Vacuum at the Top

As Scott noted previously, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized for three days before Joe Biden knew anything about it. Austin claimed he “could have done a better job ensuring that the public was informed.” Such an understatement raises more than a few questions. We now know he was being treated for prostate cancer, but neither President Biden nor his staff knew this until today—weeks after Secretary Austin went to the hospital for what was described as an “elective” procedure. While prostate cancer treatment varies widely, calling any of them “elective” seems irregular, to say the least.

Being AWOL is a pattern by now. Where was the Secretary of Defense last January when China sent a massive surveillance balloon over some of our most sensitive military bases? Why was this Chinese spy balloon allowed into American airspace? If potential damage on the ground was the problem, as military bosses claimed, why was it not shot down when it passed over water between Alaska and the lower 48? Could Gen. Austin “have done a better job?” Consider also the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in August of 2021.

The United States handed billions in sophisticated military gear to the Taliban and stranded Americans and Afghan allies alike. According to Biden,  “the extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery, and selfless courage of the United States military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals,” and so on. Could Lloyd Austin, Defense Secretary since January 22, 2021, have done a better job?

The defense secretary is “the principal assistant to the president in all matters relating to the Department of Defense and serves on the National Security Council.” Joe Biden didn’t know that his principal military assistant was in the hospital. “We don’t know the whole story,” Scott explains, but “it seems representative of the vacuum at the top of the administration.”

Embattled Americans should take it as the latest evidence that Joe Biden, a waxworks effigy of a president in Conrad Black’s phrase, is not really running the country. The alphabet agencies doubtless pull the strings but the puppeteer-in-chief emerged last August 2 in “The Obama Factor.”

Tablet editor David Samuels interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winner David Garrow, whose massive Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama confirmed that Dreams from My Father was a novel and the author a “composite character.” As Samuels explained, the fictitious character became president and is responsible for “the disaster that we are living through now.” Samuels even provided a roster of Obama officials still in the White House laying down policy, particularly on Iran.

Back in 1979, Iran’s Islamic regime invaded the US embassy in Tehran, and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The regime still chants “Death to Israel, Death to America,” and remains a major funder of terrorism. With no apology to Biden and Austin, anybody who thinks the USA can negotiate with this Islamofascist death squad needs a brain scan and spine transplant.

The purpose of the U.S. military is to fight and win wars. The Biden Junta has turned military leaders into zampolits, political officers deploying woke policies that divide and weaken the force. Such a military, whatever the number of planes, tanks and missiles, is not the best it can be.

As George Will put it, going into battle with the second-best military is like playing poker with the second-best hand. You have two choices: bluff or fold. If anybody thought that’s what Obama has in mind it would be hard to blame them.

Never underestimate a president who sends a planeload of cash to Iran. Never forget the president who called an Muslim terrorist’s mass murder of American soldiers “workplace violence,” not even gun violence. Never disregard the composite character responsible for the disaster we are living through now.