The world has witnessed Joe Biden finding his inner lying dog-faced pony soldier.  It is an ugly display.  Despite the horror, vainglory, rape, and pillage to be that Biden has inflicted on Afghanistan and the callous disdain he has heaped on our allies, American foot soldiers, and American people, he shows no empathy.  He bellows angrily that the mission has been a huge success.

Listening to his, Blinken's, and Psaki's nauseating press conferences, one would think no Americans or Afghan partners were left behind and all our billions in equipment have been airlifted back to the United States.  In their alternate universe, the party that prefers a handout to a hand up has no empathy.  In fact, Joe revealed his true feelings when he checked his watch multiple times as the flag-draped coffins of the murdered American soldiers from the Kabul Airport heartbreakingly passed by him at the Dover Air Force Base.

The Democrats have a history of missing an empathy chip.  Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, didn't show any when our ambassador and other officials were defiled and murdered in Benghazi.  When queried before a Senate hearing, she raised her voice and demanded to know what difference it made how or why those diplomats died, while lying that it was all due to a video that nobody had ever heard of instead of her rotten decision-making.  Recently, New York's Governor Cuomo displayed the same arrogant callousness when he couldn't understand why it mattered whether COVID patients had died in nursing homes (thereby receiving inferior care and spreading the disease) instead of being sent to specially constructed hospitals.

Now, strangely, the usual woke warriors seem to have gone underground.  Perhaps there was a crash at the three-way intersection of Woke Way, Climate Change Cul-de-Sac, and Critical Race Theory's toll gate.  Where are the #MeToo feminists crying out for the underage girls and women who are surely going to be raped and/or forced into slave-like marriages?  Where are all the rabid women in "pussy hats" and The Handmaid's Tale garb protesting faux Republican high crimes and misdemeanors?  Where are all the frenzied women howling and scratching at the Supreme Court's doors, agonizing because a male candidate might have gotten sloshed at a frat party?  The LGBT tribe is also mute, as the world waits for the Taliban to resume throwing gays off rooftops.

Our sniveling withdrawal from Afghanistan is murky in myriad ways.  Biden takes full responsibility for the sickening end to a twenty-year war but blames President Trump for forcing him into a Trump-negotiated departure.  However, since Biden has publicly ended many of Trump's other successful policies, this diatribe rings hollow.

Next, there is the culpability of the "generals."  Or not.  Accounts are conflicting.  Our military leaders have been inappropriately preoccupied with Critical Race Theory and climate change instead of focusing on military tactics and strategic thinking.  Did Biden follow their distracted opinions, or did they provide proper intelligence that Biden disregarded?  Since nobody, not one single soul, has been fired, we don't know.

Once upon a time, shame was a thing.  As was honor.  Tragically, we now have an administration where those in power exhibit not a single iota of either.

The lyrically eloquent author Joseph Conrad wrote a mesmerizing fictional account of a man consumed by shame over his lost honor.  Considered one of the 100 greatest English novels of all time, Lord Jim, written in 1900, tells of Jim, an officer on the Patna, a ship.

In the dark of night, the ship hits a bulky object that causes it to tilt.  Certain the ship will capsize, the captain wants the crew to depart immediately.  Jim balks, stating his desire to save as many of the sleeping passengers as possible in the few lifeboats available.  The captain refuses and convinces Jim to abandon the Patna and the hapless passengers.  In a stunning twist of fate, when the cowardly crew arrives onshore, they see the Patna at the dock and all the passengers safe — rescued by a passing ship.

Jim cannot live with his guilt and escapes to isolated chunks of land where nobody has learned of the scandal.  Yet the past always catches up, forcing Jim to flee from one remote location to another, each time his dishonorable past is revealed.

A 1977 Eaton Press publication of Lord Jim contained a "Publisher's Preface":

It is the marvel of those who have read about Joseph Conrad, or who have enjoyed and admired his novels and stories — all written in English — that he first learned the language around the age of twenty-one[.] ... Conrad astonished the British and American critics with the beauty of his style — a style that was the perfect vehicle for the keenest of his psychological perception ... the depth of his human sympathy[.]

I have read Lord Jim multiple times — and Joe Biden is no Lord Jim.

Image: Joe Biden’s empty eyes.  YouTube screen grab.

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