It’s Wednesday, September 1st, 2021, and 82 years ago today, one of the worst actors on the world stage, emboldened by the weakness, vacillation and isolationism which possessed the forces of freedom, ignited a fire which soon engulfed the world.

It hasn’t taken long for Hitler’s contemporary equivalents to recognize the incredible of weakness of the today’s nominal leader of the free world, not only in terms of his physical and cognitive deficiencies but his many and manifest character flaws, spells opportunity…

…opportunity of which they won’t hesitate to take advantage.  Were we Taiwan, we’d be on the highest possible alert.

BTW, WTF are these a*sclowns, all of who have undoubtedly been vaccinated, wearing masks…outside?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the New York Post via FOX News, Michael Goodwin asks the question on everyone’s mind, as he wonders, in light of the…

Biden team’s meltdown – Afghanistan crisis renews doubts. Is he up to the job?

What if the Biden team is every bit as bad as it looks?

“There’s a maxim in sports that you are not as good as you look when you win, or as bad as you look when you lose. It aims to give athletes an even-keel attitude instead of riding an emotional roller coaster. No doubt there are Democrats and well-meaning others giving similar advice now to the Biden White House. The president’s team is understandably shaken by the horrific events in Afghanistan and must fear it will never regain its footing and public trust.

But what if the sports approach isn’t valid in this case? What if the Biden team is every bit as bad as it looks? Having been in office eight months, its successes are so minimal and its mistakes so glaring that doubts exist across the political spectrum about whether the president is up to the job. The doubts recall warnings about Biden from two people who know him best.

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f- -k things up,” Barack Obama reportedly said. Then there’s Robert Gates’ charge that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”

Such devastating views take on added significance in light of Biden’s obvious frailties and cognitive decline. The resulting leadership vacuum is so apparent that a well-connected Dem who asked a White House confidant how Biden could have chosen such an uninspiring roster of top aides was told Biden didn’t make the choices…”

As this snippet from the Journal recounts…

“The way U.S. forces quietly slipped out of Bagram was also demoralizing for the Afghan army and probably contributed to its collapse. The Associated Press spoke to soldiers wandering the base the next day. “They lost all the goodwill of 20 years,” one said, “by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.” The word must have spread: If the U.S. is abandoning its prized air base, then it really was bugging out altogether.

After the collapse of the Afghan government, Mr. Biden could have sent in enough U.S. troops to retake Bagram and provide for a safer evacuation. He declined that option in favor of getting to the exits as fast as possible, hoping to avoid a confrontation with the Taliban that could result in American casualties. On Thursday he got casualties anyway.“

Along with the tens of millions of the slaughtered unborn already on his conscience…assuming he has thoughts for anyone other than his dead, non-combatant Beau.

Since we’re on the subject of abject failures who need to go, the Post also correctly concludes it’s time for Mark Milley to turn in his stars, as its Editorial Board recounts… 

The fatal failure of Gen. Mark A. Milley over closing Bagram Air Base

“Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, must go.

President Biden claims that the military advised him to close Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and instead use Kabul’s airport to evacuate Americans. They were the ones who said the Afghan army would hold, that the pullout would go smoothly.

If Biden is telling the truth, this disaster is on Milley’s watch. Or Biden is lying (the more likely scenario, based on what sources inside the administration are saying) and Milley failed to do his duty and push back against a commander in chief who is making deadly decisions. Either way, he is derelict in his duty — and must either take responsibility for what went wrong or tell Americans the truth about their president.

Biden was reportedly so intent on drawing down the number of troops in Afghanistan to less than 1,000, a force not large enough to secure Bagram, that we gave up its strategic advantage. Not only that, but we left in the dead of night, abandoning weapons and vehicles to the Taliban and demoralizing our Afghan allies.That forced Marines to protect the perimeter of Hamid Karzai International Airport, a situation the parent of one of the 13 service members who lost their lives compared to a “turkey shoot.” Biden should never have left the safety of evacuating Americans in the hands of the Taliban, nor put these young men and women — 11 Marines, one Navy member and one Army soldier — in such danger.

