EDIT: POTUS Disapproval Ratings Climb To 57%; 1 in 10 Regret Their Vote For Biden
Defense analysts roundly condemn Biden's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan -- and the American public's anger is palpable.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sometimes the coffee doesn’t quite kick in and I totally miss the most important part of any article — THE HEADLINE.
Obviously the news here is that Biden’s disapproval ratings are at 57%. I’ll do better with more caffeine… and apologies for this second e-mail. — SVK
In what might be the defining image of Joe Biden’s catastrophic failure in Afghanistan, this reminds us of the power of the word and.
As in, we can oppose how the Afghanistan War was handled andoppose the way Biden created a human rights disaster by summarily pulling the United States out of the war.
Despite Democratic PR Efforts, National Perspectives Are United Against Biden’s Handling Of The Withdrawal
First and foremost, there has been a lot of handwringing about the fact that the Taliban now has access to a great deal of what — for the region — might be considered advanced aircraft.
Two small problems? They’re not precisely advanced and they aren’t even well maintained:
While the Taliban could seek to sell captured aircraft, none of the planes or helicopters operated by the Afghan air force contain sensitive technologies that would be useful to nations like China or Russia, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group.
“Truth be told, if the Russians or Chinese wanted to get their hands on a Super Tucano or early model Black Hawk it wouldn’t be that hard,” he said. “They were equipped in a pretty low-tech way.”
The most advanced aircraft? The Brazilian-made A-29 — a turboprop plane that looks more like a P-51 Mustang had a secret love child with a Super Cessna.
Biden withdrew most of the contractors responsible for maintaining this equipment. The problem is akin to running your car for 6-9 months without maintenance and then trying to have your mechanic walk you through how to do replace the alternator and the starter via Zoom.
Even then, given what most of these aircraft actually do? The Taliban can’t fly them and the Afghans couldn’t use them in their own defense. One more in a litany of calculated mistakes.
One might almost go so far as to say the collapse of the Afghan National Army was engineered so as to provide as little resistance to the Taliban as possible.
Meanwhile, Matt Taibbi — not precisely a man of the right — outlines how the United States spent $2 trillion dollars over the last 20 years — that’s about $300 million a day — in Afghanistan where nearly 30% of what was spent was effectively poured right down the drain:
The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) some years ago identified “$15.5 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse… in our published reports and closed investigations between SIGAR’s inception in 2008 and December 31, 2017,” and added an additional $3.4 billion in a subsequent review. All told, “SIGAR reviewed approximately $63 billion and concluded that a total of approximately $19 billion or 30 percent of the amount reviewed was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.”
That is $600 billion lost to waste, fraud and abuse.
Taibbi hits the nail squarely on the head here:
How would the public have looked at [such] practices like bringing billions of dollars in cash on pallets to pay bribes, or multi-million-dollar construction projects to nowhere, or millions spent on hired guns for phantom deliveries or security exercises, during the Battle of the Bulge? Much differently than it did for the endless war in Afghanistan, which on some level every American understood was a massive welfare program for contractors.
Yet the talking point being heaved out by the likes of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow are that Afghanistan failed the United States — the good intentions and shoveling money at things is always the right solution and that the fault, dear reader, is in the stars of the Afghans themselves.
Not so.
Until we resolve the grand problem from South Vietnam to Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and back to Afghanistan — the fault isn’t in the region.
The fault is in our stars.
Unless you are willing to go in with a Marshall Plan? Don’t nation build. General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf said it best — the US military does two things very well: kill people and break things. When it comes to nation building, we are actually quite good at it — Germany, South Korea, Japan, Detroit — we can do it rather well.
But we have to commit to the task.
Just in case you were wondering, total amount spent in 1953 US dollars on the Marshall Plan? $452.96 billion.
Total wasted in Afghanistan over the last 20 years? $600 billion.
Nation building — so it seems — begins at home.
As before — we can oppose how the Afghanistan War was handled andoppose the way Biden created a human rights disaster by summarily pulling the United States out of the war.
That’s the power of being able to hold two things as simultaneously true — something propagandists love to tell folks they can’t do in a chase for binary thinking (either/or) in order to get folks to emote rather than think.
Rasmussen: Biden Approval Ratings At 57%
The latest and greatest from the RealClearPolitics averages show Biden to have suffered a great deal over the weekend as images of Afghans clamoring to board C17s — and worse — have peppered the internet.
One will immediately note that the FOX News poll was taken well before events occurred on the ground in Afghanistan. The Economist/YouGov poll isn’t precisely a center-right polling outfit, while Rasmussen was the preferred pollster of the Trump administration.
While I am not a great fan of Trafalgar Group and their solicitous approach to ethics, even they have picked up on the real question of the hour:
That’s just about 3 in 5 Americans who strongly disapprove, with a good 10.7% who seem to thing people falling off of C17s to escape the tender mercies of the Taliban is a net positive for American prestige.
Whether this shifts opinions on the Democratic Party writ large remains to be seen, as the media is beginning to shift away from the conduct of the collapse and more towards the plight of Afghan refugees — specifically those who were attached to the US military as interpreters and so forth.
Joe Biden would like to remind you that Afghans who put “America First” by working with our warfighters? Aren’t that big of a deal…
Democrats are quick to pounce on certain voices that are insisting Afghans do not deserve to be relocated on American soil as racism. Mostly as a means of avoiding the conversation over who created the refugee crisis.
Yet we live in such a world where Democrats themselves pay heavy coin to infiltrators and instigators in order to get them to say the worst — so that the media can use it as a bright shiny object to divert from the failures of the political left.
Anything to get Biden’s approval ratings back into the mid-50s.
Biden Loses To Trump If Election Were Held Today…
Which gets us back to another interesting tidbit from the Rasmussen poll. When asked the question whether they regretted their vote for Joe Biden? 10% of Democrats signaled that they did.
Now this may not seem like a tremendous amount. But 10% of 81 million cast votes is 8.1 million walking away from the Democratic Party.
Donald Trump had 74 million votes.
Math is good.
Want some more sunshine? 81% of all Americans believe in Voter ID according to a poll conducted by the Honest Elections Project.
Of course, even with Voter ID the vast majority of election fraud occurs — not necessarily with the ID card — with absentee balloting via mail-in ballots. Despite what Democrats will tell you, this question shouldn’t be about making voting harder, but rather making sure that the most important action we perform as citizens has integrity. One man and one vote.
But that’s another topic for another time.
…Oh, And Ralph Northam Has $2.6 Billion Of Your Money
Doesn’t quite mention that it is all federal COVID relief money that he is going to sprinkle on Democratic pet projects, does he?
National debt? $28,659,013,000,000 trillion (or thereabouts).
Thank your grandchildren for this surplus. They’ll be paying for it by working for multinationals for generations to come.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.