Tucker Asks Glenn Greenwald, "What Do YouThink Is Happening?"

In the clip above, Tucker Carlson, puzzled at why legacy media and some senior Democrats have effectively abandoned President Biden, reaches out almost in desperation to Glenn Greenwald, not your ordinary Fox talking head, to ask him what's going on. Greemwald puts it to a combination of Biden's cognitive decline and the permanent war faction of the deep state. I disagree on both counts.

First, if the deep state wants to get you, they don't need to rely on the Taliban. They'll just make up Russian hookers peeing on the bed. They didn't get Trump that way, and so far, they won't get Biden with the Taliban.

Second, even up to the clip of Biden wandering through the White House shrubbery, I would have signed on to the cognitive decline story, but I no longer do. Part of it is the folk wisdom that dementia isn't when you forget your keys; dementia is when you forget what your keys are for. As I said yesterday, senile people are disorganized. Lying, evading, and manipulating are organized behaviors, even if poorly done.

As a true crime fan, I think it's related to the legal issue of insanity. No matter how "crazy" a killer may seem, legally, if he does anything to cover up his crime, escape from the scene, dispose of the weapon, or anything like that, he's aware of the potential consequences of his act and thus legally sane. He's engaging in organized behavior. He's neither crazy nor senile. Biden has the same issue.

Biden's problems aren't medical, or if they're medical, they aren't a major issue. Biden's problems are with character. I don't think it's too far off to suggest he's shallow, obtuse, stubborn, and dishonest, and those who know him are fully aware of this. It's now well known that Obama is reported to have said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--k things up.”

I think it's significant that Maryland Democrat Senator Ben Cardin, an establishment member of the Senate club like Biden himself, is making criticisms of the Afghanistan mess that come close to Biden:

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) said the chaotic situation in Afghanistan was predictable because “We had information about how the Taliban could likely control the country.” And that many of the questions that were asked at a Friday briefing with lawmakers and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley “went unanswered.”

Cardin said, “[W]e should have been able to predict the chaos that is occurring today. We had information about how the Taliban could likely control the country. We should have been prepared to take necessary steps faster.”

The Friday cabinet-level briefing with lawmakers didn't go well. Secretary Blinken made highly damaging admissions, Regarding the State Department internal dissent memo predicting the fast collapse of the Afghan government,

Blinken admitted reading the internal cable cautioning Kabul could fall when he and Gen. Mike Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, were briefing lawmakers Friday about the post-Taliban takeover chaos engulfing the country.

In response to Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) asking, “when he read the dissent cable that said the Taliban would take over Afghanistan quicker, Blinken said he read it in mid-July,” Punch Bowl News Founder Jake Sherman wrote on Twitter.

It sounds as though enough other questions went unanswered in the session that firings and resignations would normally be in order. Democrat Rep Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a statement Friday that said in part,

The mistakes made in the execution of the withdrawal are also clear to me: The plan to evacuate civilians was wholly inadequate. In the coming months, we need to examine why it has happened this way and make sure it never happens again. We must also scrutinize the intelligence behind this operation to understand whether it provided any clarity regarding how swiftly the Taliban would move in and what our response should have looked like.

. . . Finally, and most importantly, our immediate focus must be the safe evacuation of all U.S. personnel from Afghanistan, and as many Afghan nationals as possible.

The problem seems to be that, even if Democrats and legacy media see only a political threat in 2022, they're beginning to focus on its seriousness. There are few good solutions, either for them or the country. If Biden is removed or prevailed upon to resign, this would simply be yet another evidence of elite failure, and in fact it could lead to more, not fewer, disasters down the road in a Harris administration.

An interesting vignette is the wavering that took place all last week over when, or whether, Biden would return to the bunker in Wilmington. As late as Friday or even Saturday morning, the plan was that he would. Ultimately, he stayed in the White House. Now he's scheduled to address the country again this afternoon. It sounds like he's being persuaded by his own party, possibly even his inner circle, at least to give the appearance of trying to control the situation in Kabul. The problem is, again, that he's shallow, obtuse, stubborn, and dishonest, and that's what they have to work with.