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SEPTEMBER 1,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

BIDEN'S TRIP SOUTH GETS EVEN MORE BUMPY – FROM REDSTATE:    Joe Biden’s ship has finally run aground on the polls.  They began to nosedive at the beginning of the Afghanistan debacle in the middle of last month. For example, his polling average went under 50 by August 16.But now, Biden’s numbers have absolutely cratered in all respects.  Both the Real Clear Politics average and the FiveThirtyEight average were underwater.  FiveThiryEight had 47.2 disapproving and 46.7 approving.  Real Clear Politics really skewered him with 49.2 disapproving to 45.8 approving, first time the approval was under 46... If you factor in that the polls tend to weight to Democrats, you know the numbers are likely even worse. Although, no doubt, you will still get folks saying how does he even get above 40% approval after all he has done?  But those were the good numbers.  Biden was underwater in the Morning Consult poll as well, but perhaps even more significantly, six in ten people said the country has “seriously gone off on the wrong track.” That’s a horrible indicator for Biden.  On top of that, the latest Rasmussen numbers found that 52% want Biden to resign over the disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal, while 39% disagree. But that wasn’t all.

An even bigger number agreed with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that Biden deserved to be impeached. 60% agreed with Graham’s statement that Biden should be impeached, with 37% saying no, according to Newsmax.  That’s a pretty huge number that agree with impeachment. One of the reasons? Biden is finally finding no real cover in the media, there’s been a lot of honest reporting and a lot of truth is coming out when it comes to Afghanistan.  But, at this point, the only thing that’s really saving him on that in the public’s mind is that his replacement is Kamala Harris, who the public also has a great deal of concern about. People are still very hinky on the concept of her taking over from him.  One thing:  Let us not be overconfident.  It is a lesson learned well in 1948 by President Dewey.

September 1, 2021       Permalink

FIGHTING BACK – OVERNIGHT:  No, not against the Taliban.  We lost that one.  But against the ongoing relentless march of the WOKE battalions.

There is resistance,  this time led by the Brits.  Maybe we're seeing the intellectual equivalent of 1940.  From College Fix:

A group of academics, primarily from the United Kingdom, have formed a group to stop, in their words, the “abuse of history for political purposes.”

The academics, led by Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of French History Robert Tombs, have created a new website they are calling “History Reclaimed,” which seeks to restore a “shared history” for scholars to use.

“The abuse of history for political purposes is as old as history itself,” Tombs said in a statement following the launch of the website. “In recent years, we have seen campaigns to rewrite the history of western democracies in a way that undermines their solidarity as communities, their sense of achievement, even their very legitimacy.”

Other academics joining the website as contributors include Cambridge historian David Abulafia, Oxford ethicist Nigel Biggar, Stanford academic and author Niall Ferguson, Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, educational researcher Alka Cuthbert, and historians Lawrence James, Zareer Masani and Andrew Roberts.

“Whether to ward off criticism or to gain moral advantage, institutions have rushed to embrace the most negative interpretations of their own countries’ histories,” Tombs wrote.

“Activists sometimes assert that ‘facing up’ to a past they present as overwhelmingly and permanently shameful is the path to a better and more ‘inclusive’ future.”

“But the real effect—perhaps the true aim—of their actions is nihilistic destruction,” Tombs wrote.
The full roster of professors, researchers and lecturers includes academics from the U.K., Australia, Poland, and the U.S.

Oxford literary scholar Dr. Marie Daouda told The College Fix her involvement in the group is not so much “anti-wokeism” as it is “a care for truth and for balanced debate.”

“Many members of the group have diverging opinions on matters such as Brexit, economic strategy, religion, or state education,” Daouda said, “but we all hope to provide a reliable source of alternative perspectives on history and how it shapes our present and our future.”

Among the U.S.-based professors contributing to the site is Elizabeth Weiss, who has been attacked as a “racist” by the Anthropology department at San Jose State University for advocating for more rigorous scientific standards when researching human remains.

COMMENT:  I hope this movement grows.  It will do so if academics act with courage, and if the American people start cracking down on how their tax funds are spent to finance corrupt "studies" in our universities.  The road back to sanity will be tough, and minefields await the liberators.  No one, after all, wants to be called a racist, and that's what will happen.

Read the rest of the piece.  These are heroes and heroines.

September 1, 2021       Permalink

AUGUST 31,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

HUMILIATION – FROM DAILY MAIL:   The Taliban held mock funerals for American, British, French and NATO forces today as thousands turned out on the streets of major cities to celebrate the end of the west's 20-year war.   Coffins draped with the US, UK and French flags as well as NATO's insignia were paraded through the streets of Khost by crowds flying the Taliban's emblem - just two weeks after anti-Taliban protests in the same city.  In Kandahar - a traditional stronghold of the Islamists - thousands also turned out waving white Taliban flags to celebrate what the group is referring to as its 'independence day', hours after the final American troops boarded an evacuation flight out of the country.  It comes after celebratory scenes in Kabul overnight, where fireworks exploded and gunfire rattled through the air moments after the final US jet departed.  Where is the American leader who will overcome this, just as Ronald Reagan led America to overcome the despair that followed Vietnam?  Where is the leader who will once again say that it is morning in America?

