Free Republic

A basic summary of Americans' contempt for their repellent ruling class boils down to three sentences: Establishment politicians and other regime operatives view everything through the lens of power. They never assume any responsibility. They never suffer any consequences for their failures. On Wednesday -- the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States -- White House National Security Council communications adviser John Kirby demonstrated the mind of a well-placed regime toady when he accidentally included Fox News in a "reply all" email chain that featured a message dismissive of what he called "a 'handful'...

WASHINGTON – Families of the 13 US service members who were killed in an ISIS suicide bombing during the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan lined up Monday to slam the White House — with one Gold Star mom accusing the president of callously likening her son’s death to that of his late son Beau. Cheryl Rex, whose son Marine Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola died in the Aug. 26, 2021, bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, said she became enraged at Biden’s mawkish sentiment, knowing full well that Beau Biden died of brain cancer on US soil. “His...

Former secretary of state under President Trump Mike Pompeo fired back at claims from the Biden administration that Trump constrained the conditions of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, during which 13 American soldiers died in a suicide bombing while protecting the Kabul airport, and untold numbers of Americans and Afghans eligible for evacuation were stranded. [cut] Mike Pompeo, who also served as CIA director under Trump, said he wasn't surprised by Kirby's tact, saying President Biden and members of his administration routinely blame anyone but themselves for their own multiple failures. "I am outraged by the fact that the 13...

Reporter (Peter Doocy, Fox News): "Who is going to get fired over [the Afghanistan withdrawal]?"Spokesman John Kirby: "The purpose of it is not accountability."Comments made on 4/6/23

There's always press coverage about Republican mismanagement or Republicans getting into trouble governing as ideologues, but you don't hear much about the reverse. There's a lot to critique about Republicans, but for mismanagement and for blindly putting ideology above all else, resident Joe Biden may be the all-time champ. Biden campaigned as a pragmatist who could bring stability and national unification. His inaugural address was all about these themes. America needs some level of national healing more than anything else. Americans can't go on at each other's throats. The country is falling apart. Biden deserved praise for starting his presidency...

Biden’s most recently revealed Afghanistan lie is just the latest in a string of outright falsehoods and deceptions the White House is resorting to in the face of failure.Hardly a day passes anymore that resident Joe Biden or members of his administration do not stand before the American people and lie through their teeth.The latest lie to be exposed came Tuesday, when Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he advised Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, and that withdrawing them “would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military...

Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends or your interests -- without a major war. Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed. It's an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited. The tired democracies of the 1930s learned that lesson when they kept acquiescing to Hitler's serial aggressions. Hitler's Germany foolishly later attacked a far stronger Soviet Union in 1941, given Moscow's lost deterrence after its lackluster performances...

When the hijacked planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that first 9/11, the Taliban were in control of Afghanistan and providing sanctuary for al-Qaida. Today, the Taliban are in control of Afghanistan and providing sanctuary to al-Qaida. What then did our longest war accomplish? The Afghan army and government we stood up and sustained for decades has collapsed. The U.S. military has withdrawn. U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghans who fought alongside us have been left behind. The triumphant Taliban of today are far stronger than were the Taliban of 2001 who fled...

It doesn’t matter how badly they botch their jobs, or how much misery they cause, our ruling class is immune from accountability.It must be nice to work for the Biden administration. No matter how badly you mess up, or lie, or mislead the American people, you will never be forced to resign or be held accountable. You can lie and dissimulate about the most serious matters facing the country, and nothing will happen to you.Take two recent examples: the origins of COVID-19 and the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.When news broke this week that the U.S. National Institute Of Allergy and Infectious...

‘Whether it is true or not,’ this president and his enablers ‘need to project a different picture’: that the Afghanistan retreat was a great success.Earlier this week, this writer addressed the Biden administration’s instinctive lying on matters big and small, concluding: “When the president allows his key advisors lie to us about a dog bite, the only confidence the American people can have is that he will not be honest with us about these and other life-and-death matters if the truth would hurt his poll numbers or endanger Democrats’ reelection chances.”Regrettably, recent events confirm that the president’s deceptions and misstatements...

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the country was united behind him. The America First Committee, the largest anti-war movement in our history, which had the backing of President Herbert Hoover and future Presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, was closing its doors and enlisting. When President George W. Bush stood atop the ruins of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan after the attack of 9/11, the country was united behind him. resident Joe Biden, however, knows no such unity....

