Category Archives: Politics

Celebrate the Heroes Who Warned Us that Afghanistan would be a Disaster

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Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Afghans, $2 trillion down the toilet, a Taliban victory that leaves America’s international reputation in shambles. This disaster didn’t happen by itself. Political and military leaders, aided and abetted by the news media, are responsible and should be held accountable. Voters let themselves be led by the nose, and they should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror because what they did and didn’t do caused many people to die.

Antiwar heroes deserve recognition and respect for telling us not to go into Afghanistan, and after we did, telling us to get out despite being marginalized and ridiculed. They were lonely. Despite widespread reports of casualties among Afghan civilians and the glaring fact that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11, 88% of Americans — Democrats and Republicans alike — supported former President George W. Bush’s war three weeks after U.S. bombs began raining down on Kabul, Afghanistan.

Let’s celebrate the good guys.

During the fall of 2001, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched against the war in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other U.S. cities. The marchers were too few and too peaceful to move the needle. But the judgment of history is now final: the tiny minority who opposed invading Afghanistan were morally upright and correctly skeptical about the outcome. If you know any of these true American heroes, thank them for their service and buy them a drink.

While nationalist nimrods drove around with their cars idiotically festooned by American flags, intelligent ethical individuals spoke out for what was right. “Under the (U.N.) charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the (U.N.) Security Council approves,” said Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild. “Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men —15 from Saudi Arabia — did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the U.S. or another U.N. member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The U.S. war in Afghanistan is illegal.”

All 98 senators present, including Bernie Sanders, voted to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan and install the puppet regime whose corruption led to the Taliban takeover. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 420 to 1. There was only one sane, only one correct voice in opposition in the entire Congress: Rep. Barbara Lee of California. “As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she implored.

“For her lone stance,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2016, “Lee was deluged with rancid insults and death threats to the point where she needed around-the-clock bodyguards. She was vilified as ‘anti-American’ by numerous outlets including the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Times editorialized on September 18 that ‘Ms. Lee is a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies — from Fidel Castro on down’ and that ‘while most of the left-wing Democrats spent the week praising President Bush and trying to sound as moderate as possible, Barbara Lee continued to sail under her true colors.’ Since then, she has been repeatedly rejected in her bids to join the House Democratic leadership, typically losing to candidates close to Wall Street and in support of militarism.” Two years later, pro-war Democrats denied her yet another post, as chairperson of their House caucus, to punish her for voting against the Afghan war.

Every congressman and senator who voted for this stupid Afghanistan war is a fool who should resign at once.

Americans who supported this stupid Afghanistan war should refrain from voting ever again.

Media outlets that editorialized in favor of this stupid Afghanistan war deserve to go out of business.

American history has been defined by war, mostly illegally and unjustified on the part of the United States government. That history will continue unless we recognize, elevate and employ the voices of people who speak out against stupid wars before they start.

Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer,” now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.

America Already has a Taliban

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We already have a Taliban in the United States. It’s called the Democratic Party. It’s called leftism.

The American version of the Taliban favors coercion over persuasion. Leftists are grossly intolerant — just like the Taliban. Leftism shames, threatens and intimidates. Psychologically, leftism is precisely like the Taliban. Leftists cancel all who disagree with them. It’s not hard to imagine them favoring worse than mere “cancellation”, for dissenters and others with conscientious objections to the rule of their edicts and beliefs.

The American Taliban worships at the altar of government. Just as the Taliban says, “Our authorities speak the will of Allah,” America’s leftists claim to speak unquestionable truth. They call it “science”. But science, in its correct meaning, refers to objective proof and ruling out alternative explanations. Science refers to an integration of ALL relevant facts, not only facts that Facebook, Twitter or the Biden White House says you may or may not consider. Science requires reason; and reason means thinking, objecting and always being open to modifying. These qualities are 100 percent absent from American leftism, culture and their whole approach to government. America’s Taliban perverts science as a means of using authority to blindly accept whatever authority says.

“Follow the science” say America’s Democrats and leftists. “Follow Allah” say the Taliban. Both mean the same thing: “Subvert independent judgment; SUBMIT to authority.”

The Taliban and the American left who rule us have one simple goal in common: submission.

In Afghanistan, you’re jailed or killed if you don’t follow the state religion. In America, you’re shamed, censored or cancelled if you don’t follow the state religion imposed through state-run schools, and state-intimidated corporations and music, movies, television, and sports. You’re thrown in Facebook jail. You’re banished from Twitter forever. Real jailing will soon come. What’s to stop it? On our current course, even worse will come. It always does — absent a massive, immediate, and TOTAL U-turn in absolutely everything we’re doing.

The Taliban stands for conformity, and brutal enforcement of that conformity. Shaming substitutes rational morality, and willful blindness replaces freedom of speech and thought.

How on earth is it ANY different in America today, insofar as America is influenced and controlled by leftists?

When I look at Taliban terrorists and I look at Pelosi, Schumer, Biden or AOC … I see exactly the same thing. If you value your survival, you would do well to do the same.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Learning Locke: An Introduction to Cato’s Letters

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Thomas Jefferson famously adapted key passages of John Locke’s Second Treatise in his draft Declaration of Independence. An 18th century gentleman could hardly regard himself as learned without the ability to quote a few Lockean passages from memory.

Yet, what of the average colonial? Books were expensive imports. How were the yeomanry educated well enough in Lockean concepts to readily understand and accept this radical document, the Declaration of Independence?

Through newspapers.

Like modern Americans, our colonial forebears were also political junkies. Freewheeling editorials, letters to the editor that criticized parliamentary and colonial governments were standing features of public life.

On November 5th 1720, the opposition newspaper London Journal began a series of entertaining, sarcastic, biting and accurate letters that hammered the corruption of the English government surrounding the collapse of the South Sea Company. Without getting into detail here that can be Wikied by anyone, suffice to say the damage done by the South Sea Company bubble and collapse was equivalent to the 2006 US Housing Crash. Like the US Housing Crash, the South Sea debacle enriched politicians, members of parliament, the royal court and their cronies at public expense.

The authors of Cato’s Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, exposed high political crimes and embarrassed numerous leading men. Men of the era were schooled in Roman history, and reference to Cato the Younger (95-46 BC), the implacable foe of Julius Caesar and champion of republicanism, appealed to their sense of honor and virtue. Of the 138 published letters, only twelve were devoted to the South Sea crisis; the remainder examined other areas of public morality: the ideas of liberty and the nature of tyranny. Considered all together, Trenchard and Gordon brought the philosophy of John Locke to the masses in a thoroughly engaging manner.

Cato’s Letters were published as a collection in 1724. Five more editions appeared through 1755. Copies soon appeared in colonial book seller’s catalogues and thereafter in American newspapers well into the Revolution.

The late historian Clinton Rossiter wrote that no one can spend any time in colonial newspapers without realizing the presence of Cato’s Letters and how Cato, rather than Locke’s Two Treatises, was the quotable, most popular source of political ideas in the colonial period. As noted by Ronald Hamowy, “From its first publication through the revolutionary era that ended the century, its impact on both side of the Atlantic was enormous. Its arguments against oppressive government and in support of the splendors of freedom were quoted constantly and its authors were regarded as the country’s most eloquent opponents of despotism.”

Cato wrote that the foundation of tyranny in all countries is essentially the same; there is too much force in the hands of one man, or a few unaccountable magistrates, and power without balance. Can it be a crime to write against great evil? Ask the conservative groups stymied by Lois Lerner’s IRS. The sum of the question is whether mankind have a right to be happy and oppose their own destruction. What man has the right to make another miserable?

Since mankind and America circa 2016 have a right to be happy and oppose their own destruction, it follows that we must take means appropriate to this noble end. Nothing is more appropriate than the peaceful means outlined in Article V to limit the power and jurisdiction of Washington DC, to restore free government.

Rodney Dodsworth

NOTE: The Artful Dilettante is proud to own a first edition, 4-four volume set of Cato’s Letters, a classic of Enlightenment thought.

America In Afghanistan: From The Greatest Generation To The Softest In Just 80 Years

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Thursday’s horrific bombings in Kabul, Afghanistan were many things. They were shocking and they were infuriating. They were preventable and they were embarrassing. And make no mistake, they were entirely the fault of our pathetic Commander-in-Chief: President Joseph R. Biden. But Thursday’s bloodbath was also illustrative. As we approach two significant anniversaries in the coming months, the carnage we saw this week exemplifies the ongoing erosion of America’s resolve, credibility, and collective courage. In just 80 years, the United States, which was once a fearsome foe, is now a complete laughingstock.

