By Mike Huckabee
August 27, 2021
|
|
Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Bible Verse of the Day - Psalm 118:24
- ICYMI: New Podcast Episode
- Setting The Conditions Of Failure, By Kenneth Allard
- America The Beautiful
- The Deadliest Day
- Taliban rule
- Pallets of cash
- This is what a President who's not fit to lead looks like
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
24 This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Psalm 118:24
ICYMI: My Latest Podcast Episode
By Mike Huckabee
Very honored to get perspective of Congressman Michael Waltz as he served in Afghanistan and was 1st Green Beret to ever serve in Congress.
TO LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE, GO HERE>>>
Setting The Conditions Of Failure
By Kenneth Allard
Note: Col. Ken Allard, USA (Ret.) is a former Cold War intelligence officer, West Point faculty member and Dean of the National War College. He also served for ten years as an on-air military analyst for NBC News.
My heart aches for the 12 Marines and one Navy corpsman killed yesterday in Kabul. Even more for their 13 families awaiting that life-changing visit from serving officers in dress uniforms; bringing the official notification that their loved one gave his life carrying out a noble but badly flawed mission. But there is something especially tragic about Marines engaged in a mercy mission, pitilessly targeted by suicide bombers committing war crimes under the guise of religious obligation.
General Jim Mattis is most closely identified with the slogan, “No better friend, no worse enemy” to describe the marine’s warrior ethos. An alite force of naval infantry, marines deploy on the toughest missions: to seize an island, to assault a beach-head - or to rectify an impossible situation created by a singularly inept president. Sadly, that was the situation in which these hapless marines found themselves: guarding the over-crowded cul-de-sac where the truly desperate scrambled madly for escape. Making these uncertainties infinitely worse was that baseline security was supposedly provided by the Taliban, our sworn enemies since 9-11.
How had it come to this? From the commander-in-chief on down through the entire chain-of-command, effective performance depends on many factors but this above all: Has this admiral or general, commander or colonel set the conditions that will ensure the deployed forces have their greatest chance of success? That unforgiving calculus begins at the service academies, continues through the staff colleges and identifies the elites who attend the war colleges and ultimately fill command billets. Regardless of service, these flag officers have learned to construct forces best geared to prevail in their missions, balancing its components on air, land and sea. An equally important question: What forces will flow to the theater of operations and in which order? And when Murphy’s Law always kicks in, what will you do about it?
Unfortunately, we live in an age of rampant military illiteracy where less than half of one percent of all Americans ever serve in uniform. Military history is an unknown subject in most colleges and may permanently disqualify you from applying for journalism school. Joe Biden embodies that legacy of ignorance, made even worse by his 50 years of service as a legislator. Compromising values is a routine legislative strategy where the most fundamental differences are routinely split down the middle. With that training, Biden always sounds like a pandering poseur when he threatens to use military force. Like yesterday, when according to The Federalist, he swore, “Those who carried out this attack and anyone who wishes America harm know this, we will not forgive…We will not forget. We will hunt you down to make you pay. I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command.” Think our enemies believed him, that their sandals trembled at the fearsome prospect of having annoyed the ferocious Joe Biden? Nope, I don’t either.
The munchkins surrounding him went out of their way to assure Americans that now is not the time for recriminations, that our entire focus must be on de-constructing the artful trap which Biden willfully engineered. While Kabul suffers agonies, Washington endlessly dissembles. To hear Biden tell it, they deliberately bypassed the Bagram air base - one of the biggest in the region - because Kabul’s sole airstrip was closer and more convenient. Seriously, fellas? That they reversed the natural order of operations, removing the bulk of American combat power while leaving the teeming multitudes for last? In what war college do they teach that concept? Even worse: The Daily Wire reported on Wednesday that the US is leaving behind for Taliban use some 70,000 vehicles, 600,000 vehicles and 208 aircraft. The article by Joseph Curl quoted one authority, “We built them a pretty amazing war chest and now all of it is in the hands of the Taliban.” Bottom Line: Biden set the conditions for failure, not success.
His presidential ineptitude may have its greatest effect when our enemies test our open southern border, now stripped of all its defenses. When they do, remember that the 2020 electoral defeat of Donald Trump will cast an even larger shadow in American history than the looming towers of 9-11.
The Deadliest Day
By Mike Huckabee
Thursday was the deadliest day for US troops in Afghanistan since 2011, as a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport killed 13 US service members and more than 90 Afghans. Until President Biden implemented his plan to remove our troops from harm’s way, we had lost only one service member in the past 18 months.
Here’s a link to Fox News’ regular updates on this story, which are coming too quickly for us to keep up with in our newsletter:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/afghanistan-news-kabul-airport-taliban-biden
Biden gave a press conference following the tragic bombing. You’ll find a full write-up of that elsewhere in our newsletter/website, as well as a guest editorial on the topic by Ken Allard.
Taliban rule
By Mike Huckabee
News also came that the new “moderate” Taliban has ordered that music be banned in Afghanistan. I wonder how all the rich liberal music stars who worked so hard and donated so much to elect Joe Biden are feeling now.
But the lifetime achievement award for cluelessness has to go to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who ignored the tragic attack in Kabul and instead tweeted about “Women’s Equality Day,” joked with reporters and repeated one of her favorite lies about Republicans engaging in “voter suppression” by passing basic election integrity laws.
Say, Madame Speaker, do you know what’s really bad for women’s equality? Abandoning them to the brutal rule of the Taliban.
America The Beautiful
God's creation is all around us. To learn more about Joshua Tree National Park, visit its website here.
