Joe Biden -- daily shuffling closer to a bottomless bowl of ice cream -- took to the airwaves the other night to double-down on failure.  Claimed our latter-day -- albeit, wooden -- Harry Truman: the buck stopped on his desk for the fiasco decorously referred to as the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.  Not really, though. 

Either Biden’s cocktail of psychotropics needs adjustment or plain cynicism drove him to trot out the Truman cliché.  Biden inanely fingered Trump and pro-American Afghanis for his lack of a cogent exit strategy.  If the buck made it to Joe’s desk, he quickly pocketed it.  Old habits die hard.    

The Afghanistan regime’s collapse was at warp speed.  Twenty years of nation-building availed nothing more than a trillion-dollar sandcastle.  Such are the conceits and hubris of “Making the World Safe for Democracy.”  A century plus of Wilsonian foreign policy (one part interventionism, two parts sanctimony) is a chronicle of failures.  There are no points for good intentions. 

You’d think our elected leaders and “best and brightest” would have learned something from LBJ’s Vietnam catastrophe.  Robert McNamara’s metrics-driven execution of the war (remember the obsession with “body counts?”) is a wonk’s way, not a warrior’s.  Johnson’s limited war strategy came a-cropper, effectively giving Ho Chi Min and his cutthroat communists the space and time to outlast the U.S.  Dick Nixon came in from the bullpen in ’68 to clean up the mess.  But learn from that woeful episode?  Nah! 

The takeaways from Afghanistan, which were the takeaways from Vietnam, are 1) We can’t fight other people’s wars for them; 2) we can’t social-engineer backward countries into being card-carrying members of the “community of civilized nations” (a dwindling club as-is); and 3) we must rediscover this truth: A country exists to safeguard and promote its national interests.  A nation isn’t a philanthropy, a police force, or both.  America doesn’t exist to police and/or “transform” the world.  Woodrow Wilson’s conceit has been a curse.      

With resolute bluster (Biden’s trademark dating back to his tense confrontation with Corn Pop), our semi-lucid president declared that his hightailing it out of Afghanistan was the right decision at the right time, consequences be damned.  Up to 40,000 stranded American nationals and hundreds of thousands of our Afghani allies are just unfortunate collateral damage, they being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Back to hibernating at Camp David.  Though Joe is dimly aware, his regime has a taller order: wrecking transforming the U.S.      

But even the MSM -- Democrat shills though they are -- couldn’t simply ignore Biden’s Big Afghanistan Bust.  For an instant, ugly reality rudely intruded on the MSM’s fantasy narratives and gaslighting about Biden and a bevy of increasingly gloomy news, foreign and domestic.          

The corporate media just couldn’t whitewash images of panicked Afghanis chasing a U.S. military transport down Kabul’s only serviceable runway.  Or visuals of hapless Afghanis who clung to the transport falling from the sky. 

Yet, in the days to come, expect mainstream propagandists to close ranks and recover their sense of mission.  George Stephanopoulos’s interview with Biden is the kickoff.  The MSM exists to serve a statist ideology and corrupt power structure.  Biden, degraded and knocked back on his heels, doesn’t help the debauched, liberty-robbing agenda that Democrats are pushing.

The Afghanistan debacle has temporarily taken our eyes off debacles-in-the-making here at home.  Our nation is flirting with ruin on multiple fronts. 

Our southern border has evaporated, thanks not to Biden administration incompetence, but it’s very deliberate policy.  Two million illegals will invade our country this year alone, bringing with them disease and crime.  Speaking of crime, it’s surging in “deconstructed” Democrat-run cities, as an encore to last year’s unchecked rampages in blue metropolises. 

Democrats are seeking to reimpose mask tyranny and have added forced vaccination to the mix.  “Show us your vax papers” is fascism in the guise of public health policy.  Inflation and prices are climbing higher with each passing month, taking bigger bites from paychecks. 

Biden and the Senate’s establishment Republicans have just signed off on a trillion-dollar “infrastructure” measure.  Infrastructure is now a term of art; it not only covers old-fashioned boondoggles, payoffs, and pork, but slyly adds provisions that permit Democrats to grab more power.  The day must come when Mitch McConnell and his 18 GOP conspirators are tarred, feathered, and ridden out on an Amtrak train to Newark.       

Our conventional energy sector, which President Trump liberated to give us independence from OPEC for the first time in decades, is under concerted assault by Biden’s string-pullers and Congress’ green Marxists.  Energy -- gas and coal -- is the lifeblood of modern economies.  In an absurd twist, Biden’s handlers are trying to coax OPEC to produce more oil to make up for the deficit they’ve created.    

Progressive culture is a cancer metastasizing across society.  This cancer is being spread by militants who aim to destroy traditional culture.  Speech codes and “gender fluidity” are malignant variants.  Drag queens dance at public libraries for kids while approving parents fork over dollar bills.  That says all we need to know about the rottenness of the progressive soul.       

Compounding our troubles, Biden’s calamitous retreat from Afghanistan will surely embolden our nation’s enemies.  Xi Jinping isn’t a competitor; he’s a full-blown enemy of the United States.  His laser-like focus is unsurprisingly sensible: it’s on the PCR’s national interests and ambitions.  He covets regional then global hegemony.  It’s not a matter of if Taiwan is attacked, it’s a matter of when -- and the when is sooner than later. 

Xi -- like Putin, Kim Jung-un, and Iran’s mullahs -- is an apex predator.  Xi and his fellow rogues not only smell weakness in Biden and his practically vanished sidekick Kamala Harris, but they also smell weakness in the entire corrupted and corroded enterprise branded progressivism, and in the parasitic, self-obsessed, power-grubbing Democrats tasked with imposing tyranny on us. 

I’ll renew my prediction that the 2020s will prove a tumultuous, convulsive time in U.S. history, perhaps rivaling the Civil War era.  We’ll emerge from this crucible either free or slave.  Or the nation will shatter into a thousand pieces like Humpty Dumpty and we won’t be able to put it back together again.     

Our options for resolution are winnowing.  The best would be agreement on a radical decentralization of the national government or a “radical federalization,” as Angelo Codevilla terms it.  Let us, blue and red, live in loose association, staying out of each other’s way -- but agreeing to the necessity of a common defense.

Alas, our differences may be too great; the gulf between us unbridgeable… the power-lust and drive to dominate appears boundless in Democrats and their compadres, making peace and accommodation unachievable.   

What remains is a zero-sum game.  One or the other side wins.  Their victory leads to a squalid America of unfree people.  Ours, of necessity, to a refounding of the republic; meaning on terms in far closer approximation to our original founding.  Liberty is finally for a faithful and moral people.  Banished the apostasy of malevolent progressivism… diminished and shunted, the would-be oligarchs who now menace us.  No more great concentrations of power allowed.   

The Constitution mandates that the Biden-Harris regime has about 3.5 years remaining.  Much damage can be wrought by their regime over that time.  Our lows now are likely only glimpses of greater lows ahead.  To save freedom, and safeguard ourselves, fights there must be.  Patriots aren’t permitted to hang out in the bleachers.  We must endure and overcome.  Freedom demands a price.  Time to prepare ourselves to pay it. 

J. Robert Smith can be found on Parler @JRobertSmith and more so at Gab, again @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.                

Image: Rick Obst

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