Two weeks from today we will commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in which approximately 3,000 Americans were murdered by a cowardly group of religious fanatics. Less than three months later will be the 80th Anniversary of the equally cowardly attack at Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941, in which approximately 2,400 Americans were slaughtered. In both cases, America’s initial reaction was swift and monumentally forceful. But in less than twenty years since 9/11, and less than 80 years since Pearl Harbor, we’ve gone from what Tom Brokaw dubbed “The Greatest Generation” to what can only be described as “The Softest Generation.”null

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and FDR’s “a day that will live in infamy” speech, America dug in its heels and hunkered down. America was pissed off. That generation sent millions of men to fight the imperialist Japanese and the socialist/fascist Nazis and Italians. During the course of World War II, over 50 million young men registered for Selective Service, aka The Draft. Basic food staples such as meat and cheese were rationed, as was gasoline and other commodities. Women who had previously made up a small portion of our workforce, put on work boots and gloves by the millions, reporting to factories to build ships, planes, and tanks, giving birth to the image of “Rosie the Riveter.”

Over 400,000 Americans were killed during WW2, including the thousands who died on D-Day in one of the most breathtaking examples of valor and determination in human history. And very few Americans from the Greatest Generation complained – about the rationing, or the inconveniences, or the draft, or the massive amounts of casualties we endured. As a result, in less than four years after Pearl Harbor, the tyrannical regimes of Hideki Tojo, Adolph Hitler, and Benito Mussolini weren’t just defeated, they were obliterated.

Fast-forward sixty years to September 2001. Usama Bin Laden and his psychopaths in Al Qaeda were successful in terrorizing us, due in large part to the assistance and enabling by the Taliban and other combatants who torment us once again. Thousands died that day, and images of the World Trade Center and Pentagon shook us to our cores. But we reacted with fortitude. President George W. Bush promised that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.” And hear us they did.

Americans rallied around our troops as we cheered them on. The American flag flew from countless cars and pickup trucks and hung from highway overpasses across the country. President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, and by the end of 2002, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were largely defeated. A decade later, Usama Bin Laden himself was finally held accountable for his crimes as heroic Navy Seals took him down in a remarkable nighttime raid at the direction of President Barack Obama, and all of us -left, right, and center – cheered the decision and its result.

Now, look where we find ourselves. Prior to Thursday, America hadn’t had a combat death in Afghanistan since February 2020. For over eighteen months, and since prior to the word “COVID” becoming a household name, we hadn’t lost a single American servicemember. We were spending approximately $40 billion annually to fund operations there, which is chump change for our freewheeling friends on the left, and only 1% of total federal spending.

But President Biden decided to pull out all our troops anyway and did so with a majority of Americans fundamentally supporting the idea. Yes, Biden royally screwed up the implementation of the withdrawal, leading to the most glaring problem of dead civilians and American service members, but the worst aspects of Biden’s decision are undoubtedly still to come. Withdrawing our troops was a disastrous decision from the get-go. Biden’s debacle has created a power vacuum in a region that has previously proven capable of killing Americans in our homeland, and that void is already being filled by China, Russia, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and terrorist newcomers.

Those who had initially applauded Joe Biden’s decision to pull our troops frequently cited the need to get our sons and daughters out of an “Endless War.” But was it really an endless war if no one was being harmed? Was it even a war at all? And if we call a situation with no blood having been shed for over a year and a half a “war,” what in the hell do we call what happens in Chicago every weekend?

America has gone weak. Polling data shows that not only did a majority of Americans support the idea of withdrawing from Afghanistan, but they also support the initiative even it means a resurgence of Al Qaeda. We are not the same country that crushed the Axis powers in World War II. We are not even the same country that blew the roof off football stadiums twenty years ago as we sang the national anthem. We can’t even stomach the idea of having troops stationed unmolested in a country that was used as an operation’s base to kill 3,000 fellow Americans not even twenty years ago.