It’s hard to think of a worse way to handle this pullout. Biden likes to blame former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban for the situation, but even setting aside that Biden could have negotiated to extend the deadline, he’s been president since January. Milley has been chairman of the Joint Chiefs since 2019. What have they been doing all these months? The US could have organized an evacuation from Bagram and held the base until Aug. 31 or longer, if necessary.

Instead, Milley spent his time defending Critical Race Theory to Congress, Biden ate ice cream.

And the response of the administration since? Let’s talk about COVID, climate change, putting our kids in debt for generations. Biden on Sunday angrily turned away from reporters when he was asked about Afghanistan, saying he’d only talk about Hurricane Ida. Anything but the mistakes that were made…”

Hat tip to Speed for the above artwork.

In a related item, The Daily Caller via White House Dossier informs us some 90 retired flag officers have called on Milley and SecDef Lloyd Austin to immediately resign, noting:

“If they did not do everything within their authority to stop the hasty withdrawal, they should resign. Conversely, if they did do everything within their ability to persuade the [president] to not hastily exit the country without ensuring the safety of our citizens and Afghans loyal to America, then they should have resigned in protest as a matter of conscience and public statement.”

Which begs the question why these same flag officers didn’t publicly object to The Obamao’s evisceration of our Armed Forces.  Evidently, courage, for some, is a situational attribute.

Meanwhile, writing at the WSJ, Paul Wolfowitz reminds us…

The ‘Forever War’ Hasn’t Ended

Thursday’s attacks were a reminder that ‘the enemy always gets a vote.’ With the Afghanistan pullout, the long war against jihadists has become more daunting.

“…Those who complain of “forever wars” seem to ignore the reason we were in Afghanistan in the first place, or they misstate it, as Mr. Biden did in this instance. We were never in Afghanistan to participate in its civil war. We went there to prevent a murderous gang from regaining control of Afghanistan, where they ruled 20 years ago and where they enabled an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people on American soil.

The war with that gang and its affiliates won’t end because the U.S. has quit. Nothing we know about the Taliban, much less anything that we have seen in the last month, suggests that they are ready to quit. Thursday’s bombings appear to have been the work of a rival gang, ISIS-K. Mr. Biden called it “an archenemy of the Taliban,” but the two groups both hate the U.S. and believe it’s glorious to kill Americans. It’s a shame they can’t both lose, as someone said in a different context—but whoever wins will make Afghanistan a haven for anti-American terrorists.

The Taliban feel inspired by their victory over the U.S., which they portray as replicating the historic victory of the Afghan resistance over the Soviet Union in the 1980s—even though the group didn’t exist until after the Soviets had left. Almost all the leadership of the anti-Soviet resistance supported the U.S. after 9/11. The Taliban—which was strongly supported by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence beginning in the early 1990s—drew on a new generation of fanatics who had been educated in Pakistani madrassas.

When Americans were asked in a poll last May whether they favored withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, without any context or qualification, 69% said yes. Had that same poll asked whether they favored withdrawing American troops and handing Afghanistan to a terrorist regime that could permit al Qaeda (and others) to re-establish terrorist bases and training camps, support for withdrawal would surely have been considerably less. As Americans watched that outcome unfold in the past few weeks, support for withdrawal had already plummeted by 20 points as of a week ago…”

Along with support for the architect…

….of this embarrassing debacle.

Here’s the juice: Jihadists are just like the Terminator, so…

But if you thought what you’d learned to date of Biden’s central role in this complete…

…didn’t reflect well on that doddering dolt, wait until you read the latest installment of Best of the Web.

Next up, also courtesy of the Journal, if you didn’t already know it, Lance Morrow relates why…

You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity

The convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements has produced an explosion of brainlessness

“…I’ve been working on a Unified Field Theory of Stupidity. My hypothesis: Stupidity dominates in our time because of the convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements that—mixed together at one moment, in one cultural beaker—have produced a fatal explosion of brainlessness. What are those ingredients? You will have your own list, of course.

