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Amateur hour

The New Neo Posted on by

What a difference 5 weeks [see NOTE below] makes:

Notice that, among other things, he did not answer the question. The question wasn’t, “How did the Taliban overrun the country so fast?” It was essentially, “Why did you fail to predict it?”

[NOTE: That first clip is dated with two different dates in that tweet, July 7th and June 7th. So it either was said 5 weeks ago or 9 weeks ago. I think the earlier date may have been correct, but he may have repeated it on July 7th. Hard to tell.]

Comments

Amateur hour — 46 Comments

  1. To win a war you have to bring the opposition to their knees, an atomic bomb as in Japan or lots of boots on the ground as at the end of WWI, and then, I when we let the fricking Russians be standing the boots in Berlin and that was the last war we won and that was a mess to get figured out over about 50 years.

    We know how to fight and win but since the Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI we have screwed up the peace or what ever you want to call the rolling over and giving up of the enemy, we win but we don’t conquer until we bring them to their knees and let the beg for mercy and pledge fidelity to those who won. Old Greco-Roman, European ideas of war and the Asians don’t give a shit about that. Too Bad, So Sad…….

  4. So apparently they have already alerted the media that Biden has no public appearances scheduled for tomorrow.

    One source of perverse entertainment is going to be watching the media explain why this style of (non)leadership is really awesome and the way it should be done.

  5. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Blinken

    That’s Blinken’s Wiki page. If it’s accurate, the dude is a non-entity seat filler who supported a trifecta of terrible ideas: the Iraq War, the intervention in Libya, and the arming of the Syrian rebels.

    He’s like the perfect stereotype of modern U.S. elites. He’s advanced by competing within existing bureaucratic and political systems while producing virtually NOTHING of value to the greater world and he’s never suffered from awful judgment because he was always making the same mistake everybody else was.

    Mike

  6. What will be the MSNBC, CNN strategy for tomorrow?

    1. Cover this straight.
    2. Cover this but blame Trump with a dash of Bush.
    3. Completely ignore this and focus on Florida (but not any other state with a D governor) and DeSantis.

  7. MBunge, there’s also this: In the Obama administration he “helped craft U.S. policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the nuclear program of Iran.” We’re obviously in good hands.

  8. Griffin:

    Blame Trump.

    For example:

  9. Blinkin works for Nod (taking a lid for a few days). The 25th Amendment is looking overdue right now

    But nobody is winkin, it’s not a joke.

  11. neo,

    Yes, my above 2) is the answer with a healthy mix of ‘DeathSantis’ for the fear porn segment of the audience.

    But, wow, Biden being MIA and now I just saw that Psaki is also on vacation this week. They are going to really make their media buddies work this week.

  12. Z is being repressed. Poor dear. Bless his heart, he means well?

    “I’m just a man
    whose intentions are good.
    Oh Lord, please don’t let
    my intentions
    be misunderstood.”

    Don’t recall the group who made the record.

    Carry on.

  16. The thing that makes all this so ridiculous is people pretend it’s Biden making any of these decisions. I would guess it’s some combination of Dr Jill, Ron Klain, Susan Rice etc. but really who knows.

    The picture they sent out of Biden in a room alone video conferencing with others is being picked apart. The clock is in standard time not daylight savings for one example.

    He took a 5 day weekend last week returned to the White House and got lost trying to find the door then a day later went to Camp David and hasn’t been seen since.

    Super!

  17. Link found at Ace.

    “Any political settlement that the Afghans pursue to avert bloodshed must include having women at the table. The fate of women and girls in Afghanistan is critical to the future of Afghanistan. As we strive to assist women, we must recognize that their voices are important, and all must listen to them for solutions, respectful of their culture. There is bipartisan support to assist the women and girls of Afghanistan,” Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

    https://dailycaller.com/2021/08/15/nancy-pelosi-commends-joe-biden-taliban-advance-kabul/

  18. When Biden stated “America is Back” (with a straight face, somehow) what he really meant (insofar as he was able to mean anything) was that “Obama is Back”—but that didn’t really matter all that much to the jubilant multitudes who ONLY cared that “Trump was Gone”.

    And so, for those pining achingly for the genius Nobel Prize winner who brought us the marvelously novel “concept” of “leading from behind” (though of course no one really knew what it meant, not really—since it’s quite obviously meaningless, but when mouthed by the right person takes on the aura of deep wisdom), we now have the next iteration:
    “leading from nowhere to be seen”.

    In real terms, this means…well, many things…but I’ll take two, FWIW
    Iran is waiting its turn with tremendous anticipation (and great expectations, which it knows WILL BE fulfilled, ultimately—yes, tomorrow DOES belong to US); and Israel’s tyro leadership must wake up quickly because otherwise they’re gonna be caught like a deer in the headlights. It won’t be easy for Israel to decouple from this Second Coming of the Obama’s Rogue Administration (i.e., “The Sequel”), but it will have to be done—both in the realm of foreign affairs and the country’s response to Covid. Regarding the latter, although the Israeli govt., from the get-go, decided (for some reason) to march in lockstep with the uber-politicized CDC, there have recently been some encouraging signs—e.g., the development of parallel treatments, which are probably “merely” combinations of HCQ+ or Ivermectin, or Quercetin+ or similar—that it has decided to, de facto, pursue a much saner and humane treatment alternatives, tested in Greece and just now being sent to the country of Georgia, which needless to say have been rejected by the CDC on account of not having undergone “sufficient double-blind testing” yadda, yadda (still hauling out that old warhorse whenever necessary!).

    Such “decoupling” will not be at all easy for a government that seems to believe that the US “has its back” and doesn’t appear to understand that “Biden”, devoted to the cause of “his” country’s destruction, has no intention of supporting Israel unless Israel agrees to dismantle itself.

    Perhaps the current debacle will open some eyes—the debacle itself but more importantly, “Biden” ‘s response to it.

    It ought to open the eyes of other countries, as well, especially those who have contributed to the Afghanistan mission, who will be lucky to get their personnel out of there alive.

    On the other hand, just why they aren’t already aware of the egregious and destructive nature of the “Biden” administration is beyond understanding—except that they probably believe their own media, too…. (And of course, Trump is GONE!, which as mentioned above may be the ONLY thing that matters to these paragons of virtue, discernment and wisdom.)

  20. Who is the dim bulb responsible for Afghanistan having a Sharia based constitution? In which case, why bother fighting the Taliban? Sharia based law means when “he said…she said” happens in court, two female witnesses balance one male witness. Compulsory mosque attendance, ban on alcohol, and women not allowed outside the home without family male supervision. Countries like Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq were happier with secular governments than with Islamist governments. No wonder they folded so quickly. The Marxist government installed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lasted about 2 years after Soviet withdrawal.
    Too many of our leaders and news organizations are fools. We’re not, collectively, much smarter, for giving them control.

  22. You heard him… “When we came to office the Taliban was at its strongest since 2001.” It’s all Trump’s fault! Waaaahhh!

    But Gropey Joe can’t make it to the teleprompter until…but yeah…blame Trump.

  23. It can’t be “Biden” ‘s fault because, well because he was on holiday when it happened.
    https://justthenews.com/government/security/what-went-wrong-afghanistan-unpacking-failures-amid-evolving-crisis

    (It can’t get much clearer than that.)

    Similarly—identically?—the southern border of the US is NOT—CATEGORICALLY NOT—a crisis…

    …but if it, in fact, sorta, might be, could be—IS—a crisis…well then, it can’t be anybody’s fault but Trump’s.

    (Say what you want about “Biden” but at least “he” IS consistent….)

  26. I guess they think that if they just take the week off, this will all blow over and no one will blame them.

    Pelosi’s statement on women in Afghanistan is especially stupid. Um, Nancy, this is an Islamist regime. Think ISIS. Women are property.

  27. Well, after leveling al Qaeda camps we should have left them alone and kept an eye out for terrorists. People were saying back then that trying to impose a new form of government on a collection of tribes was fool hardy at best.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afghanistan10

    ‘You can rent Afghanistan,’ one commander said last week, ‘but you can’t buy it.’

    …

    No one could agree on what scenario would be best suited to Afghanistan. No one had any real idea of how to form an inclusive and representational government. Their country, after all, has never had one.

    On two things they all agreed: first, that the American air strikes had made the task of winning wavering Taliban commanders over far harder by turning the hardline Islamic militia from villains into victims and, second, that a decision by the allies to use ground troops would mean the coalition’s war was no longer against terrorism but against Afghanistan. Then there would be only one thing for the disparate factions of the country to do: fight the invader.

  28. “There is bipartisan support to assist the women and girls of Afghanistan,” Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)“

    Was there bipartisan support for her brother’s tape acquittal??????

  30. “Amateur hour”?

    One might like to think so. And mock.

    But if “Biden” ‘s actual GOAL is to destroy America—and it is—then “he” is right on track, even ahead of schedule. (And the pace is blistering.)

    “Amateur”?
    Depends on how you define (or even recognize) the goal.

    “Amateur”?
    And so, NO, not in the slightest. In fact, a professional arsonist just doing “his” job…
    A professional wrecker just doing “his” thing.
    A professional beserker just going along “his” merry way.
    A professional termite undermining the entire foundation.
    A professional moth destroying the fabric….

    Had us all fooled, didn’t “he”…

    But not all of us…. Victor D. Hanson nails it (again):
    “We are in the midst of a revolutionary epoch and probably most don’t even know it.”
    https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/15/are-we-in-a-revolution-and-dont-even-know-it/

  33. They told me that if I voted for Trump, we would end up with a incompetent demogogue in the White House.

    I had a recurring conversation with an acquaintance last year to the effect that although I thought Trump was bad, I really couldn’t see how progressives in general or Biden in particular would be any better, even in the areas where Trump was weakest. If we were destined to have a incompetent demogogue in the White House, I argued that the rational response for someone with my political views was to vote for the incompetent demogauge who had a lot of policies that I think are best instead of the one who would barely do a single thing that I agreed with. I also argued that it would be better to have an incompetent demogogue who would be regularly challenged by the press instead of one who should probably list all the major press outlets as in-kind campaign contributors. Orange man being bad and all, my acquaintance just couldn’t grasp either point.

    I think my reasoning has held up fairly well.

    That said, pray for our country.

  34. Maybe it is time to start a betting pool on when the first terrorist attack either based in or enabled out of Afghanistan, hits the U.S. shores.

    One wonders how Presidentrix Harris will respond to a slaughter in New York or San Fran. Probably much the same way Biden has responded to those responsible for the Wuhan leak.

    One has to wonder too, if the coasts have any goodwill left in flyover country. Will the folks there, mortified, say “Good God!”, or will they shrug at the destruction of those whom they are convinced were ultimately behind what they perceive as a stolen election, and simply mutter, “Good riddance”.

  35. DNW – my fear is the attack wont be in or enable out of Afghanistan, but rather some Afghani already here, feeling utterly betrayed by our country.

    Or a lone/small group of veterans feeling the same, taking their anger out on TPTB.

  36. “Bauxite on August 16, 2021 at 1:03 pm said:

    They told me that if I voted for Trump, we would end up with a incompetent demogogue in the White House.”

    Presuming you voted for Trump, that turned out to be true. LOL via Material implication, and irony both.

  37. From https://twitter.com/USAmbKabul: “The Taliban’s statements in Doha do not resemble their actions in Badakhshan, Ghazni, Helmand & Kandahar. Attempts to monopolize power through violence, fear, & war will only lead to international isolation.”

    Pathetic. I knew this guy many years ago in D.C. He married a grad school classmate of mine, also a foreign service officer. Codevilla’s ruling class in action.

    DNW: Seeing the folks who bragged in Time magazine about “fortifying our democracy” get greased? I’m betting on “good riddance”. Problem is, there’ll be a lot of collateral damage too.

    Finally, a few words in defense of our fellow commenter Zaphod. Yes, he’s obnoxious. The race obsession and the Jew-spotting are tiresome. That said, he’s usually fun to read. He can take it as well as dish it out, and with good humo(u)r. He also hits the nail on the head a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. And no, I don’t think he understands the States very well. Rather, he understands some of it quite well, but there are some important things he just doesn’t get. (Mark Steyn gets them, but he lives in New Hampshire.) And because he doesn’t get these things, he regards them with reflexive contempt. I blame bad company: the Americans he hangs out with overseas belong to Codevilla’s ruling class, not Codevilla’s country class. If he ever makes it to this part of the Deep South, I’ll take him out for some meat-and-three and range time with experienced shooters. He might have to re-calibrate his Weltanschauung. Anyway, I hope he turns up here again. But then I’m a big ol’ softy who even misses Montage.

  38. Hubert on August 16, 2021 at 3:50 pm said:

    From https://twitter.com/USAmbKabul: “The Taliban’s statements in Doha do not resemble their actions in Badakhshan, Ghazni, Helmand & Kandahar. Attempts to monopolize power through violence, fear, & war will only lead to international isolation.”

    Pathetic. I knew this guy many years ago in D.C. He married a grad school classmate of mine, also a foreign service officer. Codevilla’s ruling class in action.”

    Yeah … You’d think that these professional niche seekers would eventually weary of delivering the same, stale, rancid, recitations year after year after year.

    I mean, I am certainly weary of repeating myself – mainly on the ramifications of a few key points of logic as they relate to certain sociopolitical assumptions and dynamics – and I have been doing that far less than 20 years.

    But then, my paycheck does not depend on issuing these banalities as proof of engagement, nor count as remunerable work product. Perhaps that keeps the perseverating intonations of these flaccid-faced, startled-looking, scant-bearded talking heads and functionaries, ever-green, to their minds.

    Or maybe it is just a very special form of autism.

    “Finally, a few words in defense of our fellow commenter Zaphod. Yes, he’s obnoxious. The race obsession and the Jew-spotting are tiresome. That said, he’s usually fun to read. He can take it as well as dish it out, and with good humo(u)r. He also hits the nail on the head a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. And no, I don’t think he understands the States very well. Rather, he understands some of it quite well, but there are some important things he just doesn’t get….

    I think that that was worth repeating. So I did.

    His relentless Progressive-Jew bashing skirts the line for me, despite there being a bit of inside baseball to it from his point of view. But I really cannot find much to criticize in his criticism of self-defeating behavior be it engaged in by Jew or Gentile, Tikkun acolyte, or Episcopalian masochist.

    And frankly, my outrage meter has thrown its needle and has not really been working for quite some time now.

    I’m spending my spare time sweeping out the barn and bringing as much of the old place back into some decent state of repair as I can; both for the sake of engaging in positive activity per se, and as a kind of – albeit unrealistic – insurance.

    Since I have seen that neither pleading nor reason works, I’ll leave it to others to try and coax jumpers off the ledge … or to serve as a mattress; as many seem determined to do.

    “If he ever makes it to this part of the Deep South, I’ll take him out for some meat-and-three and range time with experienced shooters. He might have to re-calibrate his Weltanschauung …”

    Years ago, when I first moved to Texas, I could not believe what I was experiencing. It was the first time in my life I had lived with people who seemed to be more than shitheads I just had to tolerate. There did not seem to be a calculation behind every word of welcome or personal encounter. Cynicism was not the order of the day. And that beckoning future Zaphod speaks of, was there, under the big Texas sky.

    I loved my upper south relatives up here in the Great Lakes State North. As a child, I deeply appreciated my 3rd generation Irish and Italian suburban playmates and their families, too.

    But the first time I ever felt the least stirrings of patriotism, and took the run of the mill man and woman I encountered as presumptive honest and honorable, was in the South.

    Yankees just don’t believe in honor, by and large. And neither it seems do the neurotic females who run their lives.

    Imagine for a moment a society which has basically internalized the most cynical aspects of Nietzsche’s take on the geneology of morals, while masquerading behind a tissue thin veil of deracinated-by-way-of-Utilitarianism, Christian morals.

    Associating in good faith with such people is basically to engage in a life and death game of musical chairs. Not, the version where people swap jobs in a large commercial organization. But the one where a seat is snatched away from the stock of places to sit, as the children circle about waiting for the music to stop so that they can shove their way to planting their posteriors in one of the dwindling spots.

    It is blatantly designed for cheating; but everyone pretends not to notice so as to play the game.

    Codevilla’s ruling class has cheated their way to their safe spots. That is why they feel guilty. That is why they engage in all that breast-beating.

    But as I have mentioned numerous times before, it is our breasts they wish to beat in order to expiate their sins of commission and omission.

    ‘Through your fault, through your fault; through your most grievous fault’

    Zaphod thinks that to save the western way, includes indiscriminately saving them. But they are why we are in this spot in the first place.

    Not all women are natural-born Gomers. And we are not limited to being either their masters, or their punks and the punks of their punks

    It is that, that Zaphod does not seem to get. He figures the tares must be saved along with the wheat.

    But that is just a Sisyphean cycle of wash, rinse and repeat. The most dismal eternal recurrence of the same imaginable.

  39. DNW,

    You might find these comments about the American South by the late British military historian John Keegan of interest:

    “Oddly I came to like the South and still like it more than any other part of the United States. […] Europe is a continent of defeated nations; even Britain, the off-shore survivor, has had occasion to lick its wounds. Victorious America has never known the tread of occupation, the return of beaten men. The South is the exception. Its warrior spirit, which supplies the armed forces with a disproportionate flow of recruits, is a denial of the decision of 1865. […] Pain is a dimension of old civilizations. The South has it. The rest of the United States does not.” (Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, page 41 in the Vintage paperback edition.)