Pallets of Cash
By Mike Huckabee
About the one positive thing you can say for Biden’s plan is that at least he didn’t send pallets of American dollars to the Taliban. But apparently, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
This is what a President who's not fit to lead looks like
By Mike Huckabee
Our prediction that President Biden would come out in his late-day press briefing on Thursday and blame everyone but himself turned out to be, sadly, correct.
If you didn’t see it, imagine at the podium the weakest, most feeble, most pathetic excuse for a Commander-in-Chief you can dredge out of the recesses of your mind, and then somehow dial it back even weaker. The real thing was worse than that.
Think I’m exaggerating? The British news organization DAILY MAIL was merciless.
Yes, Biden did blame Trump, again: “I bear responsibility for, fundamentally, all that’s happened of late. But [editorial note: there’s always a “but”] here’s the deal: You know –- I wish that one day, you say these things –- you know as well as I do that [the] former President made a deal with the Taliban that we would get all American forces out of Afghanistan by May 1. In return, the commitment was made, and that was a year before.”
Biden keeps going back to that, when it’s clear to all of us watching that he didn’t have to follow that timetable at all. HE’S our Commander-in-Chief; it's not the head of the Taliban. WE’RE the superpower, not them. WE say when we leave. And President Trump certainly would not have conformed to some arbitrary deadline it if it meant leaving Americans and friends behind. Until now, I’ve always tried to conduct myself with enough class to avoid telling the President of the United States to shut his yap, but Biden is making that extremely difficult for me now.
Here’s the carefully-considered plan President Trump had for leaving Afghanistan that Biden scrapped, simply because it was a remnant of Trump’s administration. Kash Patel, Trump’s chief of staff at the Pentagon, wrote about it for the NEW YORK POST last week, and WESTERN JOURNAL summarizes it here. Highly recommended reading.
Biden acknowledged during Thursday’s briefing that Americans would be left behind after August 31. Jen Psaki said later that we would “need to coordinate with the Taliban to get those people to the airport and out of the airport.” That's like "coordinating" with an alligator to help you cross the river.
Katie Pavlich has a good commentary on how Biden & Co. are talking about getting those Americans out who are still there after the deadline.
Actually, Biden didn’t blame Trump for EVERYTHING. He blamed his generals for the (incredibly stupid) decision to leave Bagram Air Base before the evacuation. The generals gave him bad advice, so what could he do?
Perhaps most shockingly of all (and I would think criminal), Biden didn’t deny reports that the Taliban were given a helpful list of Americans stranded in the region. To, uh, help them get to the airport? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Clearly, Joe Biden is not fit to lead. The problem is, those around him don’t seem fit to lead, either, and somebody has to. That vacuum of leadership at the top might be the main thing keeping Biden in the Oval Office right now. Last night on Shannon Bream’s FOX NEWS show, Democrat strategist Kevin Walling, when confronted by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s call for Biden’s resignation, said that “this President absolutely has the will to lead,” pointing out that “this weighs heavily on the President’s heart” because he had a son who served in combat. He “has the will to finish this mission out in the next five days.”
Ah, so Biden is still planning to wrap this up in five days? Apparently so.
Walling continued: “Any calls for any kind of resignation or impeachment of him or his team, really, uh, are a distraction from this core mission that he is set to accomplish, uh, in these next couple of days. No one in the wake of 9/11 called for George W. Bush...to resign. This is just party politics, when we need to focus on the mission, supporting the troops on the ground, paying tribute to those lives lost, and supporting this effort in the waning days in Afghanistan.”
Well, if anyone knows about party politics, it’s a Democrat strategist. Okay, Mr. Walling, let’s all focus on the mission now that it’s been botched, support the troops now that they face new and unnecessary dangers, pay tribute to the lives that Biden needlessly put in harm’s way and got killed, and support this effort to dig out of the deep quicksand we’re in, thanks to our feeble-brained Commander-in-Chief.
Also, it doesn’t exactly instill confidence in our President when he reveals he’s been “instructed” to call on reporters from a list his helpful aides have given him. Not kidding.
You might be able to tell that I and my research team have completely had it with the “leadership” of this administration –- on many fronts, not just this one –- and we have plenty of company. Thanks to Joe Biden and the people who put him in office, America has lost lives, experienced humiliation around the world, shocked and dismayed our allies, seriously risked our own national security, and now faces critical decisions on how to move forward from this.
Starting off our round-up is Spencer Brown, writing for TOWNHALL, who said, “[Biden’s] failure to successfully or safely bring the United States out of Afghanistan is squarely the fault of President Biden.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/08/26/biden-remarks-on-kabul-attacks-n2594821
Paula Bolyard at PJ MEDIA said he “stumbled badly...sounding more defeated and confused than resolute.” The quotes she included really show how incoherent he was at times. She noted the bizarre way in which he linked the loss of his son Beau (who did serve in Iraq but who died of brain cancer) to this situation. It WAS strange.
“Sadly,” she wrote, “we have a Commander-in-Chief who doesn’t seem fully able to grasp the gravity of the situation and the enormity of the disaster he’s wrought.”
Nick Arama at RedState.com was unsparing in his description of this slow-motion train derailment.
Earlier in the afternoon, before Biden’s briefing, he had this excellent assessment.
Donald Trump, Jr.’s, tweet after the briefing shows what the world is seeing right now: profound weakness.
Finally, I might have saved the best for last. Stephen Kruiser at PJ MEDIA says it all with his headline: “America is now actually the mess Dems pretended it was under Trump.” He tells us that he started writing it a few weeks ago as just a general commentary, before the evacuation of Afghanistan went bad. This new horror took his original point to the tenth power.
You know, there aren’t many ideas from California that I give a thumbs-up, too, but in this situation, there’s one I dearly wish we could adopt (but we can’t): “recall election.” Do it over and get it right this time!
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2021/8/morning-edition-august-27