America’s exit from Afghanistan is a monumental debacle born of a failure of leadership utterly breathtaking in its magnitude. Hundreds of Americans and perhaps tens of thousands of Afghan allies were abandoned to the predations of an emboldened Taliban in a rush to satisfy an artificial and self-imposed deadline. Thirteen American soldiers and at least a couple hundred Afghans have been killed so far, and I fear this toll will be a drop in the bucket compared to what almost certainly lies ahead for those our President and his team left behind.
Left-partisans, of course and as usual, are spinning. The true-Blue are working double-time to blame the debacle on Trump, and since it’s TRUMP!, some of them might actually believe the bullshit they’re babbling. Worse, some have the gross audacity to actually praise Biden and call this a big success. The mainstream press, knowing that the high-holy stink of this mess cannot simply be waved off, are distancing themselves from it, offering us every possible shiny-object distraction they can because they know that the Afghanistan business, if permitted to remain in the public eye, will be an albatross around Biden’s neck that will drag down the entire Democratic Party and slow or halt its radically expansionist but oh-so-adored-by-the-Left agenda.
While we are justified in recalling Barack Obama’s awkward utterance, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” Biden is not an outlier when it comes to fucking things up. Government, top-to-bottom and left-to-right, offers us daily demonstrations of incompetence, futility, waste, error, good-ideas-gone-bad, bad-ideas-made-permanent, corruption, cronyism, pettiness, intransigence, obstruction, and uselessness. Even great presidents stand at the top of this mountain of misery, and the great ones know that the only right thing to do is make the mountain smaller. When was the last time we had a great President, by the way?
How anyone can look at the unholy messes, large and small, born daily of excess government, and think “yes, give me more!” or “if we give even more money and power to politicians, they’ll finally get things right” is beyond me.
Albert Einstein purportedly (and probably apocryphally) observed that “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it. Government fits this aphorism – in the negative. The bigger our government, the more gross the incompetence, and the longer we tolerate the growth of government, the greater our misery.
As I type this, the Democrats are trying to figure out how to use their razor-thin majorities to pass a $3.5 TRILLION (that’s $3,500,000,000,000) tax-and-spend bill that will fundamentally alter the nation, and give oh-so-much more power to a government whose incompetence is dwarfed only by its size. That $3.5T, if it were dollar bills stacked, would stand 24,000 miles tall. If it were dollar bills laid end-to-end, it would stretch a third of the way to the Sun. It is an incomprehensible amount of money. We already know that the government is absolutely horrible at managing money. No one knows where it all goes. No one even knows how many government agencies there are. Tens of billions in waste and fraud are simply shrugged off every year, and that’s before we get into the duplicative and the totally unnecessary.
We will spend decades debating the lessons learned from our twenty year Afghan sojourn. I expect the most important one of all, that of government incompetence, will be the least discussed and the least heeded. It is the rarest of public servants who wants to put himself and his brethren out of their jobs, to diminish their power, and to leave the citizens’ money in their own hands.
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