's BioNTech and Uruguay's Mega Pharma $ 11.00 $ 9.60
Pankaj Patel Controls listed company Cadila Healthcare. The company now manufactures drugs to treat Covid-19 such as Remdesivir from Gilead. Its Covid-19 vaccine, ZyCoV-D, is undergoing clinical trials. $ 5.00 $ 2.90
Patrick Soon-ShiongImmunityBio - selected for the US federal government's "Operation Warp Speed" to help quickly develop a Covid-19 vaccine.$ 7.50$ 6.40






























Tuesday, July 20, 2021

How the mighty are fallen


Ten masts attach'd make not the altitude
That thou hast perpendicularly fallen.
 
-- William Shakespeare

Saturday, July 17, 2021

The dumbest political take of the week comes from Stephen L. Miller aka @redsteeze


DeSantis is the only name mentioned as a future replacement for Trump. He tacks close or higher than Trump in casual polling, his name is the first that comes up, even among the Trumpist base, as a preferred candidate. This is a burden no politician should be saddled with. The country and the GOP is one Ron DeSantis scandal away from returning to Trump’s awkward embrace in 2024.

More.

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine Ronald Reagan in 1975 reading this about himself as he's coming off the governorship of California and preparing to run for the Republican nomination against sitting President Gerald Ford.

"Oh my God. The burden! And I signed that damn abortion legislation in California and if anyone finds out, I'm toast! What oh what should I do?"

If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would laugh out loud at redsteeze. Like any skeleton lurking in DeSantis' closet could possibly hold a candle to the smoldering wreckage left in the wake of the SS Trumptanic. 

Ron DeSantis should definitely run against Trump, the biggest LOSER and biggest PHONY to ever make the big time.

Just win reelection in 2022 in Florida first, Ron. And then do run run.

Friday, July 2, 2021

America continues in decline, undershooting its potential by 13 million full-time jobs

Full-time employment in June 2021 in the US, not seasonally adjusted, was 48.7% of civilian noninstitutional population. The average level had been 50.4% in 2019, historically anemic. That's a deficit of 4.6 million full-time jobs in June 2021 compared with the 2019 average.
 
If you can imagine full-time employment at 53.6% of civilian noninstitutional population as in the year 2000, you are talking about 140 million with full-time jobs today instead of the actual 127 million. America continues in decline undershooting its potential by 13 million full-time.
 
Sad!

 
 
48.7% June 2021

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Mark Levin is so pathetic: He can characterize what went on in America's streets last year as an insurrection when millions rioted . . .

. . . and yet he still insists on the principle of non-violence from the people to put it down. We should just sit there and take it, watch our cities, businesses and homes burn down while the government does NOTHING.

I don't expect normie conservatism EVER to advocate watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and their mobs.

This is because normie conservatism is really just Republicanism. Its roots do not go back further than Lincoln and his "project" for racial equality, which was in truth nothing but a demagogue's ploy to keep from losing a war. And because of this it has disarmed itself for every other political conflict except for the cause of racial equality. For THAT they will gladly destroy the country and see it destroyed, but otherwise won't lift a finger when BLM and Antifa come knocking.

This is why Republicanism failed to stop the income tax and women's suffrage, Social Security and the welfare state, abortion and gay marriage, and a whole host of other things large and small they said they were against over the years but on which they eventually caved, and then eventually championed. It's the reason "conservatism" has failed, because Republicans aren't conservatives. They are, according to their own lights, simply better versions of Democrats.

For this reason Republicanism can never be about the American Founding, protest to the contrary as it may, boast otherwise as it may. Lincoln destroyed the Founding and redefined the country, by force of arms!, and Republicans are stuck with it, and we with them, unless someone can recover the original spirit of liberty. And Democrats exist to never let them forget it, to make them live by their new principles which only tie their hands and guarantee their ongoing defeat.

Meanwhile, don't look for the Founding spirit from Noon to 3 let alone from 6 to 9. Instead look for more of the same game played by Rush Limbaugh, the "they're the real racists" game.

Race, race, race. Black unemployment was never lower than under Trump.  Hunter Biden said the n-word and the fag-word and gets away with it. Blah, blah, blah, as your kid can't find a decent job to start his own life.

 




Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Donald Trump has transformed the GOP into a pro-same sex marriage party, which kinda explains the Jan 6 insurrection

Which is kinda mentally ill.

I mean, come on, the tip of the spear was Ashli Babbitt, who had an unusual personal life, reminiscent of Katie Hill.

The percentage supporting same sex marriage has jumped 15 points since 2016, with a clear majority of 55% of the GOP now supporting same sex marriage.

To quote Andrew Cuomo, America was never really that great. Until now that is.

Gallup.

 



Monday, June 7, 2021

LOL, Rod Dreher finally is ready for government by a Strong Man to protect the white man

 
 

Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist :

I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough. I’m not sure what can be done, but if we keep tolerating this, there is going to be violence, one way or another.  I am not willing to sit here and listen to these aristocrats like Dr. Khilanani, and malignant institutions like Yale, turn people against me, my children, and my neighbors, because we are white.

Sunday, June 6, 2021

First presidential visit to Tulsa in a hundred years by Biden comes almost a year after President Trump visited there

If the S&P 500 regressed to trend level tomorrow, it would fall to about 1551 according to the geeks

Think of it as fair value.

Another way to get there: 

GDP(63) = S&P fair value

$22.061 trillion x 63 = 1390

That formula worked for most of the post-war up until the Trump era. The fancy regression analysis done by the geeks always came up pretty close to the same result, but not lately.

Still another way to look at it:

S&P 500 4230 / GDP 22.061 = 192.

That's an elevated ratio which was common before 1929, but we've never seen such levels in the post-war.

Sum ting funny goin' on.