Daily Digest |  |
- When you’ve lost the New York Times (6)
- Parole for Sirhan Sirhan?
- Loose Ends (137)
- What we left behind
- The Biden bye bye
| When you’ve lost the New York Times (6) Posted: 30 Aug 2021 01:35 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) The New York Times isn’t as hard on Joe Biden as it should be, but it isn’t giving him the kind of cover Biden’s backers would like to see (and probably expect). My friend who is following the Times’ coverage of the Afghanistan fiasco filed this report on today’s edition: NYT's core news coverage does relatively little to protect Biden. The drone attack gets a headline, but the article quickly notes that the U.S. is "leaving untold thousands" of Afghans who helped us behind. The piece calls our exit "chaotic and bloody." Another article focuses on fears that American-allied Afghans will be killed, despite Taliban assurances to the contrary. Another article covers Biden at the transfer ceremony for the bodies of the slain American soldiers. On the other hand, although the crucial matter of American citizens left behind is not ignored by NYT, it is not much of a focus either. Arguably, the Times is pulling its punches on this to minimize damage to Biden. Curiously, one article says that according to the U.S., "about 250 American citizens still in Afghanistan are trying to leave, some of whom were already at the airport." Yet an article on the next page says, "The State Department said an additional 350 Americans were still waiting to be evacuated as of Saturday." Why do these numbers differ? Do they include Americans trapped outside of Kabul? Do they represent what the administration claims to be the total number of American citizens who want to leave who are left in country? None of this is clear. The status of stranded American citizens ought to be subject to the sort to detailed coverage the Times is devoting to our Afghan allies, but we are offered nothing of the sort. The Op-Ed page features a piece by Dennis Ross, an American diplomat who's worked under Republican and Democratic administrations. Ross makes the case that U.S. credibility has not been dealt a "mortal blow" or "forever doomed." This is a straw man. Ross concedes that American credibility has taken a significant hit, and that is what counts. Strikingly, Ross calls on Biden to extend the withdrawal deadline so as to evacuate all Americans, and all Afghans who worked with us. I see no sign that Biden will do this. So even an Op-Ed that beats a straw man in order to minimize Biden's blow to American credibility implicitly criticizes the president by calling on him not to desert our citizens and allies. There is no covering for this fiasco.     |
| Posted: 30 Aug 2021 12:57 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) I agree with Steve’s post about the California parole board’s grant of parole to Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert Kennedy. I do wonder whether Steve is being too optimistic in suggesting that Governor Newsom will overturn the parole board's decision so as to improve his prospects of avoiding recall. But Steve is an informed observer of California politics, so I’m heartened by his optimism. Perhaps Newsom will take into account the view of six of RFK’s nine surviving children. They have expressed outrage over the parole board’s decision. The six issued a statement that says, in part:
The signatories are former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, Christopher G. Kennedy , Courtney Kennedy, Kerry Kennedy, Maxwell T. Kennedy and Rory Kennedy. Two of RFK’s children, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Douglas Kennedy, apparently support the parole board’s decision. I was never a fan of Robert Kennedy. However, the statement that Sirhan “took him from America” isn’t hyperbole. Democrats might well have nominated RFK for president and, in that event, America might have elected him president. In this sense, the assassination was an offense against “our democracy,” to use a favorite term of Democrats these days. Moreover, any cold-blooded murderer should be punished with a lifetime in prison, at a minimum. My view is that execution is the punishment that better fits the crime. If Sirhan is released, it will reinforce the argument in favor of the death penalty. Opponents sell the notion that a life sentence is sufficient punishment for murder. But when murderers like Sirhan are paroled or, in the case of Weather Underground killer David Gilbert, have their sentence commuted, it demonstrates that lifetime sentences aren’t really that. (Even a lifetime sentence “without the possibility of parole” can be commuted.) This is another example of the how American left plays the rest of us for suckers.   |
| Posted: 30 Aug 2021 08:32 AM PDT (Steven Hayward) • Don’t look now, but many institutions are collapsing under the unsustainable weight of smug leftism. First item: late night television. Fifty million Americans tuned in to Johnny Carson’s last appearance on The Tonight Show. Today, his Tonight Show successor, along with the egregious Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on CBS, barely have 2 million viewers on a good night, and are now being beaten in the late night ratings by conservative Fox humorist Greg Gutfeld. I’ll bet Gutfeld’s staff is not even one-tenth as large as the production staffs of the late night network shows. • Speaking of self-immolating liberal institutions, have you heard the news: Harvard University’s new chaplain is an atheist. I suppose the only question here is: what took them so long? I recall a story of a writer friend—someone whose name you’d recognize—who spent a year in a liberal seminary several decades ago now, and recounted how a faculty member said to him one day: “I think I know why you are so unhappy here. You actually believe in God.” • Oh goody: North Korea has restarted its plutonium-producing nuclear reactor. As the Wall Street Journal reports: “Kim Jong Un's regime is fully aware that activity at its nuclear sites is closely watched by satellite surveillance.” In other words, the Norks have taken the measure of Biden, and proceeded accordingly. • This one hardly needs comment beyond pointing out that the tech world’s “artificial intelligence” appears even more stupid than the human intelligence it is meant to replace:
• Another college fraud exposed, only this time it is a college president:
Turns out former president Lyon isn’t just a liberal bigot, but a fabricator as well:
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| Posted: 30 Aug 2021 05:58 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) President Biden is responsible for the epic disaster that is still unfolding in Afghanistan — “the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road,” to borrow Churchill’s formulation. President Biden, his administration, and our military leadership should be held to account. None of them has yet responded substantively to inquiries about what we have left behind in the way of equipment. “We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week. Over the weekend The Times (UK) has published the graphic in the tweet below. It accompanies the Times story here (behind the Times paywall). Roger Kimball comments in “What we left behind in Afghanistan” and Victor Davis Hanson comments in “Our Afghan nightmare: Tanks for nothing.”. The nightmare is multifaceted. The graphic only captures one (enormous) dimension.
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| Posted: 30 Aug 2021 04:44 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) President Biden appeared in public at FEMA headquarters yesterday afternoon with the press in attendance. At the conclusion of his remarks Biden stated he “wasn’t supposed to take any questions,” but he took a question from Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs (video below). When Jacobs posed a question about Afghanistan, Biden demurred and skedaddled, both in the manner to which we have become accustomed. As I hear him, Biden responded to Jacobs’s question that he was “not gonna answer ‘ghanistan now.” He then pounded the lectern for emphasis, turned tail and departed.
On Twitter Sean Parnell asked the obvious question:
Even if they’re obvious, those are good questions.
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