Biden is merely the boil that has now burst on a diseased body politic

Melanie Phillips Aug 27

The sickening if utterly predictable atrocities at Kabul airport have brought yet more calls for US President Joe Biden to be removed from office in disgrace.

There’s no doubt that he owns this lethal catastrophe. Yes, it’s true that the misbegotten policy of withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan was laid down by President Donald Trump last year.

But it was Biden who not only failed to repudiate that policy (as Justin Webb points out in The Times, Biden signed up to isolationism back in the seventies as a result of Vietnam) but actually accelerated the date of withdrawal — grotesquely, just for the PR stunt of being able cynically and misleadingly to announce “mission accomplished” in Afghanistan on the iconic date of 9/11 this year.

It was the Biden administration that then compounded this disastrous error by failing to grasp what was plain to anyone with eyes to see — let alone with the whole apparatus of US intelligence to inform him —  that the Afghan army was collapsing as a result of the imminent US withdrawal and that the Taliban were rapidly taking over the country.

It was the Biden administration that brought about the astonishing situation in which the world-beating might of the US armed forces was unable even to secure a civilian airport.

It was the Biden administration that created the panic driving thousands of desperate Afghans to the gates of that airport, and who were then trapped between the murderous Taliban and the overwhelmed American and British soldiers who were unable to process such a huge number within the Biden-imposed deadline.

It was the Biden administration that turned those Afghans, along with the US soldiers themselves, into sitting ducks for the human bombs of the jihad.

Now Politico has reported that the Biden administration actually gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to to be allowed entry into the Taliban-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport (dwarfing the story in today’s Times that, in the panic to flee the British embassy in Kabul, Foreign Office staff left scattered on the ground at the British embassy compound documents with the contact details of Afghans working for them as well as of locals applying for jobs).

The Biden administration’s decision to provide specific names to the Taliban has horrified American law-makers and military officials, as well it might. Politico reports:

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defence official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean”.

Yet Biden takes no responsibility for any of this. Instead, he has repeatedly doubled down on the rightness of his decision. The carnage he has facilitated apparently has nothing to do with him. And of course he blames it all on Trump.

Now, obscenely, he is voicing outrage over atrocities that he himself made inevitable, and is trying to project a power that he himself has squandered. The New York Times reports:

“To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: we will not forgive,” the president said. “We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay”.

How, when he is removing all American forces from the country in four days’ time and is also destroying US intelligence capacity there?

Some people have suggested that this level of self-delusion confirms the long-standing suspicion that Biden is in the grip of physical cognitive decline. And perhaps he is.

But the suggestion misses a key point. For self-delusion is the signature characteristic of the Democratic party and the western left.

Their certainty that a Palestinian state would end the century-old Arab war against the Jews in the land of Israel is delusional.

Their belief that, if the west offers Iran a path to western acceptance, it will abandon its genocidal nuclear weapons programme and transform itself from a terrorist state into a model global citizen is delusional.

Their obsession that Trump was responsible for all the ills of the world, leading to their protracted attempt to lever him out of office by subverting the constitution and the rule of law on the basis of nothing other than a politically motivated fiction, was as delusional as it was corrupt.

At home, they support the delusional agendas of identity politics, from denying biological sex differences to claiming that the demonisation of all white people is “anti-racism” — and then further demonising as “terfs,” “racists” or “Islamophobes” all who call any of this out for the madness that it is.

The seamless robe of this lunacy, stretching from American campuses to Kabul, is glimpsed in this nugget by Zuhdi Jasser and Karys Rhea in the Washington Times: 

Mr. Biden also hid from us that part of the two trillion spent in Afghanistan  included educating Afghanis in gender identity politics  — woke programming that the locals inevitably resisted, creating tension with their American overseers.

In their own way, these left-wing ideologues now in control of the Democratic Party are as fanatical and delusional as those in the grip of communism or Islamism. They are utterly convinced of their own virtue, utterly certain that all who oppose them are evil  — and utterly ruthless in stamping out all who dissent. In the grip of such fanatical self-delusion, they will never, ever take responsibility for the appalling harm they do and never ever admit they are wrong.

Of course, the people responsible for the atrocities at Kabul airport are Islamic State. The people responsible for the atrocities already being reported against Afghan women, and the hunting down and murder of Afghans who helped coalition troops, are the Taliban. Nevertheless, those who paved the way for these fanatics to do these terrible things must also bear a measure of responsibility for what has already happened and what is now set to happen still further.

In the first instance, the Biden administration bears that responsibility. But behind that administration are those who helped inflict it upon America and the world.

All those who voted for Biden as US president bear responsibility for bringing this calamitous individual to high office.

All those in the media who minimised, denied, ignored or failed to ask the necessary questions about Biden’s history of gross political error, the allegations against him of corruption and the apparent evidence of his cognitive decline also bear that responsibility.

All those precious, preening, posturing personalities who cheered Biden on while demonising all who stood against the Democrats or their left-wing agenda bear responsibility for swelling the fetid cultural sea in which this administration swims.

The point of saying all this is not to point fingers gratuitously and inappropriately in the wake of a tragic and still-unfolding catastrophe in Afghanistan. The Taliban and Islamic State are responsible for the savagery there. The Chinese Communist Party, Russia’s President Putin, the Islamic regime of Iran and their Sunni jihadi counterparts, not to mention Pakistan and North Korea, are the enemies of the west and the free world.

But along with swathes of the western left, the Democratic Party is currently a fifth column in the defence of America and the west against these enemies. The point of calling this out is to warn about the supreme danger of ever putting the left into power.

The Democrats have shown themselves to be institutionally unsuitable for high office. They currently constitute a menace to the cultural integrity and continued strength of the United States, are placing individual American lives at terrible risk and are presenting a mortal threat to the security of the free world. And if Biden were to be removed, he would merely be replaced by the Vice-President, Kamala Harris, who is an even worse proposition; and after her in the constitutional pecking order comes the ineffable Nancy Pelosi. Say no more.

Unlike other societies, the people who live in democracies have a choice about who rules them. What’s happened in Afghanistan should be a graphic warning to the west to snap out of its complacency about the left. Their track record, both in and out of office, shows that they are generally as delusional as they are incompetent.

And they will never change. The notion that the Democratic Party has been hijacked by a few extremists is itself delusional. Just look at what the universities and schools are teaching the young — to hate their country and western values, to internalise the Marxist trope that all relationships are defined by power, and to believe that lies are truth and truth is lies.

These ignorant, spoiled, viciously indoctrinated young people are the future of the Democratic party. And this educational subversion has been going on for decades — with the mainstream media its most conspicuous and degraded advertisement.

Where have all those “centrist” Democrats been all this time? Either being sucked into the madness by telling themselves that their political tribe is virtue incarnate and so everything it does is right and good; or else covering their eyes and ears and pretending that this cultural meltdown, and their side’s role in it, isn’t happening. And exactly the same thing has happened to Britain’s Labour party and wider “progressive” circles.

Biden is merely the boil that has now burst on a diseased body politic. As soon as they are able to do so, decent Americans should use their votes to remove the Democrats from office and, unless the party repudiates what it has become, prevent it from gaining power in America ever again.

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