Here's What Hit Me About Biden's Speech

There were a lot of odd things about Biden's speech yesterday -- it got remarkably little coverage yesterday evening -- but I watched it. The one thing that bothered me all night was that his suit didn't fit. I don't mean it hung loosely (though to some extent it did) or the sleeves were too short; that would have been obvious. But the subtler sign of a cheap suit is that the collar stands away from the neck, as it does in the photo above. Presidential suits normally fit extremely well. Check Dubya, for instance, in the photo at right, for how a presidential suit should actually fit.

Both Obama's and Trump's suits always hugged their necks. This is to be expected. A president can afford suits that fit. Reagan's tailor even watched his public appearances for signs that lapels weren't sitting exactly flat or whatever and made ongoing alterations.

It's plain that Biden's handlers, having prevailed on him to remain in the White House over the weekend, set up the Sunday speech on short notice in an effort to stop his decline in credibility, The ultra-serious dark suit was part of the package. But normally his suits fit better. Was the good dark suit still back in Wilmington? They clearly coached him this time to appear more engaged, sharper, less woozy, but somehow the loose collar kept everything from quite coming together.

His prepared remarks were a little less otherworldly than they were on Friday, though I think his writers are as bad as his tailors -- why should writers actually compose word salad for the teleprompter, which they clearly do? But he continues to slur and stumble in his presentation. This may give the impression of mental decline, but I think it's more habit borne of laziness. He just never felt the need to speak effectively, he was in a safe seat and did what he was told anyhow. The picture for me isn't cognitive decline, it's laziness and flawed character that do contribute to the other impression.

Commentators noted chiefly that his remarks were designed not to make statements that could be contradicted on the evening news, as they clearly were on Friday, but they continued to be largely happy talk leavened by warnings that nothing is perfect, and no matter how well planned things might be, there could be unspecified horrible things, which would be unavoidable but not his fault. We'll have to see how that plays out.

But generally, commentary on the speech itself has been sparse. This may be because it was announced at short notice on an August Sunday, when nobody was paying attention, and it dwelt primarily on appearances. But one passage has gone unremarked. In the transcript, it goes,

One, planes taking off from Kabul are not flying directly to the United States. They’re landing at U.S. military bases and transit centers around the world.

Number two, at these sites where they’re landing, we are conducting thorough scrutiny — security screenings for everyone who is not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident. Anyone arriving in the United States will have undergone a background check.

Why are they taking such different measures with arrivals from Afghanistan vis-a-vis arrivals at the southern border? As far as I can see, the people at the southern border are waved through and quickly flown to the US interior without security screenings or background checks. But of course, we're talking about tens of thousands in any case, with no real resources available to do screenings and checks based on non-existent or inaccessible records back in Afghanistan. It doesn't matter if these promises are impractical or inconsistent with existing policy, it's all happy talk anyhow.

Yesterday and last week, Biden and his spokespeople have hedged and danced around whether they'll need to stay beyond the August 31 deadline. The consensus seems to be they'll almost certainly need to do that, but now the Taliban has threatened "conequences" if Western forces remain beyond that date. It's plain that the Biden administration in particular is treating the Taliban very gingerly; after all, they have thousands of hostages.

By the way, somebody should be talking to John Kirby about his cheap suits as well. The guy's a retired admiral, now double-dipping as civilian Pentagon flack. He can and should afford better. Not a good look at all.

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.

Let's Revisit The Götterdämmerung Strategy

A week ago, I posted on what in early 2021 seemed to be a consensus "Götterdämmerung strategy" among the elites, whereby Speaker Pelosi, possibly expected to retire after the 2022 election, would use slim congressional majorities, plus control of the White House, to enact a massive Great Reset agenda and ignore the post-2022 consequences because, well, she'd be retired by then. I likened this to someone who, assuming the world would end on December 21, decided to run up a huge credit card bill that would never need to be repaid.

The dificulty arises with scheduling. If for any reason the world doesn't end exactly when you expect it to, or even if you run your card up to its limit too soon, you'll be forced to make those extravagant payments after all. President Biden summed up the scheduling problem with his remark, “The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” In other words, the collapse of Afghanistan had been programmed into the agenda, they were just figuring it would take place around the time the world would end and they didn't need to worry about it.

But this and the subsequent events of the past week gave me more insight into Biden's character. Look at his now well-quoted remarks on July 8:

Q Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?

THE PRESIDENT: No, it is not.

Q Why?

THE PRESIDENT: Because you — the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.

. . . The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.

There's really no difference between his glibness on July 8 and his happy talk in his presentation at the White House yesterday:

We’re going to do everything — everything that we can to provide safe evacuation for our Afghan allies, partners, and Afghans who might be targeted if — because of their association with the United States.

But let me be clear, any American who wants to come home, we will get you home.

But make no mistake: This evacuation mission is dangerous. It involves risks to our armed forces, and it is being conducted under difficult circumstances.

I cannot promise what the final outcome will be or what it will be — that it will be without risk of loss. But as Commander-in-Chief, I can assure you that I will mobilize every resource necessary.

What he's doing at this point isn't just hedging his bets, he's anticipating that things are definitely going to turn to poop, and he's programming in the excuse he'll use after August 31: hey, I never promised you it would work out, I just said we'd do all we could. And we flew out blah blah blah in an unprecedented blah blah blah. My heart goes out to the blah blah blah.

The problem now is that his strategies have become predictable and pro forma. His situation reminds me of an insightful remark Jordan Peterson made some years ago that's stayed with me: he disagreed with the opinion we've often seen that corporate executives are narcissists and sociopaths. "They can't be," he more or less said. "Narcissists and sociopaths wear out their welcome."

I think this goes to what I;m beginning to recognize about Biden's character. He isn't senile. A senile person is disorganized. Biden is all too organized. His lies are deliberate, and his evasions are planned. However, he's wearing out his welcome. The dilemma is they actually can't use the 25th Amendment or force his resignation. Biden isn't senile, to start with, and he's stubborn, but notwithstanding Harris's utter unsuitability for the office, if she leaves the vice presidency, she also ceases to be the tiebreaking vote in the Senate, with the confirmation of a new vice president a fraught issue. This would completely unravel any remaining hopes for the 2021 agenda.

His current strategy appears to be to hunker down, kick the can down the road for a few more weeks with some happy talk, and hope something intervenes -- but that's effectively to hope the world ends in time for him to get out of making payments. I don't think this will work, but I don't see the end game yet.

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.

UPDATE: As of now, Biden has changed his mind yet again over going back to Wilmington -- hard to tell if he will or won't.

The Elites Lose More Credibility

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. . .

But the CDC website still says categorically:

• 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.

“We Did It In Vietnam. Nixon And Kissinger Got Away With It.”

A story that emerged overnight offers some insight into President Biden's actual strategy for the Afghanistan pullout:

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.

Even so, US public statements acknowledge the need for this many evacuess to be flown out:

[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.

But in any case, current reports are that planes are leaving Kabul half empty.

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!

Has He Lost Jake Tapper?

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.

UPDATE: The UK Daily Mail puts the estimate at 40,000 US citizens in Kabul. In addition,

“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.