We’re now a country that’s more concerned with not offending people by using incorrect pronouns than we are with protecting our own way of life.

We’re a country that shrugs our shoulders over the idea of people pouring illegally over our borders, preferring instead to seek being perceived as enlightened and compassionate by morons in Europe and elsewhere.

We’re a country that nods along with millionaire entertainers and athletes badmouthing our country’s founding and its ‘unfair’ economic system as they sport thousands of dollars of jewelry and designer clothes.

We’re a country that embraces man-buns, idiotic gender ideology, and government authoritarianism in the name of public health, and we’re happy to admit it. In a word: we’re pathetic.

For those who died at the hands of the America-hating terrorists on Thursday, may you Rest in Peace; please pray for us. For those American service members who continue to put themselves in harm’s way to protect us, Godspeed to you all, and may God protect and watch over you. And for those of you who are part of the problem here at home, for those suffering from white guilt, and the anthem-kneelers, and the Antifa soy boys… snap out of it! You’re living in the greatest country the world has ever seen. Grow a pair and start acting like it.

God Bless America.

PF Whalen

P.F. Whalen is a conservative blogger at TheBlueStateConservative.com.  His work has appeared in multiple publications, including Human Events, the Western Journal, and American Thinker. Follow him on Parler @PFWhalen.

This is Harvard Today

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Once upon a time when I was young, Harvard was a prestigious university where a determined student could get a good education.

But education was not the real attraction of the university. It was Harvard’s network that was valuable. Of course, to get in you had to have a network, that is, you had to be someone in addition to academic capability. Harvard was a place like Yale and Princeton for maintaining elite networks from which America’s political and business leaders arose, people some of whom were capable of putting the pubic interest ahead of their own.

Harvard was mainly reserved for the northeast prep school graduates and sons of alumni, but on occasion would take a promising applicant from the South, Midwest, and West Coast. Harvard was always interested in enlarging its network.

Jews were distrusted and kept away. It was the days of WASP rule. Harvard refused employment to Paul Samuelson, a Jew and the dean of American economists during the last half of the 20th century. Samuelson had to find employment at MIT.

But the WASPs, undermined by self-criticism, lost confidence and power. Harvard and the Ivy League came under Jewish domination, and now the Jews have lost power, and Harvard is dominated by black, feminist, and transgender interests. Harvard’s Jewish president, Larry Summers, was driven out of office by feminists, and now feminists are shoved aside by transgendered and blacks.

Harvard, which formerly produced American leaders, now produces crazy people filled with notions of their entitlement as “the oppressed.”

The old entitlement was different. They had entitlement to lead. The new entitlement is entitlement to denounce and accuse those who led.

Harvard, and the rest of the Ivy League, have gone from upholding and leading the country to denouncing the country and handing over leadership to those least capable. The decision has been made to elevate equity over merit. Thus, America is doomed.

This change doesn’t seem promising for Harvard’s future or for the country’s, but for the present time it is working for Harvard. Harvard’s graduates have convinced US corporations to be “woke” and to impose on their white employees racial and gender sensitivity training, to accept that racist whites should step aside for blacks and accept reverse discrimination, and to accept rewrites of their country’s history that elevate blacks and demean whites.

We see the results everywhere. Whites have disappeared from TV ads, from Hollywood movies, from TV sitcoms. James Bond is now a black woman as are the Jedi knights in Star Wars. White people are being disappeared in their own country. Only it is no longer their country. It belongs to those due restitution having suffered white oppression.

Think about this for a moment. How does a country erased in this way stand up to Russia, China, and Iran who dispute that the US is the exceptional, indispensable country? Americans might still see themselves as a “superpower,” but the rest of the world sees us differently.

Snow White is, of course, white, but Disney is now making a film in which Snow White is black. How can the story still be Snow White? Is Disney going to call the movie Snow Black?

Cultural destruction does not raise up anyone we would want raised up. Does anyone think that powerful NATIONS, not Towers of Babel like the US and Europe, are going to take the US and its decadent puppet empire seriously?

What is going to happen the next time, or the time after, when the dumbshit illegitimate fool in the Oval Office lectures Russia, China, or Iran and issues more threats? Is Washington going to disappear under a nuclear cloud? Washington has zero capability of preventing its evaporation.

