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| Murphy |
Some moments last longer than the passing moment. On September 11 of this year, we descended into one of them.
“Biden will visit ground zero in New York City, the Pentagon
and the memorial outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 was
forced down, the White House said Saturday (9/4/2021).
“Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Shanksville,
Pennsylvania, for a separate event before joining the president at the
Pentagon, the White House said. Harris will travel with her spouse, Doug
Emhoff.”
Biden shed a tear at what has come to be called “ground
zero” in New York City. No doubt the tear was sincere, although some men of his
age, 79, have learned to cry on cue.
What tears mean depends on who is shedding them. Nero, after
he had claimed another victim, pumped a tear into a small vial he carried about
with him, and said something theatrical: “A tear for Britannicus.” But Nero
fancied himself both a God and an artist. He participated, with more gusto than
could be tolerated by some of his contemporaries, in musical events and plays,
and easily teased tears from his eyes.
Biden’s tearful moment was soon over. Professional politicians have learned to survive such moments, uncomfortable though they may be. Biden, a longtime political actor, has showed no sign of permanent discomfort. Indeed, he has shown no sign that he has learned to benefit from the mistakes of others. “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes,” Otto von Bismarck said. “The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
The media, often a handmaiden of the political left in the United
States, noted the falling tear and did not press Biden to say why exactly he
had ended a 20 year peace, uneasy to be sure, in Afghanistan.
The saving thing about painful passing moments is that they, like gallstones, pass.
The ending of the long-war in Afghanistan, unfortunately, is
not such a moment. In fact, the war has not ended, chiefly because Biden has deeded
Afghanistan to the Taliban – along with Bagram Air Base and a huge cache of
military equipment, transferable assets, and loads of hard currency.
The air base, a few miles from China and Iran, was not only a
parking lot for military equipment. It was, principally, the intelligence eyes
and ears of America in a part of the world in which Salifist ambitions, most
dramatically displayed on 9-11, had been held in check for two decades.
The often disparaged dopey giant who wanted to play “nation
maker” in Afghanistan has now lost his eyes, and his ears drums have been
punctured. With the loss of Bagram to the Taliban -- who may be renting out the
space to the Chinese communists -- American diplomats are now entirely at the
mercy of the Taliban, Pakistan, Iran, China and Russia. Anyone who thinks a
Taliban victory in Afghanistan will not enlarge the influence of America’s
enemies is no student of history; that is to say, the fool who believes such
nonsense is unwilling to learn from the mistakes of others. Such is Biden and
his troop of diplomats.
Connecticut U.S.
Senator Chris Murphy, several news outlets have reported, hopes that
Republicans will not turn Biden’s failed attempt to pacify the Taliban by
surrendering the whole of Afghanistan to them into “a three ring circus,” like
the multiple failed attempts by partisan Democrats to remove President Trump
from office through highly politicized impeachment processes, or the multiple
attempts by Democrats to besmirch the reputations of no fewer than three
Republican Supreme Court nominees, in order of appearance: the honorable Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
In Murphy’s rarified
political Eden, only Democrats will be permitted to demagogue Republicans, while justifiable criticisms of Democrats by Republicans should be denounced by men and women of
good will everywhere as a “three ring circus.”
There is an
important difference, Murphy must know from his eight years in the U.S. Senate,
between creating a three ring circus by means of smoke and mirrors and lifting
the curtain on a real, discreditable three ring circus, an apt description of
Biden’s diplomat-reliant foreign policy.
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