The Daily Gouge Archive, Friday, August 27th, 2021

On August 29, 2021, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, August 27th, 2021…but before we begin, have you ever seen the like in your life?!?

Think about it: He admitted to being “given a list” and “instructed” who to call on first.

Whoever penned this scene from The Hunt for Red October may as well have been writing about the complete disaster which is this entire Administration, from 46* and Kommielaa on down:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, Jim Geraghty details the glaring ineptitude of the…

U.S. Intelligence Community: Sorry, COVID-19’s Origin Remains a Mystery

“…“It’s basically impossible to have a proper investigation if one of the main parties doesn’t want to cooperate,” said Thomas Wright, Brookings Institution senior fellow...

…Having a proper investigation of topics when the main party involved doesn’t want to cooperate is . . . why we have an intelligence community, isn’t it? Were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan cooperative with the old OSS? Was the Soviet Union cooperative about its defense capabilities, nuclear arsenal, and long-term strategies? Were al-Qaeda and ISIS cooperative with investigations of what terror attacks each was plotting?…”

…Jamison Fouss, the U.S. consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the U.S. embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology, and health, repeatedly visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and in January 2018, they wrote a memo to Washington articulating their concerns: “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology argued that, “Bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”

A review of seven years of data from U.S. BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories found 749 incidents, including “needle sticks and other through-the-skin exposures from sharp objects; dropped containers or spills and splashes of liquids containing pathogens; bites or scratches from infected animals,” and more. The Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats in its walls, despite the denials from Peter Daszak — president of EcoHealth Alliance, longtime partner of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and one of the most staunch and outspoken critics of the lab-leak theory.

Our assessment of the virus’s origins should also include the decisions and actions of the Wuhan Institute of Virology right before, during, and after the scope of the pandemic became clear.

As DRASTIC uncovered, “On September 12, 2019, the main database of samples and viral sequences of the Wuhan Institute of Virology went offline; eventually every single of the 16 virus databases managed by the WIV was taken offline.” Separately, “Researchers at Wuhan University asked for [genetic] sequences to be removed from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), a repository for raw sequencing data maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).”

At a time when the whole world needed as much information about the genes of this virus and how it worked as possible, why were so many Chinese researchers taking information offline? As Alina Chan asked, “What’s the point of funding more virus hunting when the virus databases just evaporate and cannot be used for anything when a pandemic actually occurs?”

Finally, China suffered more cases and fatalities from the original SARS outbreak than any other country. On paper, this should have made the Chinese government more likely to overreact to reports of a new viral infection. We would have expected Beijing to respond to a potential contagious outbreak in a major city and trade hub with all of the intensity, speed, and alertness of New Yorkers responding to a report of a hijacked passenger airliner. Instead, the Chinese government spent the first three to six weeks insisting that the virus was not contagious, even as the medical counter-evidence piled higher and higher. Was this just an authoritarian regime’s reflexive psychological denial? Or was the Chinese government trying to avoid looking guilty and hoping it seemed as surprised as anyone else by the virus’s danger?

To paraphrase Ebright, in the autumn of 2019, there were three institutions in the entire world that were doing gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. One was in Galveston, Texas, one was in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the third was in Wuhan, China. The COVID-19 pandemic started right outside one of them. What are the odds that’s a coincidence?…”

About the same as Jeffrey Epstein actually committing suicide…or 46* completing his term of office. But no worries, our politicized intelligence services assure the American people…

Next, in a must-read, truly stirring account courtesy of NRO, retired Delta Force veteran Brad Taylor pinpoints…

The Day Afghanistan Died

There are a lot of different reasons for the fall of Afghanistan, and plenty of blame to go around, but the end result was not pre-ordained.

“If you’ve read the plethora of post-mortem reports on Afghanistan, there are plenty of enemies to go around, from corruption, to incompetent leadership, to 20 years of rosy assessments from our own defense establishment. For me, there is a single day that Afghanistan died, and it was June 16, 2021.

I have spent my entire adult life studying insurgency and terrorism, sometimes with books and research, other times from the barrel of a gun, and because of it, I have learned Napoleon’s ultimate truth: In warfare, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. Insurgency as a form of warfare is based on faith and belief that one will win. Why else would a peasant take up a rifle and fight against an entrenched government with every bit of that physical capability against him, if not for the belief that he or she would eventually win? It is the single form of warfare where perception can actually become reality — and that is exactly what happened in Afghanistan on June 16, 2021.

…What is tragic to me is that we held the country together with only 2,500 troops. Why did we leave? Strategically, Bagram Airbase was the single thorn in the side of everyone in the neighborhood. The current administration keeps talking about “shifting focus” to “threats that matter” in order to “get out of the forever wars” but take a look at the location of Afghanistan. To the north of Bagram airfield is Russia. To the east is China. To the west is Iran. You couldn’t ask for a better force-projection platform for the shift to the so-called “Great Power Competition.” Giving that up is a self-defeating prophecy. And that’s before we allowed the Taliban to free 5,000 terrorist prisoners from their cells on the base.

Every time I hear the words “Forever War,” as if that’s a mantra against fighting for United States interests, I can’t help but think about Korea. We are literally at war on the Korean peninsula to this day. We never signed a peace treaty, but our positioning of troops there has stabilized the region for close to 70 years. And the cost was well worth it. Nobody in America cares about this, but we have 29,000 troops in South Korea. So, 2,500 troops in Afghanistan was a ball breaker?

