About Those Adults

Not that long ago, right after Trump shocked the civilized world by defeating Herself in an election that she and all those adults figured would be a rubber-stamp of her turn at the wheel, many sky-screamers sought to comfort their aggrieved fragilities by assuming that there’d be other adults surrounding the Untethered Orange Id and keeping his worst instincts in check.

While it didn’t quite work out that way – Trump’s White House had an above-average turnover rate – the actual governance, as opposed to the rhetoric, was a mixed bag of successes and failures, few of which strayed outside the normal boundary lines of red-blue political expectations. His initial pandemic response was arguably the lowest point of his term, but he did play catch-up, and he deserves credit for the breathtaking speed with which vaccines were developed. The clarity of hindsight shows us that mistakes, miscues, misconceptions, and the like were the norm, and even now, we don’t have evidence that draconian lockdowns were a better strategy than targeted interventions.

When Biden beat Trump a few months ago, that same civilized world exhaled a sigh of relief. Return to normalcy, adults in the room, and other platitudes issued forth from both the Left and the never-Trump right. Biden was, after all, a career Beltway politician, a deal maker, a glad-hander, the most moderate of all the Democrats’ offerings, et cetera and so forth.

The tale of moderate-ness turned out to be more legend than fact. Biden pitched himself as super-liberal in pursuing the nomination, but many took that as the standard “move to the extremes for the primary, move to the center for the general” tactic. His voting record portrays him as “middling-liberal,” in the words of Politifact.

Turns out, Biden is as or more untethered than the Untethered Orange Id was, when considered from the perspective of his decades in Congress. His agenda, upon inauguration, became about being the anti-Trump. If Donald did X, Biden had to undo X. No matter whether X was a good idea or not. Soon thereafter came the leftward rush. For someone who voted center-left his whole life, the speed with which he rode the progressive horse was whiplash-inducing.

Of course, our progressives’ ideas are (when not about naked, cynical power grabs) ivory-tower idiocy that ignores the wholly predictable negative outcomes. A massive humanitarian crisis at our southern border, rampant spending that’s waking the inflation dragon, a scattershot and endlessly flip-flopping pandemic response that’s broken our trust in institutions we need to trust. An obsession with “critical ___ theories” that are dividing our society, fomenting unrest and violence, and setting race relations back rather than advancing them, being combined with cultural and moral relativism that’s actually eroding the bedrock principles of the nation.

All this was predicted by some of us (myself included).

We expected things to get bad, but the past few weeks shocked even the biggest cynics. The Afghanistan debacle is beyond comprehension. That the mightiest nation in the world, with presumably the smartest generals and the return of adults to the halls of power, could so totally bungle the long-anticipated withdrawal would be dismissed as totally unbelievable were it fiction.

If we were to believe that adults kept Trump from burning the nation down through capriciousness, foolishness, stupidity, and the like, shouldn’t we also assume that Biden would have even better adults to divert him from mistakes, poor judgment, and the like? Or are the accusations that woke training is taking precedence over preparedness instructive as to those adults’ poor judgment?

Trump’s response to the Afghanistan debacle, from his website:

First you bring out all of the American citizens. Then you bring out ALL equipment. Then you bomb the bases into smithereens—AND THEN YOU BRING OUT THE MILITARY. You don’t do it in reverse order like Biden and our woke Generals did.

A high school student could have written that, and that high school student would be far more correct in the strategy of withdrawal than our President and his generals, who abandoned Bagram Air Force base in the middle of the night, without telling our allied Afghan National Army, and without evacuating either Americans or the many thousands of Afghans who aided us. Who are now relying on the good graces of the Taliban to let those who helped us through the chokepoints they’ve created around the one airstrip we’ve retained control of. Who apparently are planning to abandon not only the interpreters and other Afghan allies, but actual green card holders – people who are lawful permanent residents of the US, on a path to citizenship.

Make no mistake, Biden’s debacle is dooming tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, to brutality, torture, rape, or death at the hands of the Taliban. While I can’t say that Trump would have done entirely right by all our allies there, I have little doubt that the withdrawal would have been better managed by far. I’d also bet that Trump’s adults would have had more sway over the fate of our Afghan allies than Biden’s have had.

Blind partisans are making pathetic and contemptible attempts to blame Trump for this mess. Such should not only be rejected ot of hand, their offerors should be excoriated for putting tribal politics ahead of a terribly grim reality.

Yesterday’s suicide bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport, that killed 13 US soldiers and close to a hundred (or more) Afghans is blood on Biden’s hands. Biden did his usual bully-boy posturing after the fact, vowing that “we will not forgive” (seriously???? Who would even consider forgiveness an option????), and promising retaliation. But, his publicly announced August 31 deadline isn’t changing.

How many will Biden abandon to the Taliban’s cruelty?

Where are the adults we were promised?