The real question is: would real Americans, not the East and West cost anti-Americans, cheer their liberation from their corrupt anti-American government in Washington, a government that only serves interest groups and sends the bill to taxpayers?

How many Americans would sign up to go to war against those countries that liberated them by obliterating Washington?

The American elites have got ahead of themselves. They are accustomed to running the show and overlooked that when they discredit their own country they have eliminated their own legitimacy.

They Know What They’re Doing

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Nasty Biden voters tell Trump supporters that THEY, Trump supporters, are responsible for the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Will these same Biden voters take ANY responsibility for the bloodshed in Afghanistan, given their choice of a President? I think we know that answer already.

From the mouths of leftists in the media:

“The Pentagon just said they expect ISIS attacks to continue and are relying on the Taliban to help protect us. The Taliban are supposed to protect us?!” Outkick.com’s Clay Travis said. “This is insanity.”

Eli Lake, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion wrote alongside a Politico story, “I never again want to hear about Biden’s competence, empathy or experience. This debacle is worse than 1000 Helsinkis. And I say that as someone who wrote that Helsinki was a humiliating disgrace.”

“These are the smartest people in America, the expert class, mostly Ivy League educated peoplde with very important titles And they’re f–ing morons,” Chronicles Magazine rerassociate editor Pedro Gonzalez emphasized.

My reply?

1) They know what they’re doing.

2) Thanks a lot, Biden supporters. This is all on YOU.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Senile or not, Biden has Betrayed America

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President Biden’s dementia no longer explains the destructive policies his administration has implemented since taking office.  The horror that took thirteen American lives in Kabul on Wednesday is intentional; there is no other explanation.  This is purposeful.

Biden may be out to lunch, but those around him are not.  They are calling the shots; it is Klain, Blinken, Austin, Milley, McKenzie, Sullivan, et al. who have brought us to the lowest the nation has ever found itself: voluntarily defeated, at home and abroad.

Susan Rice, Eric Holder, and Obama are likely part of the left’s destroy-America crowd.  Pelosi and Schumer are their second string, their tools.

The brilliant Lara Logan, who spent a year in Afghanistan, has no doubt that what has happened is intentional, that none of it would have occurred if it were not part of a plan.  That is the only explanation that makes sense.  Logan divides those responsible into three groups: the dimwits, the half-wits, and the full-wits.  The dimwits are those who do the left’s bidding.  The half-wits want to be part of the agenda but are almost as clueless.  The full-wits are those pulling the strings, making things happen for their own traitorous reasons, the ones who use and abuse the dimwits and half-wits.

As anyone can see, the Biden team is incompetent, blinded by its own feckless ideology — but these people think they know best, that they are in charge of America’s managed decline.  And they’re pleased with their role.  They are enemies of America.  The blood of those thirteen soldiers who died in Kabul is on their hands.  They orchestrated it, invited it, let it happen.

To this crowd, the loss of American lives is a small price to pay for what they think will be the glory of ending the war in Afghanistan.  They are clueless that they’ve begun WWIII in earnest.

Does anyone doubt that Biden is doing China’s bidding?  He closed Bagram, the most important air base in the world, near China and Iran.  China wanted the U.S. out of Afghanistan for a host of economic and its own national security reasons…so Biden made it happen.

His pathetic speech on Thursday was too little, too late.  It was muddled, confused, and wholly lacking in seriousness.


YouTube screen grab.

He blamed Trump’s deal with the Taliban, which was holding; no American had died in that country in eighteen months.  Biden, determined to undo everything Trump did, no matter how productive, upended it in hopes of orchestrating a victory speech on 9/11.  He ignored, apparently, all the advice of people with actual knowledge of the facts on the ground and went ahead with his mind-numbed get-out-now-no-matter-the-cost plan he thought would cement his legacy.  Well, that it did; his legacy will be as the most blundering, demented, and destructive president in U.S. history. 

As Steve Bannon often states, “Elections have consequences.  Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.”  The blood of those soldiers is on the hands of all those big tech wannabe oligarchs, co-opted faux journalists, and the news readers of the media who willingly sold their souls to defeat the best president since Reagan.  It is on the hands of the Democrats who knew of and were on board with the massive cheating that they were all privy to; remember that it was Pelosi who said that “whatever the end count is,” Joe Biden will be “inaugurated on January 20.”

