Cowabungled

Covid variants, including the new and improved "Mu" strain, continue to burn through the Greek alphabet when acquiring names. Which seems appropriate, considering we're all taking the pandemic Greek-style, if you catch our drift.

Fortunately, Mu isn't really prevalent yet because its much-more-popular cousin Delta is pretty much infecting the world right now. It's so infectious that virtually all serious scientists have agreed on the conclusion that we're all going to get it. Fortunately, vaccination seems to make it much less likely that you'll be hospitalized or have serious symptoms, but Covid has been added to the "Death and Taxes" list as something that will now always be with us.

As manmade achievements go, that's pretty damn impressive and is worthy of commemoration. Specifically, we're fatasizing about something that "escapes from a lab" and is accidentally dropped on the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Bat Viruses and Screen Doors. Nothing flashy, really - just something big enough to make the residents of Hiroshima say "Holy crap, I'm glad they didn't drop that on us."

FROM THE VAULT: LABOR DAY PAINS

Today we observe Labor Day, a celebration of the unions which gave new freedoms, wealth, and dignity to peons who previously suffered under the cruel oppression of capitalist bastards. Nowhere is this more the case than in the editorial cartooning industry, which has come so far in the past century.

Once considered a "job that Americans won't do," 100 years ago editorial cartoons were farmed out to Irish immigrants and Chinese coolies who were functionally little more than slaves, working at crude drawing tables in return for a weekly ration of potato peels or fish heads.

Later, when the Irish turned to police work and the Chinese turned to ruining SAT scores for everyone else, the greedy editorial cartoon barons put women and children (as young as four years old) into forced servitude, penning cartoons in dingy, airless factories. Their work shifts were 24 hours long, every day except Sunday - when they got 15 minutes off to pee and whimper.

Some died of ink poisoning, others died violently in the process of collecting the ink by milking octopuses, while many simply lost the will to live after being forced to look at grim news items every day.

But then the unions entered the scene and changed everything. The sweatshops were closed, women went back to prostitution, and children were again free to be beggars and pickpockets. But actual editorial cartoonists, now holding the reins of collective bargaining, became the masters of their own fate.

Today, editorial cartoonists are among the most highly paid and respected professionals in our nation, loved by all, desired by beautiful women, and universally sought after for their wit, intelligence, and dashing good looks.

Not to mention their vivid imaginations...

Kabulshit

Joe Biden took to the microphones yesterday to announce to the American public that the demonstrably disastrous pullout from Afghanistan was really a whiz-bang success of historic proportions! Everything went perfectly smoothly and according to plan, with every single goal being met. Seriously, this is the approach he decided to take (along with barking forcefully because someone told him to) and I just couldn't watch the whole speech. Especially knowing how successful "The Big Lie" can be.

Because if Joe Biden's rush for the exits was a "success," what in blithering blue Hell does a "failure" look like? Jihad Joe just gifted the Taliban with $85 billion in state-of-the-art weaponry and munitions, making them one of the best-equipped armies in the world. And that same world watched as Biden showed that America's promises no longer mean anything and we can't be trusted as allies. Moreover, hundreds of Americans and thousands of our military's Afghani partners were simply left behind despite being promised, repeatedly and recently by Biden himself, that we wouldn't pull out until he'd personally rescued each and every one of them. 

Not that these unlucky wretches will be suffering long: Joe's crack team gave the Taliban the names of all of the Americans and anti-Taliban allies left behind, seemingly not caring that this would quickly become a "kill list."

There's a lot more to be said, but I don't think I can continue without breaking into an Internet-melting stream of obscenities about Biden, his handlers and unindicted co-conspirators, the media, and every blankety-blank moron who cast a vote for this blood-drenched buffoon of a Marxist president.

So instead, I'm presenting this cartoon and commentary about Afghanistan (and Biden) from the vault, to show - sadly - how very little has changed in the past decade.,,

FROM THE VAULT (June 24, 2011)

Today's cartoon isn't subtle...but neither is war. You fight or run. You win or lose. You tell the truth or you lie like a rug. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the commander-in-chief of the United States military...God help us all. 

After recently overruling his top Whitehouse lawyers on the definition of "war" and "hostilities" in Libya (and giving the finger to Congress), Mr. Obama is now overruling his top generals and withdrawing troops from Afghanistan not when it's militarily wise, but when it will do the most good for his reelection campaign.  And it was important to announce the actual withdrawal dates right now to give our enemies time to plan for their big victory parties. 

The president and his trusty teleprompter explained all of this to the American people in flowery language that would have seemed more appropriate coming from a Poet Laureate than a president. A drunken Poet Laureate. 

"The tide of war is receding," quoth surfing aficionado Obama, indicating that he thinks military success is likely based on the gravitational pull of the moon. "Even as there will be dark days ahead in Afghanistan, the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance," he continued over a background of soothing new-age harp music. 

And Obama loves using those light/dark, future/past rhetorical juxtapositions when he speaks, because they sound great but when you put them together they mean absolutely nothing; things will be bad and things will be good? Wow, thanks for the insights, genius. 

And just where is Obama getting the military advice to take this action and likely lose a war? Not from General David Petraeus, but from his reelection campaign planners and Joe Biden, who hasn't been correct on a single foreign policy matter in his entire inexplicable career. 

Finally, Barack Obama is basically giving Afghanistan to the Taliban because, in his words, "it is time to focus on nation-building at home." Funny, we thought that a pretty good nation had already been built here... but it's obvious that this despicable little political worm of a man is intent on building something else. -

Numbered Daze

We're still not in the proper headspace for editorializing or, according to the warning labels, operating heavy machinery. But the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan demands commentary. Fortunately, William McGurn wrote a great piece for the Wall Street Journal that we're sharing here in its entirety.

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A TALIBAN 9/11 - Joe Biden rushed the Afghanistan pullout for a political speech he wanted to give

William McGurn, Wall Street Journal, 8/23/21

What on earth will Joe Biden say this Sept. 11?

We know what he planned to say. He hoped to use the 20th anniversary to proclaim himself the president who had succeeded in doing what none of his predecessors— George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump —could: end the “endless war” in Afghanistan. The purpose of the artificial deadline was to provide Mr. Biden a dramatic backdrop for the speech he wanted to give.

The bungled exit has scuttled that plan. Worse, it has forever surrendered 9/11 to the Islamist fundamentalists. It is now what they meant it to be in 2001: their day of victory.

Part of this victory belongs to al Qaeda, which seared the date 9/11 into America’s memory. Today al Qaeda’s leaders have regained the haven that they used to plan and carry out the 9/11 attacks, under the same Taliban hosts who refused to give them up even after President Bush declared the U.S. wouldn’t distinguish between the terrorists who attacked us and those who harbored them.

The Taliban victory is bigger still. Over the weekend, propaganda attributed to the Taliban’s Badri 313 unit featured a photo of its fighters, clad in captured American gear, raising the Taliban flag in a parody of the iconic World War II image of Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi. They intend to rub it in.

And why not? They won.

Back on the home front, some are arguing that it is only the botched execution, not the decision to retreat itself, that is at issue. Some further accuse President Biden of eliding responsibility by deliberately conflating the two, which he did again Sunday by emphasizing how “absolutely correct” he was in making the call to bug out.

But there is a cheaper argument about what went wrong, embedded in throwaway lines like “20 years of failure.” U.S. mistakes in Afghanistan were real, numerous, and often costly. But to write off the entire enterprise as a failure because Afghanistan didn’t transform itself into Belgium in 20 years is not serious.

Yes, there was too much optimism about remaking Afghanistan as a liberal democracy. But a more modest measure of success might yet acknowledge there is something to be said for staving off the worst—a Taliban victory. Just as we have managed in Korea, where we have 28,500 U.S. troops and there is still officially a “forever war” going on between North and South.

For as corrupt and incapable as the Afghan government was, it was a significant improvement over its predecessor—and now its successor. Not to mention Afghan women and girls whose lives are about to return to pre-medieval times. Whatever the waste and foolishness on America’s part, it’s doubtful those desperate Afghans climbing the walls at Kabul airport would be as quick to dismiss it all as 20 years of failure.

Not to mention the hit to U.S. credibility. Our most important military alliance—NATO—stands broken and discredited by the man who campaigned as the seasoned expert in diplomatic affairs. Armin Laschet, who is favored to become the new German chancellor, called the pullout a “debacle.” In the U.K., a House of Commons debate featured adjectives like “shameful” and “cruel and humiliating.” This from our friends.

On Sunday the president absurdly claimed that Moscow and Beijing read our graceless exit from Afghanistan as somehow enhancing U.S. capabilities and resolve elsewhere. To the contrary, Xi Jinping is quickly moving to replace U.S. influence in Afghanistan with China’s. And Vladimir Putin is acknowledging what he thinks of Mr. Biden’s resolve by telling the U.S. not even to think of relocating some of our forces in neighboring countries that he considers part of Russia’s sphere of influence.

So a question for those who still believe Mr. Biden was right to pull us out: Do they also believe his assurances that our loss of on-the-ground intelligence, an air base in a strategic part of the world, and an ally instead of an enemy in Kabul will all be compensated for with “over the horizon” capabilities?

No doubt most Americans have always wanted our men and women in uniform to come home. But the American people aren’t children.

It’s a pity that so few of our political leaders have been willing to make the hard argument that a continued presence in a highly strategic area might pay the kind of dividends our continued presence in, say, Germany, Japan and South Korea have. Especially given that U.S. combat responsibilities in Afghanistan had largely ended and the residual force would have been a fraction of the more than 100,000 troops we had there a decade ago (the Afghanistan Study Group suggested 4,500).

In three weeks we will mark the 20th anniversary of the deadliest attack on America’s home soil. Those who gave shelter to the terrorists who pulled it off will be whooping it up in Kabul. What on earth can Joe Biden’s speechwriters come up with now that won’t make it worse?