Our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan will do nothing for stability in the region or our own security. Beyond the strategic loss of Bagram as a power-projection platform, the Taliban are going to welcome terrorist groups with open arms. The administration claims that this is no big deal, because terrorists are operating in ungoverned spaces such as Yemen, Libya, and Somalia right now, and we deal with them from “over the horizon,” but this is a chimera. One, you need intelligence to decipher terrorist threats. Who is going to give us that in Afghanistan? Nobody, that’s who, because being seen as helping the United States is a death sentence. Two, there is an enormous difference between terrorist groups operating in ungoverned spaces and terrorist groups operating with the support of a state. If you question this, take a look at Hezbollah versus al-Qaeda right now. One has the capability — supported by Iran — to literally cause the downfall of the State of Israel. The other is living in a cave fantasizing about future attacks, waiting on their perception to become reality.

There are a lot of different reasons for the fall of Afghanistan, and plenty of blame to go around, but the end result was not pre-ordained.

Until June 16, 2021. When perception became reality.“

Here’s the juice: We abandoned our allies, pure and simple, in an ignominious retreat, the cost of which hasn’t even begun to be counted, though it already includes at least twelve Marines and one Navy corpsman , not to mention uncounted Afghans, all of who would still be alive today had such an utterly unnecessary and massively miscalculated strategy not been undertaken. As our old friend and classmate Mark Kozicz observed, if 46* were the military CO (Commanding Officer) in charge of this debacle rather than Commander-in-Chief, he and his entire staff would already have been relieved for cause.

Instead, as the Morning Jolt relates, any way you spin, slice or dice it,…

Our President Chose National Humiliation

“Before the country settles into the blame game, let’s get a clear perspective on where we stand.

Per the Washington Post editorial board: “The Taliban set up a new blockade of the airport road in Kabul to prevent more Afghans from leaving. If Mr. Biden opposes that, he did not say so in his speech.” As Rich has observed, the president no longer criticizes the Taliban, because his decisions have left him entirely at the mercy of one of the most barbaric and brutal forces in the world.

…The administration has gift-wrapped the greatest propaganda gift imaginable to anti-American forces all around the world. Bloomberg News stated that: “It’s those who helped the Stars and Stripes reach its ill-thought-out goals that slide off the sides of the departing planes as their nails give out,” Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the Russian government propaganda network RT, wrote on her Telegram channel. “The lesson: Do not help the Stars and Stripes. It’ll use you, then abandon you.”

The president justified his decision by insisting that “al-Qaeda is gone,” an assessment that his own Pentagon and State Department disputed.

…NBC News. John Brennan. The Carter Center. The New York Times. The New Yorker. CNBC. The Washington Post editorial board. The United Nations. Congressional Democrats. Former Obama administration officials. International nonprofit groups. None of those figures or institutions can be characterized as right-wing or reflexive foes of President Biden. These blistering assessments of the situation in Afghanistan, and the administration decisions that led to it, are not coming from Donald Trump, or Sean Hannity, or Alex Jones.

There is no conservative plot to make Joe Biden look bad at this moment; it would be superfluous and couldn’t do nearly as good a job of that as he’s doing himself.

Yesterday, before mentioning Afghanistan, President Biden began by saying he wanted to “discuss the progress we’re making on the Build Back Better agenda here at home.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki, fresh off insisting that Americans were not stranded in Afghanistan, declared that, “I would not say that [the mission] is anything but a success.”

And Politico reports that, “While it’s sparked accusations that the president’s team is trying to divert attention away from a crisis of its own creation, Biden’s defenders stress that, for now at least, he deserves to crow.” The headline? “White House to media: We want our props on Afghanistan.”

The Biden team thinks it isn’t getting enough credit for how good the current situation is.“

As does the DNC, along with many of its propagandists in the MSM.

Since we’re on the subject of those totally detached from reality, FOX recently reported Justin…

Trudeau’s minister for women and gender equality raised eyebrows by calling Taliban ‘our brothers‘

“…“I want to take this opportunity to speak to our brothers, the Taliban,” Maryam Monsef said. “We call on you to ensure the safe and secure passage of any individual in Afghanistan out of the country.”

“We call on you to immediately stop the violence, the genocide, the femicide, the destruction of infrastructure, including heritage buildings,” she continued. “We call on you to immediately return to the peacekeeping table, to the peace deal that was negotiated, and to ensure that women and minority voices are a part of that discussion in a meaningful way.”

Monsef, a member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, was frequently touted as Canada’s first Afghan-born member of Parliament until she conceded she was actually born in Iran…”

These gullibulls are positively cartoonish in their credulousness:

Moving on, we offer a quintet of specially selected items certain to stimulate inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). New York governor Kathy Hochul’s administration reported on Wednesday close to 12,000 additional coronavirus deaths that were unacknowledged by predecessor Sonny Cuomo: “Cuomo resigned on Monday following a report by New York attorney general Letitia James detailing allegations of sexual harassment against the former governor. Cuomo and his administration also faced scrutiny for allegedly underreporting the number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes during the first several months of the pandemic.”

Ah, it seems like only yesterday:

(2). The Journal’s Kim Strassel relates how Nancy the Red’s true legacy is to have reduced the Democratic Party to its most hollowed-out form in history.

(3). Writing at Townhall.com, Larry O’Connor points out the peril of 46*’s mammoth but fragile ego.

(4). In the wake of the completely preventable deaths in Kabul, prevaricating propagandist Jen Psaki dismissed calls for 46*’s resignation, saying, unlike every 24-hour period following The Donald’s election, this was “not a day for politics“.

(5). As a forward from Ed Hickey informs us the Navy has instituted heightened fire-safety compliance checks after the USS Bonhomme Richard blaze last year. In typical government fashion, said changes were a year late and $4.5 billion short rather than the scheduled and budgeted day late and a dollar short.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side: