PMC Commentary

What "emergencies" do we face? Let's count them. One.

This, from Brian Klass, a WaPo columnist and politics professor, appears to be the consensus take on things as they are:

Looking at the news, it's clear that there are two emergencies facing the United States - Republican attempts to create American authoritarianism and worsening climate change.

Neither is being treated like an emergency. Both are.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 30, 2021

Yet the emergencies — the threats — are not equal.

U.S. action on climate change (or on any pressing issue) hinges on averting Republican authoritarianism, which hinges on the success of Republican state legislatures rigging the electoral process, which, so far, they're accomplishing.

Election subversion is the political story, the national emergency, the one real, monstrous threat "facing the U.S." until November 2024. Nothing else matters — not climate change and what to do about it, not Trump or no Trump in three years, not Gov. DeSantis as a Trumpian doppelgänger, not Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell's obstructionism, not the filibuster, not even gerrymandering — compared to Republicans' theft of American democracy.

For with that will come Republican authoritarianism. And with that, it's game over. On everything.

And congressional Democrats had better wake the fuck up. Rather than investing time on ill-informed criticisms of President Biden and what's happening 7,000 miles away in a country forsaken 20 or 1,200 years ago, they might want to focus on the orchestrated evil occurring in our backyard.

Some purges are good

Ross Douthat writes that recent events in Afghanistan "demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors. Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path" (emphasis mine).

The columnist forgot one critical group. I cannot forgive — nor should I — Biden's boneheaded intelligence advisers who signed off on his happy, optimistic, public pronunciamentos of spring and summer, such as the U.S. withdrawal will be done "responsibly, deliberately, and safely" — April 14 — and "the drawdown is proceeding in a secure and orderly way" — July 8.

The result: President Biden has become "the singular scapegoat" in our media-frenzied, politically poisoned atmosphere of blame-naming. Through an appalling combination of incompetence, groupthink and, one supposes, utterly ungrounded dreaminess, his intelligence people ultimately hung him out to dry, twist, and look ridiculous.

And as The Godfather's Hollywood producer, Jack Woltz, said with searing precision and accuracy, "A man in my position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous."

Intelligence heads should be rolling on Pennsylvania Avenue. Would that they do, and soon. Biden has let this get ahead of him, but he still has time to recoup some of his losses. May the axes fall — before voters who may be forgiving now decide differently down the road, given the immensity of prevailing media frenzy and political poison.

This is what the desperation of "relevance" sounds like

ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost. If it is not handed back, we should either go in with unequivocal Military force and get it, or at least bomb the hell out of it. Nobody ever thought such stupidity, as this feeble-brained withdrawal, was possible!

— Donald Trump, 30 August 2021

The good news is that when swinging for wild inaccuracy, he's still batting 1.000. The cost of "all [U.S.] equipment" left behind in Afghanistan is roughly $24 billion, not $85 billion, as the Washington Post's Fact Checker notes this morning. (The vast excess was spent on training and housing Afghan security and police forces.) And much of that equipment will soon be useless to the Taliban, since they haven't the parts or technical means to maintain it.

The even better news is that some of the Trump Party's congressional candidates might feel obligated to agree with the Mar-a-Lago idiot about redeploying "unequivocal Military force" in Afghanistan, or bombing the hell out of it. The Times has an interesting piece on voters in California’s swing, 39th congressional district: "Even some Republicans who voted for Donald Trump last fall were reluctant to criticize Mr. Biden" on what has transpired in Afghanistan under his watch.

Which is to ask: Is Trump losing touch with his — and possibly his political allies' — voters?

How to murder your husband - and get away with it

A judge did what? From today's Ohio Capital Journal:

Butler County Common Pleas Judge Gregory Howard ... ruled in favor of a woman last week who sought to force a hospital to administer Ivermectin — an animal dewormer that federal regulators have warned against using in COVID-19 patients — to her husband after several weeks in the ICU with the disease….

[The woman] found Ivermectin on her own and connected with Dr. Fred Wagshul, an Ohio physician who her lawsuit identifies as "one of the foremost experts on using Ivermectin in treating COVID-19." He prescribed the drug, and the hospital refused to administer it.