    “The South has it”: indeed it does. Keegan wrote that in the early 1990s. I fear that his assertions about “victorious America” are about to be tested by events. In the Harold Macmillan sense (“Events, dear boy, events!”).

  40. DNW, Hubert:

    On-Topic for The South… Here’s a web page which tickled me pink last night.
    ______________________________________________

    When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

    –Flannery O’Connor
    https://lithub.com/watch-a-young-flannery-oconnor-teaching-her-chicken-to-walk-backwards/
    ______________________________________________

    Of course, if you know anything about O’Connor, you know she became one of the great Southern writers. I was reading through O’Connor web pages and noticed the word “perfect” kept popping up about her short stories.

    She does write perfectly and indelibly and in a voice you know but never heard before. More than any other writer I can think of, she presents you with a moral choice. She’s not fooling around and she’s not being goody-goody.
    ___________________________________

    “She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

    –Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

  41. Huxley,

    Thanks for the video clip. Here’s O’Connor in her post-chicken training career, on the grotesque in Southern literature:

    “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

  42. huxley on August 16, 2021 at 11:10 pm said:

    DNW, Hubert:

    On-Topic for The South… Here’s a web page which tickled me pink last night.”

    I’m not a Southerner. I’m not even a Kentuckian, LOL.

    But part of that atmosphere with which I grew up resonates so deeply with me that it is difficult to describe its impact. It seems the only real world, of natural, normal people, with genuinely human sensibilities and manners.

    I have never seen it – or that particular version of it – described. But then neither have I ever seen normal middle class suburban life post WWII to 1970 shown accurately and from the inside either. Is anyone seriously going to mention Happy Days, or Laverne and Shirley? LOL

    I can think of a few scenes in a few movies I guess. They are before my time but recognizable at least. The domestic scenes in Executive Suite resonate atmospherically.

    You mention Southern authors. One who comes to mind is James Agee. We had – part of – “A Death in the Family” assigned as reading in either the last year of Jr High or the first year of High School. this would have been no more than 12-13 years after it came out, probably.

    The atmosphere that Agee was able to create through his descriptive language was so powerful, that as a kid reading it I felt as though I was floating through the story, along the streets, under the lamp posts, seeing the leaves flutter in the night, rather than reading it.

    Although the family dynamic was much exaggerated in the case of young Rufus compared with me, and way more contrasty than obtained in my case, the rough outline minus the question of alcohol, mildly paralleled my own; and so alarmed me while I was reading that I could not finish: as if my white collar father might drive off one afternoon to assist some of the family “back home”, and never come back.

    That I suppose is what powerful writing can do. To take vague similarities of condition, and propel you headlong into that world; no matter that Dad’s ancestry was considerably – at least in part – more genteel than Jay’s, and in no wise was there tension -even suppressed – between “the old man” and the urban daughter in law.

    But that is the power of literature. Or some of it.

  43. Hubert:

    There are many wonderful O’Connor quotes. Here’s my favorite, about the Eucharist, within the context of high literary company:
    ______________________________________

    I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life). She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

    Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

    http://shamelesspopery.com/flannery-oconnor-on-the-eucharist-and-church-history/
    ______________________________________

    I’m not a Catholic anymore, but I never lost my respect for the Eucharist. As far as I’m concerned, people who understand Christianity as a matter of symbols haven’t lost the plot, they don’t know there is one.

  44. DNW:

    To me “A Death in the Family” is The Great Lost Treasure of American Literature. I was stunned the first time I read it — a feeling still present when I reread it now.

    It is a haunted, hypnotic story told by a man who can see into souls. I don’t understand why almost no one reads “A Death” any more.

    Well, maybe if Agee had managed to keep his life on track well enough to write more than a couple of book plus film criticism.

  45. Huxley and DNW,

    I’m a Yankee by birth and upbringing. But I had the benefit of having a native Southerner as a high-school English teacher. “A Death in the Family” was one of his favorites. And since he was a movie buff, he encouraged us read Agee’s film criticism as well.

    That was about 500 years ago in cultural time. I understand that kids in high school today are reading–perhaps “engaging with” would be more accurate, mere reading being a thing of the past–a much better class of literature. More diverse. More equitable. More inclusive.

  46. Hubert, DNW:

    FWIW, Flannery O’Connor and James Agee died young.

    She at 39 of lupus, which ran in her family. He at 45 of a heart attack, likely assisted by chain smoking and hard drinking.

    O’Connor’s father died of lupus, so she saw death coming. It shows in her writing in the best possible way.

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