BIDEN'S POLLING WOES – FROM BREITBART:   A poll released Tuesday shows President Joe Biden continues to suffer low approval ratings after his disastrous exit from Afghanistan.  Morning Consult reports that 48 percent of voters approve of Biden’s job performance while 49 percent disapprove.  That marks a seven-point drop in Biden’s net approval rating in two weeks since Kabul fell into the hands of the Taliban earlier this month.  The latest poll was conducted Aug. 27-29 among 15,623 registered U.S. voters.  Biden’s net approval rating has fallen six points among independents, the poll shows, a drop in line with other polling released over the past 48-hours as the president comes under attack from all sides.  Other polls actually have the president lower.  Rasmussen has him with a 44% approval.  He's as low as 41% in another poll.  Next week marks the start, right after Labor Day, of the political season.  Anticipate some very tough political combat.

August 31, 2021       Permalink

AMERICAN KNOW-HOW – OVERNIGHT:  The thing that seems to bother Americans most of all about the withdrawal from Afghanistan is that it was done so badly.  We have, as a people, taken a certain deserved pride in being the can-do nation.  Others concentrated on ideology and verbiage, but Americans got it done.  American know-how was never a myth.  Think of how quickly we pulled ourselves together to fight World War II, with one innovation after another.  We engulfed ourselves with quotes.  "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer."

"To do."  That is a good part of the American creed.  "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation..."  We are very good at bringing forth.  Or at least we were. 

Our teachers once taught us that the glory of American politics lay in its practicality, not its ideology.  Get it done.  "We will build good ships here," said a company in Virginia.  "At a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships."  We didn't always live up to our own standards, but we strived.

Now something has gone wrong.  Accomplishment is being replaced by theory and disparagement.  Nothing displays it more than the term, "the flyover people," which the elites on our coasts use to describe the citizens who grow our food, build our planes, patrol our streets.

The dry rot has reached every level.  The great reporter, Salena Zito, examines Joe Biden in that context, and tells us what she finds.  You should read it.  From the Washington Examiner:

Last Thursday at 6:00 p.m. in Kabul, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest as American troops at Abbey Gate were processing entrants to Hamid Karzai International Airport. Nearly 200 people died at that horrific moment, including 13 U.S. service members.

It was a horrific massacre that didn’t need to happen.

There is only one person to blame, and that is Joe Biden — not for his decision to leave Afghanistan, but instead his stubborn insistence on leaving the country on a specific date. It is a stubbornness rooted in negligence, not incompetence, a word often thrown around as reasoning for his failure at this moment.

In the days since Kabul fell, we have learned through reporting that the U.S. has depended on the Taliban for security screening outside the airport since mid-August, purposely choosing to rely on foes that killed Americans for decades to screen jihadists determined to kill Americans.

We have also learned through reporting by Politico that U.S. officials gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies to grant entry into the outer perimeter of the Kabul airport — giving their information to the very entity that has viciously murdered any Afghan who has joined up with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the 20-year war.

And those hundreds of students, their relatives, and staff of the American University of Afghanistan who had boarded buses on Sunday to evacuate on U.S. military flights were told after seven hours of sitting on the bus that all evacuations were permanently called off; the New York Times reported that because of Biden’s mandatory deadline, the military will now only be bringing its own personnel home. But a list of their names and their passport information has been shared by the U.S. military with the Taliban fighters guarding the airport checkpoints.

Biden’s negligence on Afghanistan is not a singular event but a pattern of behavior. He has been negligent in his dismissal of the crisis at the border. The dramatic surge in illegal U.S. southern border crossings — last month alone there were nearly 200,000 — is a humanitarian crisis that has endangered lives and communities, increased human and drug trafficking 100-fold, and turned the lives of people who live along the border upside down.

Incompetence denotes that Biden has no idea what he is doing. And yes, he certainly seems unsteady in numerous settings. But he has shown stubborn purpose in making the withdrawal from Afghanistan, whatever the circumstances. He has been equally purposeful in showing no responsibility for conditions at the border. That is negligence.

Biden’s fragility as the leader of our country is illustrated by the frequency of his negligence and the ease with which he and his administration and military leaders have been dismissing it.
They have willfully overlooked his flaws, or they have pardoned him without criticism. That's why history will show that his negligence is their negligence as well. If the media do not hold him accountable, they also share that burden. 

COMMENT:  We have work to do.

August 31,  2021     Permalink