In an interview, Wagshul said … the CDC and FDA [have] engaged in a "conspiracy" … to block its use…. [He added that] the science behind Ivermectin’s use in COVID-19 patients is "irrefutable."

And an Ohio professor of medicine said Wagshul is a "snake oil salesman."

But I'm more intrigued by the judge. Or perhaps the wife? Either this is the judge's really dandy method of reducing Ohio's Trump population, or it's the wife's even dandier method of reducing her spousal population.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant!

The return of the "U.S. credibility" bugaboo

Dennis Ross, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, ponders those Americans who ponder whether — after Afghanistan — U.S. credibility and reliability will ever be the same to the world; you know, just as we permanently lost our credibility and reliability after …

Vietnam,

the Iran hostage crisis,

the 1983 killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, for which President Reagan never retaliated,

the terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, "killing 19 U.S. airmen," for which President Clinton didn't retaliate, either,

the WMD-absent Iraq invasion, which deepened "sectarian conflict" and led to ISIS,

the failure of President Obama "to react militarily when chemical weapons were, in fact, used against Syrian civilians,"

and Trump, whose name alone suffices.

As Ross argues in so many words: Like it or not, the U.S. is the indispensable nation; no longer the U.S. of the American Century, for sure, but still "the most powerful country in the world." It can no more forfeit its leadership than the world — excluding its bad actors, of course — would want it to.

"It’s easy to despair over the idea that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has forever doomed American credibility," concludes Ross. "But it can recoup, just as it has before."

It can — depending on who leads it. And that's up to us, not the world.

News flash: Germany and Korea are not Afghanistan

International relations professor and journalist David Rothkopf has an excellent USA Today op-ed in which he pushes back on the "intellectual dishonesty" being hurled at President Biden on the hot-button issue of Afghanistan. He aggressively goes after "the arguments we are hearing" — pointedly, 15 of them — which he labels "indefensible."

His piece is well worth your time. Here I want only to note two of the crazier arguments, interrelated as they are, and as Rothkopf presents them:

9. We could easily have left troops there indefinitely.

10. But we have left troops in Germany and Korea.

Leaving U.S. troops anywhere is always "easy" to neoconservatives; we just plant them without giving a thought to consequences. This makes it exceedingly easy. As far as Afghanistan goes, Rothkopf, in response, observes that our "risk grew as the Taliban grew in strength," which, by the way, Trump facilitated by releasing Taliban prisoners. "Staying would have required a bigger investment," he writes, which, I would add, the American public was deeply unwilling to undertake.

The "troops in Germany and Korea" argument is especially peculiar, though. Rothkopf's pushback is this: "Those are allied nations facing real imminent threats from major enemies who pose a strategic risk to the United States. We have no similar ongoing interest in Afghanistan."

What puzzles me about his counterargument is what it omits: Neither Germany nor Korea possesses a fanatical, indigenous insurgency hellbent on overthrowing the government and willing to keep trying until its last man dies.

Of greater logical interest, however, is that proponents of leaving troops in Afghanistan (which is to say, Kabul) simply because we've left troops in Germany and Korea do not argue that we should have left troops in Saigon after North Vietnam overran the South. Nevertheless, that's what they're implicitly arguing. And that's insane.

Shiftless Covid Queens

Ronald Reagan might have called them the Covid Queens — those infected Trumpian crackers in their rebel-flag-flying, '87 pickup trucks who recently hailed their freedom! from jackbooted candy stripers but are now hogging south Louisiana's hospital beds and ICU units just as Hurricane Ida victims need them.

Whenever a monster hurricane is on its way, Baton Rouge's Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, for example, always releases patients able to make it on their own, so that the hospital can accommodate storm victims. But Our Lady of the Lake couldn't do that this week, since the Covid Queens can't make on their own — for they refused to first help themselves, simply by getting vaccinated. Now they're a burden on others.

"[Baton Rouge's] hospital officials were grappling with an extra challenge," reports the Times. "They were bracing for an influx of patients at a time when they are already strained by the coronavirus pandemic."

Said Our Lady of the Lake’s chief medical officer: "Our people are stretched, our devices are stretched. It’s not the level of care that we expect from our team or this hospital, but it is the level of care that we have been presented with and we’ll do our best."

Because shiftless Covid Queens failed to do their best — or even the minimum — federal, state and local resources are already overburdened in the grip of a crisis, and hospital staffs must now do what's less than optimal for others. St. Ronald would be outraged. 

Who's missing?

Not one woman in the entire photo.

A humanitarian effort — and no women.

If Afghanistan's deeply religious men would just stick to slaughtering each other, which they excel at, the women might pull the country into at least the 17th century.

But — literally — God forbid.

Mississippi's children and their ho-hum governor

Bless his metaphysical heart, Tate Reeves prefers taking the Godly, "big picture" approach to life and death, rather than fussing with proven, earthly measures to promote the former among his constituents. (Sort of, for he also tries to cover his sanctimonious ass with vague blather about secular safeguards.) Said the Mississippi governor at a Republican fundraiser in Tennessee on Thursday:

"I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle about covid … and why does it seem like folks in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South are a little less scared, shall we say. When you believe in eternal life — when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen — then you don’t have to be so scared of things.

"Now, God also tells us to take necessary precautions. And we all have opportunities and abilities to do that and we should all do that. I encourage everyone to do so. But the reality is that working together, we can get beyond this. We can move forward. We can move on."

Unless you're dead. And if you're one of the Mississippi children who has died from covid, you never had the chance to experience even much of a temporal "blip."

Moving forward, as the governor said, other Mississippi children may soon join their friends now enjoying eternal life, for Reeves refuses to mandate school masks.

Among those who "[didn’t] have to be so scared of things," as Reeves put it, are "two teenagers [who] have died of COVID-19 since July 25, 2021," reports the state's Free Press, "including 14-year-old Mkayla Robinson, who had begun 8th grade at a mask-optional school just eight days before dying within hours of being diagnosed."

The Free Press adds that Gov. Reeves has "struggled to remember … the state’s child death toll." But its ultimate accuracy shall stand as a neoConfederate monument to the sick admixture of religion and politics.

And some parents will never "get beyond" it, they'll never "move forward" nor "move on."     

The unspeakable cynicism behind, and exploitation of, the 13 dead service members

If you're looking for evidence of mounting, hawkish cynicism behind one national publication's declaration that the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in Kabul was a "historic catastrophe," look no further than Paul Wolfowitz's Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning.

He too notes the "terrible recent events in Afghanistan." The deaths that occurred "will hang like a dark cloud over the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11," writes George Bush's infamous deputy defense secretary.

But wait, was that number of U.S. deaths really so "terrible" — so "catastrophic" — in Wolfowitz's eyes? Turns out, no, not at all. For later he writes that had Americans "been told that U.S. combat deaths had been averaging around 20 a year since we switched to a largely advisory mission in 2015," well, we probably would have been fine with that. "[We] would have seen those 20 years of human and financial costs in a different light."

Which is to say, directly — which Wolfowitz does not — that though the deaths of 13 U.S. service members are being presented by hawks as a historic catastrophe, 20 U.S. combat deaths every year for six years were essentially a nonevent. Nothing to see there, nothing to particularly mourn — in short, nothing, really, to get exercised about.

And that, in turn, is the neoconservative foundation on which Wolfowitz & Friends hope to build: "The war with [the Taliban] and its affiliates won’t end because the U.S. has quit…. The fall of Kabul has been a wake-up call for many Americans. We can’t afford to hit snooze now and go back to sleep."

With that, Wolfowitz closes his Journal op-ed, knowing that little imagination is needed to interpret his "wake-up call."

He also needn't search far to find a likeminded friend. Writes Matthew Hennessey, the Journal's deputy editorial page editor: "Leaving Afghanistan hasn’t made us safer." He then compares this week's bombing that killed 13 service members to the thousands-fold deaths of 20 years ago. Thus, "as with 9/11," writes Hennessey, "the next attack will prompt questions. How could this have happened? People will demand official answers. Why didn’t you stop it? Some will make the familiar argument that it’s better to fight them over there than over here."

