We're all learning to navigate uncharted territory.
Friday, August 20, 2021
I Lived Through The Nixon Resignation
I keep trying to find a parallel set of circumstances to what we're seeing now -- there's a general acknowledgement that there's some similarity to the withdrawal from Viet Nam, and we're just beginning to see calls for Biden's resignation a la Nixon, but it was fairly plain to observers in 1973, a year after the Watergate burglary, that a coherent plan was afoot. In October of that year, the deep state quickly ushered Spiro Agnew out of the vice presidncy in what one commentator at the time called "the first shoe of a two-shoe drop." Gerald Ford replaced Agnew as vice president in December 1973. Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, with Ford succeeding him in what turned out to be a caretaker role. Nelson Rockefeller, with lizard ancestry clearly in his DNA, waited in the wings.
What strikes me in retrospect is how orderly this process was in contrast to what we're seeing now, which in many ways is looking like a very fast-action version of Nixon's collapse. Biden has retreated to a Wilmington bunker, and I'm not sure how long his position can remain tenable as deep-state sources leak documents daily that contradict Biden's own self-contradictory public statements. Jen Psaki, the press secretary, returned from vacation but seems disinclined now even to spin at press briefings. I strongly suspect that, even as establishment media begins to ask why Biden won't answer questions, he'll continue to have nothing concrete to say.
The whole Watergate episode lasted a little over two years, where the country had leisure to savor the circus and the people in charge had plenty of time to game things through. This will be nothing like Watergate.
The two chief issues right now are Afghanistan and COVID, and what seems to bring them together is a growing sense that the elite people who were supposed to be managing the situation are incompetent. In both cases, there are wild reversals in policy direction with little apparent planning and analysis, leading to a steady decline in credibility. On the COVID front, for instance,
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has demonstrated what anonymous administration officials described to Politico as a “worrying drop” in coronavirus vaccine efficacy over time, leading to the Biden administration’s conclusion to push vaccine booster shots.
. . . The data, which the White House Covid-19 task force reviewed Sunday, is expected to become public this week. As a result, the Biden administration is expected to roll out its plan to push booster shots for fully vaccinated Americans, but details are still being worked out, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needs authorize the booster shots. Notably, the FDA has not formally authorized any of the vaccines. Rather, they are all operating under emergency use authorization. . .
COVID 19-vaccines are effective. They can keep you from getting and spreading the virus that causes COVID-19. Learn more about the different COVID-19 vaccines.
COVID-19 vaccines also help keep you from getting seriously ill even if you do get COVID-19.
Except now, maybe not. But if the theory is now that the shots maybe only work for six months, why is the data so different across, and even within, regions? For instance, Oregon has a vaccination rate of 56.8%, Here is its current graph of COVID cases:
Their cases are through the roof, worse even than during the late 2020 surge. But look at the same graph for neighboring California, with a vaccination rate of 54.5%, lower than Oregon:
LA County, whose data drives the state's overall performance, has announced that its current surge has peaked, and daily reports reflect this. I think the comparison should at least raise questions about whether either vaccines or mask mandates are as effective as the authorities claim. The late 2020 surge was severe in LA County, but masks, social distance, and renewed business closures were completely ineffective in controlling it. But it peaked and declined rapidly as of mid-January, before anyone had been "fully vaccinated", which takes eight weeks.
Meanwhile, Oregon, with a higher vaccination rate and a renewed indoor mask mandate like that in LA County, is experiencing a bigger surge than it had in late 2020. LA County, with the same indoor mask mandate, is showing a completely different record, much milder than in late 2020.
I've heard the opinion that the severe late 2020 surge in LA County left many more people with natural immunity, resulting from those who recovered from mild (or even severe) cases or the estimated 40% who never had symptoms. This may or may not be the eventual explanation, but I think it suits the data I see better than the current sorta-kinda official version that now we need boosters.
Who benefits from a new round of shots, anyhow? Big Pharma. Heck, maybe we should ask who benefitted from 20 years in Afghanistan. Big something, you can be sure.
Joe Biden once snarled “F–k that” when asked if the US had an obligation to protect Afghans from the Taliban, according to newly resurfaced reports.
, , , At the time [2010], Biden reportedly was arguing that the US should leave Afghanistan despite the humanitarian costs, including the potential erosion of women’s rights.