My nominees will seem eccentric at first. The subversion of manners and authority (two great casualties of the 1960s) prepared the way for the death of privacy, which would eventually be ensured by the stupendously intrusive capabilities of Big Tech in the 21st century. Manners (and in a different way, authority) depend on respect for the privacy of others, as well as one’s own. Manners depend on reticence, even mystery. When those ingrained regulations, those protections of the individual mind, are gone, then you may open the floodgates to (among many other things) pornography, which is a massively lucrative assault on individual dignity and collective decorum—an assault on the manners of a society and, if you will forgive my saying so, on the divinity of the individual.

The death of manners and privacy, I argue, are profoundly political facts that, combined with other facts, lead, eventually, to an entire civilization of stupidity. It’s a short ride from stupidity to madness. Soon people aren’t quite people anymore; they are cartoons and categories. And “identities.” The media grow feral. Genitals became weirdly public issues; the sexes subdivide into 100 genders. Ideologues extract sunbeams from cucumbers. They engage in what amounts to an Oedipal rebellion against reality itself.

At the Tower of Babel, the Lord—whatever his reasons—confounded the languages of the peoples of the world. I suspect he has found he can achieve the same effect by making everyone stupid.“

It’s as we’ve always said: If ignorance were bliss, Socialists would be in Nirvana.

Moving on, we offer a septet of special selections certain to stimulate inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). Since we’re on the subject of stupidity, Jim Geraghty highlights just how useless the intelligence community’s report on the origins of the Wuhan virus was.  

(2). The Journal recently reported China is limiting the amount of time young people can play video games to three hours per week, while minors are completely banned from playing Monday through Thursday.  At least someone‘s serious about the importance of education.

(3). Jim Freeman relates the people Biden didn’t forget, as 46* uses questionable emergency powers to grant a salary increase to 2,000,000 already overpaid, under-performing federal bureaucrats.

(4). Not that Joe Biden would lie, but writing at the WSJ, one S. Paul Kapur notes, “The Biden administration’s claim that the Doha agreement left no choice but to quit Afghanistan unconditionally is false. Given the Taliban’s behavior, the U.S. wasn’t obligated to withdraw by May 1, by Aug. 31, or any other date.”  Truth is, the Trump Administration emphasized the conditional nature of the ill-advised agreement when it was signed, and it’s Biden’s failure to hold the Taliban to said conditions which is responsible for this debacle.  Which, as this cartoon from Speed suggests, earned The Groper a well-deserved…

…b*tch slap of gargantuan proportions.  Once more, hat tip to Speed for the artwork.

(5). The editors at NRO record Joe Biden’s…and the nation’s…disgrace, as after promising less than two weeks ago to remain in Afghanistan until every American was rescued from the Taliban’s tender mercies, he withdrew with roughly 200 U.S. citizens still in country, this based on the clown car’s own accounting.  Stay tuned: You can rest assured future humiliations are on their way.  Again, were we Taiwan, we’d be cancelling all leaves and setting DEFCON 1.

(6). And in the God Bless Texas segment, the Lone Star State legislature just passed the elections-reform bill Dimocrats so desperately tried to derail, giving Progressives a hearty “and the horse you rode in on!”

(7). Though its trustees say the hit from the scamdemic was less than feared, Social Security costs are expected to exceed the program’s total income in 2021, with the trust fund now expected to run dry in 2034 absent action by Congress.  We turn 66 this November 7th, and we’re taking what we can get while there’s still something to be had…sorta like the way we’re spending our sons’ inheritance!

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

Then there’s these from Ed Hickey…

…the lovely Shannon…

…and James Patrick:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap by extending our heartfelt wishes for a full and speedy recovery to our friend and frequent contributor Balls Cotton, who is in an Arlington, VA hospital.  Balls, you’re in our thoughts and prayers; get well soon.  The Gouge ain’t the same without you.

Magoo

P.S. While we don’t ask for money…YET!!!…we do humbly request you forward The Gouge on to ten of your likeminded email friends with a plea they subscribe.  And as always…

Video of the Day

Biden voters, if you’re still happy with your choice, you’re either Communists or useless idiots.

Tales of The Darkside

When even MSDNC is asking tough questions, you know you’ve got a massive PR problem on your hands.

On the Lighter Side

Why Joe Biden will never host Jeopardy.