George Rebane
’20-year Afghanistan Mission Accomplished’ tout our Democrat leaders as they thank all those service members who sacrificed their lives in so many ways. These politicians describe such sacrifices as having been made voluntarily by our military heroes. But IMHO that doesn’t jive with reality. Who among the sacrificed would have willingly done so if told from the gitgo in, say, 2012 that you’re going to Afghanistan with the possibility of dying, getting your legs blown off, or coming back with PTSD in order to deny the Taliban ragheads another eight years of running the country as a tyrannical Islamist gulag, and which will again become home to various international terror organizations of the kind that gave us 9/11, and then we will cut and run? Not many would have signed up for that kind of duty had they been told the truth.
But if being given a realistic mission, say, ‘It’s highly likely that we’ll be in Afghanistan forever with a minimal force level consisting mostly of intelligence operations, drone air support, and training Afghan security forces to prop up their government and keep the country from reverting to raghead terrorist control. You will be in combat until we can bring the situation into a desired low/no casualty stasis. This is the cost of doing White Hat business around the world to secure our homeland and the lands of our allies who join us in such operations. America has done this in the past, and realistically today we see no future time when global evil will be vanquished so that such outposts and tours of duty, first outlined by Ambassador Kennan in 1946, will no longer be necessary.’ I know of no one in our circle of friends who would not sign up for such a tour when called upon – and that is because most of us have manned the ramparts of freedom at one time or another, and will do so again. But it all starts with telling us the truth.
[4sep21 update] Never let a crisis or disaster go to waste. In the Dems’ desperate attempt to paper over the historically atrocious Biden Afghan debacle, the lamestream media are doing their best to sweep that ignominious, tragic, and chaotic military retreat under the rug, any rug of opportunity. So Ida for Al-Qaeda has become the opportune switcheroo in the socialist press and punditry. No more are we concerned about that premier terrorist organization resurging and setting up again in Afghanistan. At the best the lamestream will continue pushing the lie that the Taliban doesn’t get along with Al-Qaeda and other recidivist outfits like the ISIS-X (currently X=K) et al.
So now we don’t have to worry about the return of all kinds of bad guys as long as we ‘work with’ the Taliban. Anyone who has been paying attention (a shrinking minority) knows that all of them belong to the Haqqani network of cheek-by-jowl anti-western terror outfits. And at their chapter house meetings, they must be laughing their butts off about what they read in the NYT, WaPo, and hear on CNN, MSNBC, … . Meanwhile, to keep the Return of the Ragheads under wraps, the Democrats have qued up Covid and climate change for their lamestream as the next diversionary dollops for dimwits. (Remember, they still have to have to keep the open-border crisis hidden from their cognitively calcified constituents.)
We Live in the Golden Age of Stupidity
Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become. - Jean Cocteau
George Rebane
So argues Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and former Boston University journalism professor, in the 30aug21 WSJ (here). Morrow introduces a slightly different aspect of stupidity than the one used in these pages. (Here ignorance denotes a lack of specific knowledge, and stupid denotes the cognitive inability to process knowledge. Only the former is correctible.) Functionally, Morrow’s ‘stupidity’ is the same, but applied wholesale to large masses of people. He immediately opens with –
We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time—one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.
As we have shown for years, the American Left has dedicated itself to 1) creating wholesale ignorance through our public schools, and 2) promoting the stupid in their ranks to enduring positions of power. The former to create generations of compliant constituents, the latter to generate, promote, and maintain insane and/or dysfunctional public policies in their jurisdictions. The confluence of both creates the stupidity, as described by Morrow, that ensures the expansion and calcification of monopolistic autocracy in the body politic. The evidence for this abounds and is available to a shrinking cohort of Americans; to the remainder it is the acceptable norm, socially just, and the ‘American way’.
Until the arrival of mass media (i.e. radio circa 1920) history tells us that we Americans were extremely political animals, participating in extensive discussions of the issues, political corruption, impactive legislation, and election campaigns at all levels. Newspapers with their editorials and political cartoons (e.g. see Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures, 1904) were devoured in detail on Main Street, church suppers, and in Grange meetings. Everyone had some pertinent knowledge of current events and issues – it was a sought honor to be known as a ‘person of information’.
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Posted at 12:40 PM in Agenda 21, Critical Thinking & Numeracy, Culture Comments, Our Country | Permalink | Comments (29)
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