A Bar So High
Who Could Reach It
The Biden administration has screwed up the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan but let’s keep in mind that the bar is so high for Joe Biden that Jesus Christ himself wouldn’t be able to clear it while the bar for his predecessor was subterranean to the point where a quadriplegic flea could have made it over unharmed.
The Pentagon said Saturday that about 17,000 people have been evacuated by the U.S. from Afghanistan in the past week as the administration seeks to ramp up evacuation efforts.
So no, Joe Biden is no Jesus Christ although you could make a strong case that trump is in fact Beelzebub, a very popular figure among many Republicans these days.
It is difficult to follow the news, to read how the experts view the fluid situation, to understand the nuances, the facts of a culture that has been at war for 20 years and in turmoil for much longer, it takes time and patience, all qualities that too many Americans consider as just too much of a bother. I look at the Afghanistan situation as simply that Biden has gotten us out of a quagmire that was doomed from the start, something that neither George W. Bush, Barack Obama nor Beelzebub had the temerity to do. It is a dirty situation and while Biden is rightfully being called to the carpet about the evacuations, he made the decision that many have been demanding for years.
The great boiler down to a kindergarten level of misinformation is Fox News, which would make you believe that removing the Afghanis from the mortal danger posed by the Taliban would be a piece of cake, an easy thing to do and that you just send in enough U.S. forces and planes to evacuate and of course, the pundits compare the situation to the time in Vietnam when the south fell and thousands of terrified Vietnamese scurried to the limited American helicopters and planes hoping to flee the terror that was coming with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. It is easy to simplify complex matters, you end don’t mind wrongheaded conclusions but hey, this is Fox.
Afghanistan is no Vietnam as it is one of the most complicated places on earth with 14 ethnic groups, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Balochis, Turkmens, Nooristanis, Pamiris, Arabs, Gujars, Brahuis, Qizilbash, Aimaq and Pashai along with Sunni, Sufi and Shiite Muslims and we can see how swimmingly the groups get along elsewhere in the region.
The last semblance of stability, when one ruler was able to keep the ethnic factions from causing the country to implode, came under the last king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah. He ruled for 40 years, from 1933 to 1973, and was the last of a dynasty of Pashtuns who ruled the country since the 18th Century. Zahir Shah expanded the nation’s diplomatic relations with many countries and in the 1950s, he began modernizing the country, culminating in the creation of a new constitution and a constitutional monarchy system. But timing is everything and sadly for Zahir Shah, while vacationing in Italy in 1973, he was overthrown in a coup d’etat by his cousin and former prime minister, Mohammed Daoud Khan, and six years later, the Soviets invaded and things have continually gone off the rails ever since, until Biden got us out of there.
That is just a tiny Daedalean taste of the history of that troubled part of the world but this is America and people have the right to be incredibly out to lunch and then offer their dimwit opinions, no matter how wrong they are. Read what three typical midwestern Americans who regrettably have the right to vote said at a rally last Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa, that featured those erudite examples of race-baiting, xenophobic, anti-vaxxers, election-denying, Trump-worshiping, anti-American, QAnon-loving Rep.Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
The knowledgeable citizens at the rally included Kathy Pietraszewski, 69; Eric Riedinger, 62; and Ron James, 68.
Pietraszewski told a reporter with the N.Y. Times that she left the Republican Party after the 2020 election because she believed the GOP leaders wouldn’t back trump’s attempts to overturn the election results. Pietraszewski also feels pretty strongly against the use of COVID-19 vaccines, because it’s all part of the “globalist agenda” and “one world order starts with a vaccine. So my №1 issue is freedom.”
Pietraszewski said she worries that the nation won’t survive until 2024 and reelect trump. She frets over Black Lives Matter, Marxism and critical race theory, and I assume that in her mind, that Black Lives Matter means death to white people and taking all the money from the police; that critical race theory is just a way to blame whites for everything while ruining the schools and depressing all the little children; and that Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict as well as a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. Well maybe she thinks Marxism is about a funny guy with a fake mustache and his three brothers and the dangers they pose to our American way of life but that is her constitutional right to nescience.
Riedinger owns the website, BigTrumpFan.com, and a visit to the site showed no information, the void of which is symbolic of the understanding offered by many trumpers and Riedinger said he would not vote for any Republican who was not 1,000 percent behind trump. Riedinger cannot abide the RINOs, shorthand for “Republicans in Name Only,” those traitors who would not defy anything the Democrats do as in the RINO support of Biden’s trillion dollar infrastructure bill where “they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing” which I assume means if they do anything but what bone spurs demands.
And then there was James who is absolutely positive, knows without a doubt the undeniable, indisputable, irrefutable, stone-cold fact that trump won the election and that Biden only seemed to win because of a vast conspiracy of voter fraud even though every reliable organization and individual has concluded that Biden was fairly elected and that there was no measurable amount of fraud.
“I’m not voting for anyone who won’t say Donald Trump had the election stolen from him,” said James. “And I don’t think anyone in that room would, either.” So there, put that in your corncob pipe and smoke it.
And if anyone thought these three Americans are not symbolic of a whole lot of people, just listen to that iconic statesman, Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who has called for Biden’s impeachment, the same Graham who voted against impeaching bone spurs twice, the first time for trying to strong-arm the president of Ukraine for political purposes and the second for inciting the insurrection at the capitol. Go figure.