Category: Operation Empty Chair

The Fog of Media

Matt Walsh- This is the early days of covid all over again. People are hysterical. Media feeding the panic. Lots of blatantly false information being spread around. You are expected to believe everything you hear. People who question the narrative are shouted down and shamed.

James Lindsay- I don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine right now, but I do know the news won’t help me understand it correctly.

UnHerd- Konstantin Kisin: Has the media got Ukraine wrong?

Audio only version of UnHerd

Francisco- The UnHerd interview with Konstanin Kisin is excellent. He admits he’s part of the alternative media which also by and large doesn’t have a good handle on what’s going on yet. But then goes on to give his own account of what he understands the situation to be, both on a micro and a macro level.  He’s a recent Russian immigrant and his wife is Ukrainian. “It’s not really about the Ukraine, it’s about you”.

Russian Road Trip

Aris Rousinos over at UnHerd had a good essay at the end of January on what we’re seeing unfold today in the Ukraine.

UnHerd- Putin’s next move, a shock and awe campaign could overwhelm Ukraine

And in case you missed it earlier this morning O.J. had a good piece from Victor Davis Hansen as well.

Putin’s Predictabilities- It is easy to predict what the Russian president will do in any given situation. Biden is making it easier for Putin to act with aggression.

Truinnerashuvaduprezure

Now 22 minutes late for his 5pm live broadcast.

Well, that was brutal.

It’s a shit show : U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials. […] “Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official

Screwing Up the Retreat

Kevin Newman: The people we left behind at the gas station

Despite claims of “miraculous” progress, we are still failing to evacuate our people from Afghanistan

Each family included an average of 10 people — so make it a hundred — told it was time to leave for Canada. Others followed, and pretty soon there were 500 Afghans at the gas station hoping for rescue. Some in the huge crowd were told to wear red to identify themselves on a list Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) had compiled. One even wore a Roots Canada jacket a soldier had sent over to him years ago. But it didn’t matter. No one from Canada was there to meet them.

For at least another 40 hours they sat at that gas station, trapped in the middle, unable to leave, with no further word from Canada on whether they should attempt to return to hiding, or keep praying for a miracle.

Not Our Problem

Kevin Newman: Kabul shows the unflattering truth: Canada is slow, risk-averse and selfish

There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people . Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else.

Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them.

Prime Minister Trudeau could be found yesterday at a Food Fare in Winnipeg talking about paid sick leave. Good to see him focusing on the important things and the media allowing him to do just that.

More than 40,000 Canadians served in Afghanistan, and 158 were killed. The recapture of the country by the Taliban is probably the most significant foreign story for Canadians since we pulled out a decade ago.

Truinnerashuvaduprezure

Get over it.

More @JackPosobiec: Biden telling staff he wants to go back to Delaware. Hasn’t been sleeping well this week. Thinks he will be more functional if he stays over at home in Wilmington.

Into the quagmire: Biden declares war on Republican governors.

Update: Biden and Kamala Camps Falling Out Over Afghanistan Disaster

Paper Bag Over the Head Territory

Mark Steyn-The Scale of Humiliation

The scale of America’s global humiliation is so total that I see my friends at Fox News cannot even bear to cover it. As I write, every other world network – the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, not to mention the Chinese – is broadcasting the collapse of the American regime in real time; on Fox, meanwhile, they’re talking about the spending bill and the third Covid shot and the dead Haitians …as if the totality of the defeat is such that for once it cannot be fixed into the American right’s usual consolations (“well, this positions us pretty nicely for 2022”).

On the leftie side, of course, the court eunuchs have risen as one to protect the Dementia Kid, and are working as hurriedly as the Kabul document-shredders in an effort to figure out a way to blame it all on Trump.

Operation Empty Chair

Matthew Continetti;

Most of the coverage of James Mattis’s new book, Call Sign Chaos, co-authored with Bing West, deals with the former defense secretary’s relationship with President Trump. The Atlantic‘s pre-publication interview with Mattis was headlined, “The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore.” The New York Times editorial page ran a column about Mattis called “The Man Trump Wishes He Were.”
 
Both articles establish that Mattis doesn’t have much to say right now, in either the book or in interviews, about President Trump. Neither piece, though, mentions another president about whom Mattis is more than willing to dish. That would be Barack Obama, who was Mattis’s commander in chief when the then–Marine general led Central Command. Mattis’s critique of Obama isn’t just harsh. It’s blistering.

NOW they’re junior varsity.

ISIS defeated in last major stronghold

Pro-government forces defeated the Islamic State group in its last major stronghold in Syria, state media and a monitoring group reported on Sunday, leaving the militants to defend just strips of desert territory in the country and a besieged pocket outside the capital, Damascus.

Since curtailing Operation Empty Chair, the anti-ISIS forces have done remarkably well. Odd that.

Was There Nothing That Obama Couldn’t Do?

Holocaust Museum Pulls Study Absolving Obama Administration For Inaction In Face of Syrian Genocide

The intervention of the Holocaust Museum in a hot-button political dispute–and the apparent excuse of official US government inaction in the face of large-scale mass murder, complete with the gassing of civilians and government-run crematoria–alarmed many Jewish communal figures. “The first thing I have to say is: Shame on the Holocaust Museum,” said Leon Wieseltier, the literary critic and fellow at the Brookings Institution, who slammed the Museum for “releasing an allegedly scientific study that justifies bystanderism.”
The Museum’s exercise in counter-factual history, he suggested, was inherently absurd. “If I had the time I would gin up a parody version of this that will give us the computational-modeling algorithmic counterfactual analysis of John J McCloy’s decision not to bomb the Auschwitz ovens in 1944. I’m sure we could concoct the fucking algorithms for that, too.”

How could such a thing happen?

Some Jewish communal leaders suggested both privately to Tablet, and in conversations with board members and staff at the Holocaust Museum, that the Museum’s moral authority had been hijacked for a partisan re-writing of recent history, and alleged that the museum had absolved the Obama administration of any moral or political error in its response to mass atrocities in Syria. At least one of the architects of the Obama administration policy in Syria, former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, was appointed to the museum’s Memorial Council during the closing days of the Obama administration.

Oh.

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