“F–k that. We don’t have to worry about that,” he allegedly told [diplomat Richard] Holbrooke. “We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Two things jump out at me. The first is that Nixon and Kissinger weren't the ones who pulled out of Vietnam; that was Gerald Ford, and the images from Saigon were definitely a factor in Ford's 1976 loss. And Nixon nevertheless never got away with anything. That Biden misremembered history to suit his own views is revealing. But it also fits what I'm coming to see from this sort of offhand remark is Biden's view of himself as a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations.
Thus we now see the administration's new backup Afghanistan defense line: asked about the US citizens, Western co-workers, women, and children to be left behind, the answer from Jen Psaki in the clip above is a wave of the hand and "we're working on it". Right. Pentagon flack John Kirby gave precisely the same story in his briefing yeaterday:
Mr. Kirby: (10:35)
Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah. Right now, as the general made clear, the mission runs through August 31st. The commander-in-chief made it very clear that we were to complete this drawdown by August 31st, which now includes the pulling out of American citizens and drawdown of our embassy personnel. So that’s what we’re focused on. That’s the timeline we’re on. And as the secretary made clear to leaders, even as recently as this morning, time is of the essence and we all share a sense of urgency here. But right now, the mission runs to the 31st of August. And I won’t begin to speculate what happens after that?
Courtney: (12:03)
And then one for General Taylor. Can you just on the numbers, so this is now 700 to 800 that have gotten out. So is that now a total of somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 to 1500 total people have been taken out since August 14th when this began?
General Taylor: (12:15)
Yes, rough numbers, yeah, to the SIVs.
We're working n it. We'll work on it until August 31. We aren't thinking past that date, which is our mission.
But this isn't the response of college-educated adults. Look at the numbers. August 31 is less than two weeks away. The current estimate of US citizens trapped in Afghanistan is 40,000; special visa applicants and others is 80,000, but almost none in either category is identifiable; many don't have papers due to the lack of serious planning for the pullout, and under current conditons, few can make it to the airport. But at this point, almost anyone who makes it to the airport will probably be put on a plane, papers or no.
Until, that is, August 31, quitting time. We'll be done. But consider this. Even if it's just a total of 120,000 refugees (which doesn't count Afghans who worked for other Western countries there), we've now got 13 days to fly out that number of people, which conmes to 9,230 per day. The last C-17 to leave Kabul Sunday, the one with people clinging to the wheel wells, carried something like 640 people who made it inside. To get this number of people out will require more than 14 C-17s carrying 640 people to fly out of Kabul every day. Nobody will allow that to happen.
[Pentagon spokesman John Kirby] said that once full operations at the airport are up and running, there would be the potential to remove between 5,000 and 9,000 people per day.
For Psaki and Kirby to say we're focused on the mission, when the mission as outlined is completely out of the realm of possibility, is cynical, callous, and utterly dishonest. I've heard mention of a "Dunkirk moment", but Dunkirk involved ordiniary citizens bringing troops back to the UK in yachts and fishing boats. A Dunkirk moment might happen in Kabul if the people who flew their private jets to Obama's birthday party volunteered them for extracting the Afghans, but that's, shall we say, unlikely.
The actual strategy is what it was for Biden in 2010: F--k that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. Things'll be fine!
Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said as the Viet Nam war went south, "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the country." Given the statements in the clip from Tapper above, I'm wondering if this isn't now the case with Tapper and Biden.
Tapper is a smooth-running product of the Ivy League assembly line, something I've seen at first hand. He does what he's told; if anything, just a teeny bit extra, but not too much, nothing that would get out of line.
So in going aggressively after Biden (though only in apostrophe, as Biden took no questions) he's doing precisely what his editors have told him to do, or just maybe a teeny bit more to show he's 101% with the program.
This could change at any time. But at the moment, the legacy media is definitely not in Biden's corner.
The internet headlines have had almost no change in the past 24 hours. The most important development is that the Kabul airport has resumed operation.
At least 12 military flights had taken off, a diplomat at the airport said. Planes were due to arrive from countries including Australia and Poland to pick up their nationals and Afghan colleagues.
. . . NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called on the Taliban to allow all those who wanted to leave the country to leave.
Nevertheless, we're talking about at least 80,000 Afghans who will need to be evacuated, and this number is probably wildy optimistic. There's an unknown number of US citizens who've been told to "shelter in place" once it became plain that they wouldn't be able to reach the airport. After three days in hiding, I assume food will quickly become a problem. But that's OK, Jen Psaki has cut short her vacation, and spinning will resume as usual.
