Month: August 2021

Shame on me for laughing:

• My long time conservative friend, Darrell Michaels at Unabashedly American, wants to help out our President. Wow.
   
  He helpfully links to a suggested speech, pretty much a mea culpa for President Biden, in which the President proclaims that it is obviously his fault things in Afghanistan are so chaotic, and promises to try to be more levelheaded, which is to say conservative.
   
• Green Eagle seems to feel that the most accurate way to look at the Afghanistan withdrawal is to consider the long ago entry into the war, the conduct of the war, the eventual commitment by one President to get out, as well as the fulfillment of that commitment by the next.
   
  He seems dissatisfied with press coverage that extends only to Let’s blame Biden Cause He’s There.
   
  Seems Green Eagle has more than a point.
   
• driftglass makes a compelling argument with numbers, tracking casualties in Afghanistan with time devoted by mainstream news outlets. Not a good record for the press.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors shows Mr. Trump explaining how he completely destroyed ISIS and that bin Laden was not really a big deal. After all, he only had one big hit on 9/11/2001. Just a couple of buildings is all he got.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson is taken aback by Republican responses to the Kabul explosions.
   
• As News Corpse reports, there is a hell-freezes-over moment as a Fox Network personality scolds the GOP for its knee-jerk attack on Biden after the Afghanistan terrorism attack.
   
• Various snafus would have been logistically inevitable while evacuating after an American loss. And people have died. Conservatives are shocked that you don’t control what you want when you lose.
   
  But there have been bureaucratic tangles as well. Hackwhackers documents the role white supremacist Stephen Miller played, while in the Trump administration, in deliberately making each step more and more convoluted. The idea was to keep inferior people out – those with deficient cultural, racial, or religious characteristics.
   
  Even without the snarled matrix, people would have died. Seems car bombs don’t care about paperwork. But the tangles didn’t help.
   
• Certainly we feel anger and frustration, even denial, at an unambiguous loss in Afghanistan. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged suggests we should know that, early on, American officials said no to an unambiguous win in Afghanistan. The Bush administration would not take yes for an answer.

Continue reading “Taliban Cheered, COVID, Mea Culpa, Stephen Miller Time, Doocy Dooed”

 

 

Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19 set to receive full FDA approval tomorrow.

NOT on the FDA approval list for Covid:
Ivermectin, for livestock worms
Hydroxychloroquine, for malaria and lupus
Bleach, for chocolate stains
UV light, for crime scenes

Follow me for more medical updates!

— 𝓢𝓶𝓲𝓽𝓮!⚡️ (@7Veritas4) August 22, 2021

Sadly, there do exist chronological adults for whom this would be
startling news.

• Hackwhackers provides a clear picture of the top two issues this week: COVID and Afghanistan.
   
• Darrell Michaels of Unabashedly American really hates our President for his criminally incompetent handling of Afghanistan policy.
   
  Darrell is a longtime friend, so I felt compelled to respond on his site.
   
  It is true I’m elderly and I have learned not to completely trust what I read.
   
  Perhaps news reports on which I rely are wrong. They say Mr. Trump withdrew 83% of our forces in the last few months of his administration. As I understand it, that drawdown from 15,000 to 2500 was completed 5 days before Mr. Biden became President Biden.
   
  During that almost-transition, Mr. Trump ordered his administration to share no information with Biden or his people about the troop reduction or about anything else.
   
  Prior to the election Mr. Trump pressured the government of Afghanistan to release all 5,000 Taliban prisoners they were holding.
   
  As early as April, I read accounts that the Taliban seemed to be gaining a lot of ground. I do see a connection to the troop reduction and the massive Taliban release.
   
  I understand there existed a program of expedited immigration for those who risked their lives to help American troops. Emerging accounts now indicate that, within the Trump administration, Stephen Miller and others devised methods of red tape delay and bureaucratic obstruction. They deliberately sabotaged the rescue program.
   
  They were highly motivated by nativist ideology, especially against non-white immigrants and Muslim refugees, all of whom they see as culturally inferior. They were unswayed by reports of pro-American heroism by those refugees.
   
  We do know that a substantial proportion of conservatives are actively propagating against the refugees about whom Darrell and I share anxious concern.
   
  I suggested my friend’s anger might better be directed toward them.
   
  I asked Darrell if all that reporting is wrong.
   
  There seem to have been more recent developments reporters have been holding back for security reasons. We are now learning about rescue and transport operations into and out of Taliban areas. So I suggested we may want to wait for a more complete picture.
   
  I shared my elderly perspective that there is no orderly way to lose a war.
   
  And I asked my friend to tell me where my information is incorrect.
   
