Don's Tuesday Column

       THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/17/2021

Biden foreign policy always wrong

A brief but revealing window into current events on a friend’s TV in Waldport, Oregon, showed NBC’s Lester Holt doing his best to direct attention away from the Afghan debacle of “Bug Out Joe,” “Zero Responsibility Joe” Biden. Reporting the Taliban’s rampage through Afghanistan was a blatant effort in avoiding the obvious. Just as in Vietnam, American resources like air support are denied to the Afghan forces we led to trust us. Joe Biden engineered Obama’s nearly catastrophic “exit” from Iraq.

Obama said we’d get out of Afghanistan but, like all his promises, abandoned it. Trump set a similar goal (thousands of airstrikes brought the Taliban to negotiations), reached agreements in February 2020, but made it clear that the Taliban would suffer attacks if they did what they are now doing on national TV. In March and October last year he launched those attacks; air support for Afghans troops was provided. The destruction Trump visited upon hundreds of Russian mercenaries in Syria in 2018 showed his resolve.

Trump left him a detailed plan to successfully withdraw. Biden owns this debacle; his people are reportedly begging the Taliban to let us evacuate military and civilian personnel (what about Afghans who helped us?) and secure the air base. He also owns the inevitable assessment of America’s enemies—Iran, Russia and China—that “America is back” to being a toothless, paper tiger unwilling to back up our vital interests with deadly force.

Nobody gainsaid our righteous overthrow of the Taliban for harboring Al Qaeda that attacked us on 9/11/2001. Nobody wants American troops and sacrifice to be a perpetual guarantor of stability in Afghanistan. A westernized Afghan democracy was a fool’s errand. However, Biden—and his military leaders—have squandered twenty years of blood, limbs, mental anguish, sacrifice, family strife and national treasure.

I doubt he’d opposed China seizing Taiwan, North Korea assaulting South Korea, or Russia taking back its former Eastern Europe slave states. We’re back to Madelaine Albright’s lamenting that it wasn’t good for the world for there to be one superpower—America. Most media remain the “praetorian guard” uttering no discouraging words for Biden’s travesty: It’s a disastrous “bug out” for which Joe has already claimed “zero responsibility” in an interview when asked about Taliban taking over under his watch.

Whereas it took President Jimmy Carter years to diminish America (embassy hostages and failed military rescue in Iran), and wither America’s economy (inflation, stagnant growth, unemployment)—Joe Biden is “accomplishing” that and more in mere months.

The economy and unemployment are respectable at this time. However, consumer sentiment has plunged; inflation is on the verge of undercutting the economy; 7 in 10 say groceries and gas are a hardship, while 8 in 10 say federal economic policies are responsible for rising prices (Fox poll); reducing America’s energy production saps our independence and pocketbooks; and mindless mandates and restrictions over the Wuhan Flu threaten to reverse the business recovery from last year’s lockdowns. 10 million jobs are unfilled due to counterproductive unemployment checks for COVID, which incentivize joblessness.

Hysteria and fear-mongering now drive COVID news, obscuring facts that could calm the citizenry. Forty percent of illegal aliens—released and transported elsewhere by Biden’s I.N.S.—are infected with COVID and variants. Biden owns that travesty and its health consequences. He is leading the “mask mandate” charade of face-covering theater and virtue signaling—while Democrat luminaries like Obama and Rashida Tlaib follow the trend set by Pelosi, Fauci, and Gavin Newsom, flaunting bare faces and inches-apart bodies when they think no cameras are around.

Honesty and transparency would have boosted Americans’ confidence in medical and governmental policies. Fauci admitting to sending millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to support “gain of function” research into making a bat virus capable of transmission to humans—likely leading to lab leaks and the pandemic—would have helped accountability.

Not allowing Trump Derangement Syndrome to cloud the utility of HCQ plus other drugs as early therapy—and casting widespread doubt about “any vaccine Trump approves”—would have continued a history of not politicizing diseases, their prevention and cures. Touting the vaccines as if they were polio, measles and mumps inoculations has now exposed—due to the lack of protection against “variants”—the false reliance on said COVID vaccines for long term resistance to the pandemic.

The only full, long-term immunity has come from having had the Wuhan Flu, even with mild or no symptoms; the vaccines, like seasonal flu shots, are engineered based on certain spikes and proteins (for COVID) or expected flu strains (winter flu shots). For the “smart people” and “authorities” to insist we all get the vaccine shots defies common sense and the above facts of immunity.

Biden, Fauci, the CDC, governors and health officials projected infallibility, only to admit that “boosters” and inclusion in regular flu shots will likely ensue. We now know the pandemic has become “endemic,” or something we live with as a routine minor risk. Less than 3 out of 1,000 current cases in America are “serious, critical” (per worldometers.info/coronavirus/). Worldwide: 6 out of 1,000.

There is no need for healthy folks under 60, including children, to use masks, avoid family or friends, or even worry about the virus—unless they have weakening underlying conditions. Fallaciously using COVID and unscientific mandates to attack Republican governors like Ron DeSantis (FL), while not praising his success in protecting many of his elderly, is extremely disingenuous. Read “DeSantis Launches Monoclonal Antibody Response Teams to Prevent Hospital Overcrowding,” (theepochtimes.com, 812); know that even the CDC has put out false numbers to try to discredit him. Shameful politicization.