Talk about saying the quiet part out loud!  They, the Democrats, were all in on the steal.  And because of their pathological hatred of Trump, because of their foolish installation of Joe Biden as president, a mediocrity if there ever were one, thirteen soldiers were sacrificed on one day, murdered on Thursday by the terrorists who move freely among the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qaeda.  In the end, they are all the same: 10th-century barbarians with cell phones and U.S.-made weapons. 

There will likely be thousands more killed in the coming months — with the massive supply of weapons for which Americans paid.  Hostage Americans and U.S.-friendly Afghanis will be sought out and murdered.

The Biden team’s trust of the Taliban is as criminally stupid as Chamberlain’s trust that Hitler would honor his promise not to invade Czechoslovakia.  Bizarrely, Biden calls himself a student of history!  He did so in his speech on Thursday.  He is a student of exactly nothing but criminally enriching himself and his family.

There can no longer be any doubt that Biden, a man obviously suffering from dementia, sold his soul to any buyer long before he became Obama’s V.P.  Now he is the “imbecilic,” as Tony Blair put it, instrument of a group of radical anti-American quislings bent on transforming America into a Soviet/Maoist/Venezuelan-style totalitarian country of serfs ruled by a thoroughly amoral elite.  That’s their plan, and they are sticking to it.  They must be defeated.  The deaths of those thirteen soldiers must be a wake-up moment.  Biden must be impeached, and his Cabinet should be fired.  This is a group of people, aligned with the Democrat party, who truly do mean to transform the U.S. into everything the Founders hoped to prevent with our Declaration, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights.

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In Afghanistan, the Worst is yet to Come

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Say what you will about President Joe Biden, he has stuck to his guns on ending America’s 20-year involvement in Afghanistan’s forever war.

His decision not to delay our departure after Aug. 31 was fortified by hard intel that the terrorist ISIS-K was preparing attacks at Kabul airport.

Thursday evening, the two bomb attacks occurred.

It now seems inevitable that the withdrawal will be completed by Aug. 31, with all U.S. military forces following the last civilians out.

Before yesterday’s attacks, the airlift had been going far better than in its chaotic first days. Some 100,000 Americans and Afghans had gotten out of the country since Aug. 14.

Biden held his ground, refusing to be stampeded by Democratic critics, NATO allies, Republican hawks or media demanding he extend the deadline for departure until all Americans were out.

His adamancy testifies to the convictions Biden came by during decades at the apex of the U.S. government during our longest war.

Those convictions:

Even if the end result of a withdrawal is that Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the cause is not worth a continuance of the U.S. commitment or the blood and treasure that four presidents have invested.

Better to accept a U.S. defeat and humiliation than re-commit to a war that is inevitably going to be lost.

Biden’s decision and the botched early days of the withdrawal have not been without political cost. Polls show the president’s approval rating sliding underwater. A Suffolk poll has him down to 41%.

Yet, on his basic decision to get out now and accept the costs and consequences, his country appears to be with him. After all, former President Donald Trump was prepared to depart earlier than Aug. 31, and a majority of Americans still support the decision to write off Afghanistan and get out.

Still, we need to realize what this means and what is coming.

According to the secretary of state, 6,000 Americans were still in Afghanistan when the Afghan army collapsed and Kabul fell. Some 4,500 of these have now been evacuated.

The State Department is in touch with 500 other U.S. citizens to effect their departure. As for the remaining 1,000, we do not know where they are.

What does this mean?

Hundreds of Americans are going to be left behind, along with scores of thousands of Afghan allies who worked with our military or contributed to the cause of crushing the Taliban. And many of those Afghans are going to pay the price of having cast their lot with the Americans.

After Aug. 31, the fate of those left behind will be determined by the Taliban, and we will be made witness to the fate the Taliban imposes.

This generation is about to learn what it means to lose a war.

When the war for Algerian independence ended in 1962, and the French pulled their troops out, scores of thousands of “Harkis,” Arab and Muslim Algerians who fought alongside the French, were left behind.

