Monthly Archives: September 2021
September 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
We have been advised by the Biden administration that our surrender and evacuation of Afghanistan is a world-historic success. We know that’s not true, but we have yet to assess the the catastrophe in its multifarious dimensions. For example, we have yet to get a handle on the 120,000 Afghans included with some 6,000 American citizens in the airlift out of Kabul. AP diplomatic correspondent Matt Lee gives us a
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September 4, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I noted the American materiel we left behind in our hasty departure from Afghanistan in “What we left behind.” I included the mind-blowing graphic below from the Times (UK). A mind-blowing graphic in today's Times on what $85bn worth of lost equipment means in practice for the Taliban: pic.twitter.com/GDcuNQbb6P — Will Brown (@_Will_Brown) August 29, 2021 Our friend Victor Davis Hanson is a renowned classicist and military historian. Last night
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September 4, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Supposedly the American war in Afghanistan is over, but I keep going back to the Bertolt Brecht line, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The anti-war left used to emblazon this on t-shirts and bumper stickers, ignoring the immediate sequel: “Then, war will come to you.” More likely some decades from now we are going to look back on this new period that began this week as
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September 3, 2021 — John Hinderaker
It isn’t easy to assemble the entire Squad in one place, but reportedly it happened today in Minneapolis. The Squad held a press conference to demand that President Biden revoke the permit to construct Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 replacement pipeline. As usual, the activists’ claims are hysterical: The press conference came days after a letter from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination requested that the federal
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September 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I’ve been arguing for a while that private liberal arts colleges often exhibit much more extreme wokism that public universities, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Princeton is giving Mount Royal University a run for its money. On Wednesday, the New York Post ran an article from two Princeton faculty, John Londregan of the politics and international affairs department, and Sergiu Klainerman of mathematics, on the insidious racial slurs of
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September 3, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Kamala Harris has blood on her hands. Not in connection with Afghanistan–I doubt that she has had any influence on events there–but as a result of her support for violent crime in Minnesota. In the wake of the George Floyd riots, Harris contributed to the Minnesota Freedom Fund and encouraged others to do so as well. She did so on the pretext that the Freedom Fund was bailing out “demonstrators”
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September 3, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The New York Times is basically done with Afghanistan. My friend the Times reader reports: Afghanistan is now entirely off the NYT’s front page. The question of the Biden administration’s handling of the withdrawal has disappeared even from the coverage inside. Still no mention of the Ghani phone-call controversy. There are two long articles trying to puzzle out how the Taliban might rule, and one on a protest for women’s
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September 3, 2021 — Steven Hayward
There is little doubt that China was already giddy that they get to deal with U.S. “climate envoy” John Kerry, but having watched Biden’s weakness in Afghanistan, they aren’t even being coy about it any more. They are openly telling Kerry that the U.S. won’t get any Chinese cooperation on climate change unless the U.S. backs off pressuring China on other issues, such as trade, human rights, etc. The Wall
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September 3, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Joe Biden and his administration want to move on from the epic humiliation of the United States that it engineered in Afghanistan. It sought to move on even while the humiliation was in process. The lack of a sense of shame has proved key to the persistence of Biden and administration officials throughout. Our humiliation is sure to be compounded in the coming days as news emerges of those we
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September 3, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll provides some useful self-help advice in I AM FINE. She writes: One of our favorite movies is the 1987 Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito comedy, Throw Momma From the Train. The Crystal character is a frustrated novelist who teaches a Creative Writing class which attracts a variety of sad sacks including Danny DeVito’s character, Owen. Owen is a pathetic loser who lives with a mother who would make
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September 2, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Somewhere along the line, Joe Biden got a reputation for being empathetic. I’m not sure how this happened. It’s true that Biden seemed to empathize with the unborn, but that was before he seemed to empathize with pregnant women who want to destroy their unborn babies. He seemed to empathize with the victims of crime, but later seemed to empathize with the criminals who harm them. Actually, Biden cares only
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September 2, 2021 — John Hinderaker
Amid the disaster of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were some stories that ended happily. This is one of them. One of my colleagues and his sister are friends with an Afghan family, a husband, wife and three young children. The father translated for our forces in that country. The family came to America some time ago as legal permanent residents, and the father has a Minnesota driver’s license. Several
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September 2, 2021 — Steven Hayward
I know there’s a live argument over the Oxford comma, and whether to use one or two spaces after a period. But these are so 20-teens: did you know that capitalization is—somehow—oppressive? That’s what we’re told by Dr. Linda Manyguns, I mean, dr. linda manyguns, who is “associate vice president of indigenization and decolonization” at Mount Royal University in Alberta. Here’s the proclamation: this is a beginning effort at describing
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September 2, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
Sen. Joe Manchin has thrown a monkey wrench into Democrats’ plan to pass, via reconciliation, a $3.5 trillion spending package on top of the trillion dollar (or so) bipartisan “infrastructure” bill. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed called “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion,” Manchin states: The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future. Yet some in Congress have
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September 2, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I am scheduled to join Jon Justice, Drew Lee, and producer Samantha Sansevere for the weekly Justice & Drew round table tomorrow morning from 7:00-9:00 a.m. The show runs from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. weekdays on Twin Cities News Talk AM 1130. It is available via live stream here and in podcast form here. The show covers local and national news with a sense of humor and an upbeat twist.
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September 2, 2021 — John Hinderaker
The world’s elites claim the right to govern by virtue of their technical and bureaucratic expertise. One can think of historical eras when an elite’s claim to govern by virtue of its superior skills and its record of success would be plausible. Unfortunately, we are not living in one of them. One of many cases in point: Oxford University head ‘embarrassed’ Michael Gove is an alumnus. Michael Gove is a
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September 2, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff
The Biden Education Department has opened “civil rights” investigations into five states — Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma and Tennessee — that have banned school districts from requiring masks. This is a naked effort to back Democrats and teachers’ unions in their dispute with some Republican governors over mask wearing, a dispute that has nothing to do with civil rights. Federal civil rights law requires that students with disabilities be
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