Psst, Nancy Pelosi! Still looking for a call worth accusing a president of?
I have news for you.
Reuters has a report on a July phone call between Joe Biden and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in which the US president promises military aid in exchange for lies.
I think the “perception around the world and in some parts of Afghanistan is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden says in the July 23 call. “And it is necessary, whether true or not, to project a different image.”
Whether it is true or not.
No, things were not going well, three weeks after the United States left Bagram airfield in the middle of the night.
Biden’s solution was to create the “perception” that everything was fine. He wanted to keep the excitement long enough to cover the self-imposed deadline of August 31 to withdraw American troops and have a round of victory on September 11, when he would present himself as the first president to end the war by always.
He therefore asked Ghani to deceive an event to make him look as if he had a plan to back down from the Taliban to reassure the American allies who were beginning to question Biden’s schedule.
“I don’t know if he’s aware of it,” Biden said, “to what extent the perception around the world is that this seems like a lost proposition … so the conclusion I ask you to keep in mind is to bring everyone together. [ex-Afghan Vice President Abdul Rashid] Dostum, a [ex-President Hamid] Karzai in between. If they stay there and say they support the strategy you’ve worked out and put a warrior in their head, you know a military man. . . in charge of executing this strategy and this will change the perception ”.
Ghani tried to explain that the situation was serious: “Mr. President, we are facing a large-scale invasion, made up of Taliban, full Pakistani planning and logistical support, and at least 10 to 15,000 international terrorists. ”
He begged for American air support. “What is crucial is close air support. . . a very strong dependence on air energy ”.
The Afghan army relied on the American model, which relies on air support for enemy attacks, transporting wounded, and so on. But contractors serving Afghan planes had left, leaving the Afghan army exposed.
Biden offered conditional air support, in exchange for Ghani continuing with his cunning, but only until the August 31 deadline. Then, “who knows?”
Ghani was able to see the writing on the wall and fled Kabul three weeks later.
“Did the president somehow propel a false narrative into that call?” a journalist on Wednesday asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki after breaking Reuters history.
“I’m not going to go into the details of a private conversation,” he replied.
Hah! It was certainly not the norm for Democrats when they accused Donald Trump last year of a leaked phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That’s when Trump was accused of pressuring Ukraine to investigate the credible allegations that Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating a company that had paid Joe Hunter’s son $ 4 million.
Biden’s call with Ghani was equally self-serving and more detrimental to U.S. interests, but don’t expect Congress to persecute her.
Reuters also reported on a call to Ghani by General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chief of staff, who also focused on turning around global “perceptions” of reality.
“Perception in the United States, Europe, and the media is a narrative of Taliban momentum and a narrative of Taliban victory,” Milley said in the call, also on July 23rd. “We need collectively… Trying to turn this perception, this narrative upside down.”
But the problem was not perception. The problem was the reality that the Taliban were winning.
The denial of reality is not a winning formula. It’s a psychological illness, and it seems like he’s also gone crazy thinking about Foggy Bottom. Vanity Fair describes the delusional mentality the State Department suffered in the months leading up to the withdrawal from Afghanistan as “pathological optimism”.
This intentional naivete of Biden and his urban secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was designed to provide a plausible denial when everything was going wrong in Afghanistan, as they knew it would. His only mistake was to think that Ghani and his army would stay until 9/11.
Biden’s defiant speech on Tuesday was an attempt to overcome himself with another fantasy: the surrender of Afghanistan was a success.
We are supposed to pretend that the Taliban don’t make fun of us for funeral drills or organize parades with some of the billions of dollars of Humvees and Black Hawks and weapons we gave them.
We are destined to overlook the 13 flag coffins that went home at Dover Air Force Base on Sunday.
The president probably thinks the lies will continue to work as his presidential campaign was a triumph of perception over reality. Democrats pretended to be a candidate with a good mindset and good character, empathy, integrity, and foreign policy expertise would restore the American soul.
They got away with it just because the media and Big Tech conspired to deceive the American people.
But a new poll by Rasmussen shows that voters no longer buy the illusion: most believe Biden should resign over the Afghan debacle. The problem is that most Vice President Kamala Harris is unable to replace him.
And that is our situation for the next three years.
Illogical abortion
We have heard little from Kamala Harris about his responsibilities for the disaster on the southern border, which is on track to register 2 million illegal immigrants this year.
But on Wednesday, the vice president drafted a new “heartbeat” law in Texas that bans abortions after six weeks.
This was a case in which she and her boss see eye to eye, with the devout Catholic president also condemning the law. They both said she was racist, claiming she was targeting “women of color.”
But if they are right and live more black babies, surely this will make the law anti-racist.
The FDA rebels against Joe
Alarming developments in the FDA, just as one COVID vaccine has full approval and others are near.
Two of the agency’s top vaccination leaders have resigned, Endpoints News reports, over concerns that the Biden administration is politicizing decisions such as booster shots.
Hopefully there is another reason, but if there had been two such prominent resignations during the Trump presidency, you would know that they would tell us that the sky is falling.