One of the more realistic prognostications I saw this morning was from Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a Democrat from Silicon Valley, who said on MSNBC
that relying on negotiations with the Taliban to get people out of the country safely “is the best we can do right now. And you know, we negotiate with our adversaries all the time, and whether we’re willing to define them as adversaries, as certainly, I would, or the new leaders of Afghanistan, our obligation right now is very clear. We need to make sure those people who helped us have a way out. I have constituents that are held up in homes right now, who are American citizens, who were previously interpreters, who have no way to get to the airport right now.”
The problem is that "negotiate" is pretty clearly a nice way of saying "pay the Taliban ransom", which I'm sure they'd agree too, except that getting a firm final price will be a major task, and the result will be further humiliation. According to Josh Rogin in the Washington Post,
“An administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record told me that there are an estimated 10,000 U.S. citizens in the country, with the vast majority in or near Kabul,” Rogin wrote. “Some are residents, journalists, or aid workers who may not want to leave. Most are scrambling to escape. Some are dual nationals or children of Americans who may not have the proper passport or visas, but the State Department has not told them how to fix their paperwork.”
‘The State Department is also dealing with more than 80,000 visa applications for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government or find themselves at risk,” the official told Rogin.
. . . “American citizens’ houses have been ransacked, and they are in hiding because the Taliban are terrorizing and tormenting neighborhoods. That’s happening all over Kabul,” a “senior GOP congressional staffer” told Rogin, noting that their office had been “fielding calls” from desperate Americans left on the ground. “There are a lot of people who are falling through the cracks. [The administration] didn’t have a plan to handle this on a mass scale…For the people in Kabul, they’ve basically said it’s up to them to get to the airport.”
The concern is now that these thousands of Americans could become Taliban hostages.
“We could have done a lot more to help. The administration waited too long,” a military official told Reuters. “Every decision has come too late and in reaction to events that make the subsequent decision obsolete.”
“The source and another U.S. official told Reuters that the administration so badly misjudged the situation that the State Department flew a regular rotation of diplomats into Kabul last Tuesday even as the Taliban advanced toward the capital,” Reuters continued.
As Pentagon spokesman John Kirby put it, the situation is fluid.
If Nothing Happens, Something Will Inevitably Happen
As far as I can tell, the only White House response to the terrible debacle in Kabul over the weekend was to issue an updated verson of the Camp David photo I posted yesterday, showing Biden in a different outfit in the empty room, looking bemused instead of defeated. From various reports, he will address the nation "soon", "at the right time", or "in a few days", but there hasn't even been a peep on Twitter since Saturday. It's perhaps even more intriguing that his chief flack, Ms Psaki, is nowhere to be found:
Fox News reported late Sunday night that Psaki “is taking a break from her duties” while pretty much everyone questions “the silence of President Joe Biden.”
When Fox’s Micheal Lee attempted to make contact with Psaki multiple times via email on Sunday, he was sent an autoreply “out of office” message. Psaki apparently won’t be returning calls until August 23rd, or approximately three days after our last local friend or military contractor has been tortured and murdered.
Biden's public daily schedule for today carries just one entry, "The President receives the President’s Daily Brief [Note: Time not specified]", at Camp David. According to this report, the White House has called a lid for the day.
Meanwhile, Republican Sen Cotton appears to be the entity who's coordinating communication for US citizens caught behind Taliban checkpoints.
Cotton’s office opened its phone lines to citizens in Kabul who need help, according to a tweet the Senator sent out earlier Sunday, asking anyone in need to make contact. [New York Times reporter Maggie] Haberman tweeted Sunday night that Cotton’s office received calls from “multiple U.S. citizens” requiring help.
“If you’re an American stranded in Afghanistan, or know one who is, please contact my office immediately: (501) 223-9081 or evac@cotton.senate.gov The situation is dire, but we’ll do everything in our power to help keep you informed and to help get you out,” Cotton’s office said Sunday.
It is not immediately clear what the Biden administration is doing to rescue perhaps thousands of Americans trapped in Kabul, though it was reported Sunday afternoon that the U.S. military is now handling air traffic control on several runways at Kabul airport, and the Biden administration is “prioritizing” the evacuation of American personnel.
“The US military has suspended air operations at the Kabul airport while troops try to clear the airfield of Afghans who flooded the tarmac, per [CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr]. Biden’s national security advisers have made clear this a.m. they don’t consider the airport secure right now,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins tweeted on Monday morning.
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The inaction from Biden and his handlers is disturbing to say the least and raises legitimate concerns, bolstered by the clip of Biden wandering through the shrubbery at the White House last week despite efforts by the Secret Service to shepherd him to the door, that he's not in a condition to handle the situation, and it's likely beyond the abilitiies of his handlers as well.
I suspect developments at some point will be rapid.