Our Defeat In Afghanistan Is Only The Beginning As the post-9/11 chapter closes, a new one begins, marked above all by the end of American deterrence and the eclipse of American power.Our total defeat and ignominious, disastrous withdrawal in Afghanistan, after 20 years of war and nation-building, closes a chapter on post-9/11 America — and opens another.What comes next is to some extent uncertain, but you don’t need to be a grand strategist to see the broad outlines of what is already taking shape.First and most obvious, Afghanistan will revert to being a terrorist haven. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,...

The first third of Joe Biden’s speech defending the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal was full of lies, blaming everyone but himself while also claiming it was a big beautiful evacuation, and done in completely bad faith. “Mr. Biden described the evacuation as if it were a triumph, and that his Administration had planned for such a contingency in case the Afghan military collapsed. This is, literally, unbelievable. Multiple media reports have revealed that the White House was caught by surprise and preparing for vacation en masse when Kabul fell,” concluded the Wall Street Journal editorial board. “The President even had the...

The right people want to see this administration get back to the things they elected them to do -- and so they're going to. It's as simple as that.“Look, we’ve closed the chapter on Afghanistan. And now we’re committed to America. We want to put the past behind us and are committed to build back better and infrastructure.”“We want to focus on people, on jobs, on working-class Americans struggling to pay the bills.”“We’re not dwelling on the past.”None of these are quotes — yet. Already by the time you read this, that might have changed.Because even while the frantic Kabul...

Thirteen U.S. service members are dead, $85 billion in U.S. military equipment is controlled by the Taliban, and a recognized terrorist organization is dictating American foreign policy. Our credibility across the world is collapsing. Through it all I cannot stop thinking about my brother, an active duty helicopter pilot in the U.S. Navy. Over his years of service he’s often on my mind, but as I watched the news coverage of the fall of Kabul to Taliban control, and the now infamous photo of a U.S. Chinook helicopter airlifting Americans from the U.S. Embassy, I can’t stop thinking about him,...

To avenge some 3000 Americans killed on 9/11, Washington caused a hundred or two hundred times as many deaths. To respond to an assault on two American cities, the U.S. plunged two nations into years, even decades of war. In the end, there were more jihadists fighting allied regimes and terrorists at work targeting civilians than at the start. What kept America safe was not endless war, which struck one hornet’s nest after another, but targeted counter-terrorism efforts at home and abroad.

The deadly attacks in Afghanistan should be the final straw for Biden, whose incompetence has now cost the lives of at least a dozen American soldiers.Joe Biden is not capable or competent to hold the office of the presidency. If there were any doubt on this point, his press conference Thursday evening in the wake of a pair of coordinated suicide bombings in Kabul should put the matter to rest.The first blast Thursday killed 13 U.S. soldiers at a Kabul airport gate, along with scores of Afghans. Another bomb at a nearby hotel killed dozens more. Between the two blasts,...

Enlist in your local Cajun Navy, the American refugees are coming.Watching the dumpster fire Joe Biden and his team lit with U.S. dollars and materiel in Afghanistan is demoralizing. Realizing we’re facing at least three more years of such catastrophic ineptitude, even if Biden is nominally replaced, is almost too much to absorb.Just eight months to the regime of “normalcy,” we’ve seen millions of unknowns crossing our southern border unchecked and child-raping third-world terrorists chasing off U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan. These are not accidents; these are man-made catastrophes. They are the direct result of our elites’ corruption and of American...

As the situation in Kabul deteriorates, the Biden administration seems increasingly untethered to reality, boasting about an evacuation gone haywire and lying about stranded Americans.Americans are stranded in Afghanistan. That’s a fact. You don’t have to have special military clearance to know it, or access to classified information, or be in contact with Americans in Kabul or elsewhere in Afghanistan. All you have to do is follow the news.For days now, reports coming out of Afghanistan have chronicled the dire situation of Americans unable to get to the airport in Kabul, unable to get past Taliban checkpoints outside the airport,...

In the face of actual violence from real terrorists, the best our tech and media elite can do is mutter inane platitudes.The fall of Kabul has exposed, in horrifying and dramatic fashion, the incompetence and folly of the Biden administration.The reports and images coming out of Afghanistan are dire. As many as 10,000 American citizens are trapped behind enemy lines, stranded in and around Kabul in what amounts to a massive hostage crisis. It remains unclear whether they will be allowed to leave or even if they can even make it to the airport safely.Moreover, tens of thousands of Afghans...