  I have known Darrell for years. I am confident he will post an informed, probably snarky, and very very conservative answer.
  Let’s track this.
   
• Tommy Christopher reports on conservative condemnation of President Biden for suggesting the Taliban transformed themselves to a more tolerant posture.
   
  Seems Biden was directly asked if the Taliban have changed. He answered NO but speculated they are under pressure because they want to appear legitimate.
   
  ABC, bless their hearts, published a clip with the entire question and answer, but included a transcript that left out the word “No.”
   
  See how losing a single word can transform Biden’s unequivocal No into the Yes that never was?
   
  Nice, ABC.
   
• Infidel753 sees the Taliban victory, complete with religious absolutism with rules and standards imposed on any who remain unwilling, as a tragic triumph for religion.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson covers the under-covered aspect, just coming into central play, of the Taliban takeover: money.
   
• Nojo explains how so very much of our struggle in the Middle East comes from our addiction to immediate drama at the expense of the rest of the story, the backstory, the whole story.
   
• Laura Ingraham speaks from her perch on the Fox Network, asking viewers if they really want to accept responsibility for welcoming thousands of invading refugees from Afghanistan.
   
  Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged goes step by step as if talking to a small child, explaining to poor Laura how adult responsibility actually works in the moral universe.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has a thought about Republicans who are angry about Afghanistan.

Continue reading “Afghanistan, Biden Blame, GOP, Bush, Anti‑Vax Costs, Dental HIPPA, Racism”

• You would think conservative Christians might keep up with Francis Bacon’s reconciliation of God and science. They have had 400 years:
   
  God created the universe.
  Science is a study of God’s creation.
  God created science.
   
  North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz watches our brethren bravely insist they will trust God, not science! Right up until they can’t breathe.
   
  This is an old story, but it works:
   
  
   
• About this whole COVID thing, Marjorie Taylor Greene goes existential fatalist about fatalities – We’ll all die of something. M. Bouffant, ever the angry cynic, at Web of Evil draws the angry cynical essential reductio, which does indeed look a bit absurdum.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit distills to its essence what today’s Republican Party has adopted as its rock bed principle.
   
• NOJO describes our newest COVID attack as a sort of biological civil war, with one side going all suicide vesting with weapons of mass destruction.
   
• According to The Borowitz Report, Ron DeSantis’s favorability numbers are plummeting among Floridians who describe themselves as “somewhat,” “very,” or “strongly” opposed to being dead.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever ponders the degree of sympathy we ought to have when the willfully unvaccinated die. He decides it depends on to which of three broad categories the unprotected belong.
   
• Journalist Imani Gandy has this about right.

  There are no words.

Continue reading “COVID, God and Science, Fatal Fatalism, Death Party, Unvaccinated War, Florida”

If we’re going to attack refugees again,
can we try not to be ridiculous about it?

Not like this Fox expert thought George Washington took over revolutionary airports, but still:

Okay, okay, Mein Kampf was written by Hitler – – What of it?!!

• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger lists the ten most pathetic excuses offered by national Republicans for opposing the Jan 6th investigation.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged is sickened by the response of national Republican politicians to the testimony of officers who responded to the US Capitol insurrection. Police who put themselves into deadly danger defending lawmakers from a lynch mob are now regarded, by some of the same politicians they defended, as enemies.
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson must gently explain to a Trumper just who it was that won the state last year:
   

• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson looks to history, seeking a lesson for today’s ANTI-insurrection patriots, and finds inspiration during the Civil War in the Battle of Mobile Bay.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings word of the latest word, in her own words, from Congressional representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. She speculates about those hoping against hope that anti-vaxxers might save themselves and those they love from possible extreme grief, pain, and death. Seems those wanting to prevent needless death might get around to actually asking neighbors to please vaccinate. If that happens, Ms. Greene urges anti-vaxxers to pull out firearms and begin shooting.
   
• Infidel753 argues for a bit of shift in policy emphasis. Our primary COVID concern must be with those who, for medical or age reasons, cannot be vaccinated. We have reached the limits of our ability and our moral responsibility to save kamikaze anti-vaxxers.
   
• Scotties Toy Box illustrates in a few ways how the Fox Network can kill you.
   
• Frances Langum watches the horror debate as one Fox Network personality finally admits that maybe viewers ought to get vaccinated to avoid, you know, death and another Fox Network personality indignantly responds, without conscious irony, that news anchors should not give medical advice.
   
  I have been known to have a cynical opinion or two about conservative pundits who, thankfully, change their minds about vaccination.

Continue reading “Jan 6, COVID, Climate, Defund, Racism, Creeps, iSpy, Cuomo, DeJoy, Tan Man”