Yes, "some" will indeed make that argument, Mr. Hennessey. How clever of you and Mr. Wolfowitz not to name them.

As fickle and flaky as the American body politic has become, God only knows how many of us will listen.

Two days ago I wrote that "it seems to me that America has learned its folly," in that "our misadventures in nation-building are over." I still believe that. The neocons, however, are back — and they're plunging into what they hope will be seen by the public as a vast distinction; they're cynically exploiting the deaths of 13 U.S. service members to argue for on-the-ground, U.S. military reengagement in Afghanistan — not, heaven forbid, any sort of nation-building.

It's a Bushian-Wolfowitzian ruse, a rhetorical artifice, just another neocon hustle — and cynical as hell.

Afghanistan, cable news, psychoses, hyperpartisanship and limitless stupidity

I hadn't watched so much cable news since 9/11. Now I hope to make it another 20 years of CableLite. The most appalling and concentrated bullshit rained from the airwaves and onto our screens yesterday as unmistakable symptoms of America's rolling crackup — a national display of soulless psychoses mixed with poisonous partisanship seasoned with extraordinary stupidity, ignorance and every imaginable flavor of sheer pixilation.

Before me were elected officeholders, former public officials, military veterans and national security "analysts" pounding their Zoom tables and calling for a rejuvenation of the very hellhole of 20 years from which President Biden was finally extricating us.

The hysteria, as hysteria is wont to be, was nuts: calls for an abrupt cancellation of the withdrawal timeline; more Marines to expand Kabul airport's defensive perimeter; the reoccupation of the Bagram airbase; a landing of the 101st Airborne; an American-manned hunt for IS-K terrorists; necessarily massive redeployments to secure every last American and every last ally anywhere in Afghanistan. Essentially, a whole new war.

The number of the "stranded" and "Biden-abandoned," which last week was somewhere around 60,000, grew over the last few days to 90,000, then to 120,000, and by yesterday the number on cable news had grown to hundreds of thousands. Hysteria inflation.

Reports on two suicide bombings that killed 13 American troops swiftly morphed into screaming chyrons announcing that "President Biden has blood on his hands," though cable commentators wanted his head. Team Biden had warned of such bombings in Kabul's highest-risk areas, unlike the Bush administration's indifference to hijacked-airliner warnings that would kill 3,000, or Trump's knowing indifference to a global plague that would kill more than 600,000 Americans. By this morning the Washington Examiner, in full cable-news mode, would declare the war deaths of "at least 12 U.S. service members" to be "a historic catastrophe." 

Throughout yesterday members of the Trump Party were demanding Biden's resignation, of course; that, or the president and vice president should "face impeachment and removal from office." Notes the Washington Post: "It’s now increasingly clear [that] if Republicans win the House majority" — and they will, because they're stealing it — "Biden is very likely to be impeached." And there you have it: a leading cable-news story for the next year and a half; a further unfolding of America's psychotic, partisan meltdown.

By yesterday's end I had decided against sound judgment to catch a minute of Chris Cuomo's CNN program, in which Chris himself was keenly advising Joe to just make everything peachy. There also sat as a guest the normally sane, usually reasonable military veterans advocate Paul Rieckhoff, now asserting with seeming earnestness that President Biden's sole responsibility Thursday was "to ensure that every one of our service members is safe." In a war zone. No dangers, no potential loss of life in a Taliban-ISIS-infested perimeter.

That's when I clicked off, clutching strands of my vanishing hair. I've yet to decide if today I'll click back on. If I do, I shall be chemically fortified, I think. No one should go unarmed into cable news' hell of soulless psychoses, poisonous partisanship and extraordinary stupidity.

What in hell were these parents thinking?

The NYT: "20 students and 14 parents are stuck in Afghanistan and have requested government assistance to fly home, according to a statement from the Cajon Valley Union School District."

So these parents gathered up the kids and winged to Afghanistan just as the Taliban was knocking off one province after another and was banging at Kabul's doors.