The Götterdämmerung Strategy: What Were They Thinking?
If I try to get an idea of how the lizard people meant to game out a post-2020 strategy, I can come up with only an inchoate notion that there would be some type of master reset sustained by media consensus and having both legislative houses and the executive in the hands of the Democrats. Then there would be a series of woke reforms, including defunding police, forgiving student debt, bullet trains, largesse for the Lumpenproletariat, and whatever else.
A glimmer of difficulty arose fairly early in this phase when it began to be recognized that the 2022 election would still be held, and the Great Realignment would be enacted only through the slimmest congressional majorities, which would be threatened in the off-year election. Among other things, the initial post-2020 fantasy envisioned eliminating the Senate filibuster, which proved not to be attainable, and that forced a dial-back of other priorities.
Thus at this point, much more aware that the 2022 election would likely close their window of opportunity, the lizard people have focused on getting everything done before then. This probably matched Speaker Pelosi's rumored intent to step down as speaker after that election. In fact, rumors surfaced from time to time over the past several years that, in exchange for being restored as Speaker in 2019 after her normally expected retirement when the Democrats lost the House in 2016, she had promised to retire in 2022.
Thus she expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!
(In fact, this reminds me of the last time everyone thought the world was going to end -- was it December 2012 according to the Mayan calendar? A few people said that if they really believed that, the thing to do would be to run up a huge credit card debt just before the big thing happened. Another Götterdämmerung strategy.)
The immediate problem for Speaker Pelosi is that vulnerable House Democrats are worried that the world in fact won't end when the Speaker retires, and they'd like to have careers after 2022. Pelosi's bundled infrastructure bill strategy involves the bipartisan Senate compromise version, which, however, she won't bring to a vote in the House unless the Senate bypasses the filibuster and passes her second, much larger, Great Reset bill via reconciliation. Then the House will vote on both together.
A group of moderate House Democrats is threatening to torpedo their party's $3.5 trillion spending plan unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brings the bipartisan infrastructure bill for a vote first – an act of direct defiance to the speaker and a bold exertion of power with Democrats holding just a slim majority in the chamber.
"Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months – until the reconciliation process is completed. We disagree," the group of nine Democrats said in the letter. "With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this once-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package."
The group added: "We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law."
. . . Even if the moderate Democrats eventually cave to Pelosi and vote for the budget resolution, it's no guarantee that the reconciliation bill will make it out of the Senate. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have said that they aren't willing to vote for $3.5 trillion in spending. And if Democrats pare down the package to please those two, there is a chance they could lose some more progressive votes.
Given the events just of the past week, the idea that we can run up a big credit card debt because the world is going to end isn't working well. Even if the world will end in 2022, there are problems we need to solve now, and the man in the photo at the top of this post seems less and less capable of addressing them. He looks hunched, defeated, struggling to concentrate, in an empty room. What we have in 2021 and upcoming months looks to be a serious dilemma. Let's not even think about 2022.
Former Secret Service Agent and conservative pundit Dan Bongino has declared that Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden is suffering rapid “cognitive decline," according to sources who are "close to the situation." . . . . Breitbart News reported. "Not a joke and not hyperbole – I’m hearing from people close to the situation that Biden’s cognitive decline is rapidly worsening and is becoming increasingly difficult to mask," Bongino wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday morning.
The strong implication seems to be that Bongino's sources are former colleagues in the Secret Service, who would be in the position of routinely trying to shepherd Biden through awkward moments like those caught here. The body language of the agents in the clip suggests they're working hard to maintain a professional detachment and respect for the office, but I also have the impression that this is a routine they've become used to.
But since Biden's inauguration, his allies and operaives have in fact continued to mask it. Questions are very rare and discounted as partisan attacks when they arise. Meanwhile, he erratically reverses policies like allowing the COVID eviction moratorium to expire, apparently under pressure from Speaker Pelosi.
There's little question that at least for now, Biden is president on a part-time basis. The clip above, as far as I understand this, was made this past Tuesday as he returned to the White House from an extended weekend in Wilmington. According to his public schedule, he left the White House to return to Wilmington again Thursday, and yesterday he left Wilmington to stay at Camp David until this coming Wednesday.
One possible takeaway from the clip is that he isn't comfortable in the White House, to the extent that he seems to be unfamiliar with the basic layout of how to go in and out and presumably prefers the familiar environment of his home.
As more and more crises spin out of control, now including the impending disaster in Kabul, it's not a good look. The question is how long his inner circle and the media can continue to cover for him. They've done a remarkable job so far.
