Apr112023

Episode 703 – Why Bother Saying Anything?

There is a real world out there and it is getting way more dangerous thanks to the lack of leadership in the White House.

The Biden administrations releases it’s lessons learned over the Afghanistan exit.

And Bud Light takes it in the can after releasing their new spokesman.

 

Not Good

Here is some news:

  • Last week, Emmanuel Macron went to China. We were not sure what would happen. Well, it turned out to be a big deal for China.
    • Macron is cooling at the thought of a war against China over Taiwan.
    • He said that France needs to re-evaluate the need to protect Taiwan and see if it is in their best interest.
    • Macron said that it might be time to lower France’s dependence on the United States.
    • China started doing military drill right after Macron left.
    • This is not good. We are inching closer to World War III.
  • Documents have been leaked from the Pentagon. And they’re pretty bad.
    • These were posted on some obscure message boards like 4-Chan.
    • They are considered as damning as what Edward Snowden released.
    • Some of the things released:
      • They contain  detail secret American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military.
      • They also suggest that the Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly. Without an influx of munitions, the documents show, Ukraine’s air defense system may soon collapse, which could allow Russia to unleash its air force on Ukrainian troops.
      • To brace for the introduction of advanced NATO-supplied tanks on Ukraine’s battlefields, Russian forces are preparing to pay a bonus to troops who manage to damage or destroy one.
      • The leak itself — in particular the confirmation that the United States spies on allies and adversaries alike — may prove damaging to the unified coalition that has emerged to help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion. It may also make allies think twice about sharing sensitive information.
      • Officials  in South Korea, a key American ally whose official policy is not to provide lethal weapons to countries at war, feared that the United States might divert South Korean arms to Kyiv.
      • A hacking group under the guidance of Russia’s Federal Security Service may have compromised a Canadian gas pipeline company in February and caused damage to its infrastructure.
      • A Pentagon assessment suggested that the leadership of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, may have encouraged the agency’s staff and Israeli citizens to participate in the antigovernment protests that roiled the country in March.
      • One of the documents lays out an American assessment of scenarios that could lead Israel to provide weapons to Ukraine, in contravention of current Israeli policy.
      • The Russian Russian military may be flailing, but the private Wagner mercenary group — led by an ally of Mr. Putin — is flourishing in much of the world. Wagner is working to thwart American interests in Africa and has explored branching out to Haiti, right under the nose of the United States.
    • How has the Pentagon responded?
      • The documents are legit.
      • The media should stop reporting on it.
      • I’m not kidding.
  • Finally, Bud Light is taking it in the caboose for having Dylan Mulvaney as a spokesman.
    • Sales of Anheuser-Busch bottled products dropped 30% over the past week, while draught beer plummeted 50%, the owner said.
    • Eighty percent of Bud Light drinkers ordered something else this week, Brewhouse owner Alex Kesaris said — while the 20% who did order Bud Light “weren’t on social media and hadn’t heard yet” about its new transgender pitch person.
    • One pub in Hell’s Kitchen, a New York City neighborhood known for its large and vocal gay community, reported that Bud Light draft sales dropped 58% this week, while Bud Light bottle sales were down 70%.
    • The bar typically sells though three kegs of Bud Light at the event — a total of 495 12-ounce pours. One bar said they had an equivalent of four glasses of beer sold.
    • Bud Light’s decision to dive into the culture wars was a “bad decision” that defied “virtually every rule in building brands and marketing,” a national beer-industry analyst told FOX Business.
    • People are turning to Corona and Modelo and those beers could replace Budweiser beers as the top sellers this year.

 

https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/bud-light-suffers-bloodbath-longtime-loyal-consumers-revolt-transgender-campaign
https://www.nytimes.com/article/leaked-documents-ukraine-russia-war.html

 

Why Bother?

The White House report on the Afghanistan pull out. This was released on Thursday. It was a crap report that skipped a few things except for one thing. It was Trump’s fault and Russia’s fault for attacking Ukraine. I’m not kidding.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the report:

When he came into office, President Biden believed the right thing for the country was
to end the longest war in American history and bring American troops home. As he laid
out to the American people, after twenty years, the United States had accomplished its
mission in Afghanistan: to remove from the battlefield the terrorists who attacked the
United States on 9/11, including Osama bin Laden, and degrade the terrorist threat to
the United States. Over two decades, the United States had also—along with our
NATO allies and partners—spent hundreds of billions of dollars training and equipping
the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) and supporting successive
Afghan governments. At the outset, America’s goal was never to nation-build. But,
over time, this is what America drifted into doing. Two decades after the war had
started, America had become bogged down in a war in Afghanistan with unclear
objectives and no end in sight and was underinvesting in today’s and tomorrow’s
national security challenges.

President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were
severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor. When President Trump
took office in 2017, there were more than 10,000 troops in Afghanistan. Eighteen
months later, after introducing more than 3,000 additional troops just to maintain the
stalemate, President Trump ordered direct talks with the Taliban without consulting with
our allies and partners or allowing the Afghan government at the negotiating table. In
September 2019, President Trump embolded the Taliban by publicly considering inviting
them to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. In February 2020, the United States
and the Taliban reached a deal, known as the Doha Agreement, under which the United
States agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. In return, the
Taliban agreed to participate in a peace process and refrain from attacking U.S. troops
and threatening Afghanistan’s major cities—but only as long as the United States
remained committed to withdraw by the agreement’s deadline. As part of the deal,
President Trump also pressured the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban
fighters from prison, including senior war commanders, without securing the release of
the only American hostage known to be held by the Taliban.

 

What the report did skip was:

  • The chaos that was caused by the exit.
  • How they missed that the Taliban would take over so quickly.
  • It never mentioned the terrorist attack that killed 13 American soldiers and hundreds of Afghans and the failure to stop the terrorist when he was identified.
  • The fact that most of Biden’s advisors told him to keep the 1500 soldiers in Afghanistan to keep  the country stable.
  • The fact that the deal with Trump and the Taliban was void because it was conditional and the Taliban failed to keep their committments.
  • Biden said all the allies supported him. That was not true. They wondered why he did what he did and why it was so sloppy.
  • He said we got most people out when, in fact, we still have Americans and translators still there with no plan to get them out.
  • Russia did not threaten Ukraine until months after the pullout.
  • We were, in fact, not fighting a war but merely advising and helping the Afghan government. A U.S. soldier hadn’t been killed since 2013.

Joe Biden never addressed the report. The report was handed out and he held a speech before the media had time to read it. He then took off Thursday afternoon for another vacation. He comes back on Monday and will probably still not talk about the report.

Who did get stuck with having to address this is John Kirby. He, kind of, made an ass out of himself.

Here he is addressing the issue of the billions of dollars of equipment behind for the Taliban to use:

Here he is addressing the chaos of the pullout.

Here he is talking about how proud the administration is about their performance.

And this is a question we all wondered about. The answer is less than satisfying.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/04/06/the-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/