In another sign of monumental parental cluelessness, one family asked the school district to "hold their children’s spots in their classrooms while they were stranded."

Would open desks in San Diego County's classrooms be very far up in your mind as you and your children are trying to evade violence-addicted, religiously whacked-out gangs of terroristic cutthroats?

Not to worry. Rep. Darrell Issa is on this. "I won’t stop until we have answers and action," he says. He wants answers but I have a question. Did you, Mr. Issa, know these idiot parents planned on vacationing in Afghanistan?

Where are they going next summer? North Korea?

Ideology again clashes with reality

Hugh Hewitt:

"In Britain’s Daily Telegraph Wednesday, U.S. editor Nick Allen published a column titled 'Joe Biden’s betrayal: Allies can never trust this president again.' It tells a tale of perfidy. The allies wanted to stay, to rescue, to save their and our citizens." (Britain has signaled the same.)

The NYT:

"Belgium decided to end its evacuation flights from Kabul on Wednesday night…. The Netherlands noted that the government could no longer continue with its evacuations…. Denmark’s defense ministry also reported on Wednesday evening that its armed forces had conducted their last airlift from Kabul…. The Pentagon has vowed that the U.S. civilian airlift will continue apace."

Do neocons still hold sway? He says yes. I say no.

I'm able to track Ezra Klein's thinking for a while, but then he loses me:

"Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures…. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation…. I will not pretend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But neither do a lot of people dominating the airwaves right now. And the confident pronouncements to the contrary over the past two weeks leave me worried that America has learned little … [about the] illusion of our control."

Read: nation-building.

The culprits behind Klein's initial sentences are easy to identify. The first group is everywhere, especially on cable news, casually bedimming our memory of America's prolonged miscalculations in Afghanistan — namely, the mistake of nation-building. So too are the cable cowboys easy to spot; those who imagine a smoother withdrawal by, in reality, never withdrawing.

But who are the people dominating the airwaves in the advocacy of more nation-building elsewhere?

It seems to me that America has learned its folly, the "illusion" is gone, our misadventures in nation-building are over. The electorate's support of President Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan is clear evidence of our reeducation. That's not to say our illusion of foreign control won't return. It will, because of generational forgetfulness, human arrogance and indefatigable ignorance. For now, though, that illusion has been shattered.

No longer does even neocon-savant Bret Stephens dream of rebuilding graveyards and hellholes in America's image. He has instead reverted to reveries of "strategic relevance" and traditional realpolitik and appropriately placed firepower: "Critics of the past 75 years of American foreign policy have consistently attacked the idea, and counted the costs, of the United States as the world’s policeman," wrote Stephens on Tuesday. "They are soon to learn just how high the costs can go when the policeman walks off the job."

Let's face it. There is something to what Stephens says.

The United States cannot and at any rate should not withdraw itself into madcap, Trumpian isolationism. We're still a world leader, if not the leader. Despite riotous family squabbles, the free world still looks to the U.S. for both its defense and the promulgation of human rights, representative democracy, universal education, the rule of law and all else that defines enlightened, Western values. Forfeiting that leadership to the bad actors of China, Russia and Iran would be tantamount to welcoming the Visigoths at Rome's gates.

We cannot build nations, yet rebuild some nations we indeed have — and with spectacular, postwar success. The key is to know which nations have the necessary sociopolitical foundations for growth, or regrowth, as the case may be. Afghanistan wasn't one of them. Neither was Iraq, Yemen, Somalia or Libya, as Ben Rhodes, an Obama foreign policy adviser, pointed out to Klein.

But again, who are these people whom Mr. Klein says are "dominating the airwaves," still advocating a U.S. refashioning of the world? They'll be back, no doubt. For now, though, they're out of fashion.

Remember those carefree days of Trumpian excellence?

I know you've seen this luscious, 16 seconds of hilarity. I know that. But I'd never forgive myself if I failed to "curate" it on this site.

Kayleigh: When President Trump was President, you didn’t see crisis after crisis. pic.twitter.com/pipF8GWbBg

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 24, 2021