Commentary

Regular readers will recall that I select a fool to recognize on the first day of each month, not just in April.  It would be easy to again pick President Biden for this ignominious honor.

However, my September Fool’s Day pick goes to the 81,284,666 individuals who elected Biden to be president in 2020, who, by now, must realize their mistake.

They voted for him, knowing he was not up to the job of being president, not only because of the evidence of his deteriorating mental and physical capacity, his record of failures in foreign policy, and the Biden family corruption.

Worse, they permitted their hatred of President Trump to cloud their thinking; clearly, with no thought of their vote’s effect on our nation’s future.

Now, in Biden’s August 31, 2021 speech at the conclusion of the withdrawal, he attempted to fend off critics referring to it as another foreign policy failure by spinning it as an “extraordinary success.”

Certainly, Biden supporters recall how he frequently said on the campaign that “I’ll always tell you the truth. This is the responsibility of a president.  That’s what is owed the American people.”

Then, during his inaugural address, he pointedly said “there is truth and there are lies … I will always level with you.”

During his August 19, 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Biden insisted that “the intelligence community did not say back in June or July that, in fact, this was gonna collapse like it did.”

“Your top military advisors warned against withdrawing on this timeline,” said Stephanopoulos, “They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.”

“No, they didn’t …. That wasn’t true,” Biden responded, then stuttered, “No, no one said that to me that I can recall.”

While he was confidently assuring Stephanopoulos that we were on a path to get everyone out of Afghanistan by August 31, we now learn from excerpts of a phone call a few days later between Biden and Afghan President Ghani obtained by Reuters, that Biden was concerned over the optics of the chaos in Afghanistan. 

“I don’t need to tell you the perception around the world, and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said.  “And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.

“I’m not telling you what that plan should precisely look like, you’re going to get not only more help, but you’re going to get a perception that is going to change in terms of how, um … our allies and folks here in the states and other placed think we’re doing.”

“There is truth and there are lies … I will always level with you.” –  President Biden, Inaugural Address.

Biden continued to lie about the agreement between President Trump and the Taliban.  The Taliban didn’t honor its commitments in Trump’s conditional agreement and began taking Afghan districts by force.  The Biden administration’s claim that the agreement left no choice but to leave Afghanistan unconditionally is false.

With the Taliban on the move, the U.S. was no longer obligated to leave by May 1, by August 31, or any other date.  Under the terms of the agreement, Biden could have insisted that the Taliban meet its obligations or face U. S. military pressure.  But that would have meant that Biden couldn’t keep his campaign promise to get out of Afghanistan.  He chose to show weakness.

His Afghan debacle merely tops off eight months of other poor decisions, including his halting of our energy independence, allowing illegals, many with Covid, and drugs to flow freely across our southern border, unabated urban crime, rising prices of gas, food and other goods as inflation mounts precipitously, all while he chases an impossible goal of stopping climate change at our expense.

“President Biden’s defiant, accusatory defense on Tuesday of his Afghanistan withdrawal and its execution was so dishonest, and so lacking in self-reflections or accountability, that it was unworthy of the sacrifices Americans have made in that conflict.” – Wall Street Journal editorial board

I can only hope that there are Biden 2020 voters in the 61 percent who think things ”have pretty seriously gone off on the wrong track” in the latest POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, in which just three in 10 respondents gave Biden passing marks on his handling of Afghanistan.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.