The atrocities against the Harkis ran into the tens of thousands. Such may be the fate of scores of thousands of Afghans who fought beside us.

Biden’s diplomats may be negotiating with the Taliban to prevent the war crime of using U.S. citizens left behind as hostages. But we are not going to be able to save all of our friends and allies who cast their lot with us and fought alongside us.

Yet, while the promises of the Taliban are not credible and ought not to be believed, we are not without leverage.

As The New York Times writes, the Afghan economy is “in free fall.”

“Cash is growing scarce, and food prices are rising. Fuel is becoming harder to find. Government services have stalled as civil servants avoid work, fearing retribution.”

The Taliban’s desperate need is for people to run the economy and for money from the international community to pay for imports of food and vital necessities of life.

What will also be needed from us, soon after the fall of Afghanistan, is a reappraisal of America’s commitments across the Middle East.

We have 900 U.S. troops in Syria who control the oil reserves of that country and serve as a shield for the Syrian Kurds.

How long should we keep them there?

We retain several thousand troops in Iraq. Why?

These are questions for which new answers are going to be needed.

Indeed, there will be a temptation to counter our defeat and humiliation with defiant gestures or precipitate action to restore our lost credibility. Henry Kissinger’s advice on any such action today seems wise:

“No dramatic strategic move is available in the immediate future to offset this self-inflicted setback, such as by making new formal commitments in other regions. American rashness would compound disappointment among allies, encourage adversaries, and sow confusion among observers.”

As for Afghanistan and the Kabul airport, there comes a time when even a great nation needs to accept the reality that Corregidor is lost.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”

The United States is an Occupied Country

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For over six months now, all we’ve heard is: “If you don’t support Joe Biden’s regime, you are an insurrectionist. You are a domestic terrorist. If you are one of these things, you deserve arrest, prosecution, or worse.” Interestingly, the same far leftists who now say all this are the same people who did NOT want terrorists responsible for 9/11 arrested, detained or treated as anything other than “freedom fighters”. To these people, opposing Biden or any other Communist Democrat makes you a terrorist, while forcing people to live under a totalitarian religious dictatorship (as the Taliban and the resurgent ISIS do) makes you an ally. It’s no wonder Biden wants to negotiate and “do business” with the Taliban. Totalitarians, like criminals, understand each other.

One of my favorite Ayn Rand lines is “mistakes of that kind are not made innocently”. That applies to Afghanistan. The military knows better than to leave weapons behind, and to deliberately abandon civilian Americans and their allies while the military pulls out. These mistakes are too staggering and incomprehensible to be labeled “incompetence.” These are acts of deliberate negligence and unspeakable evil. Why these events happened, or who is responsible for them, you can guess for yourself. But there’s no question these mistakes are not innocent. The same goes for the policies of inflationary spending and debt expansion that will be enough, by themselves, to wreck our economy and our civilization if repeated lockdowns, medical procedure mandates and choking children with masks and totalitarian, racist ideology do not bring us down first.

It’s time to face the truth: America is an occupied country. If Russians or Chinese had invaded our country, they would be doing the same things as the Biden regime now does routinely. They would seek to weaken the American people by turning them against each other, and by instilling fear to coerce them into at least pretending allegiance toward the new rulers. Elections would, at best, be a sham; free speech would no longer be practiced and “private” companies like Twitter and Facebook would be enlisted to comply with the whims and preferences of the regime. Does any of this sound familiar? If so, it’s because you read it in this morning’s news.

It’s all happening now. It’s not a theory; and it’s not an imaginary conspiracy. It’s happening right before our eyes. It’s getting worse, every day. That’s why decent, freedom-loving people cannot stand looking at the news any longer. It’s more grotesque than the scene of a horrible car accident. Just yesterday, Kamala Harris, the second-in-command of the regime, all but stated openly that Americans should expect supply chain shortages before Christmas. These kinds of threats and words of intimidation are the very things done in all dictatorships. They view the means and the results of production as their own property, and theirs to control. If you don’t think we’re living in a dictatorship already, then these inept, toxic freaks have done their job well: They have fooled you into thinking you’re still free, when you’re self-evidently not.

The challenge in the United States — and by extension, most of the world — is no longer to preserve freedom. It’s to restore freedom.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason