It was quite remarkable to watch last Tuesday and Wednesday as three top generals — Defense Secretary/retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and CentCom Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie — contradicted their Commander-in-Chief, President Biden, in congressional testimony about whether the U.S. should have kept a small, residual military force in Afghanistan to prevent the chaotic, precipitous withdrawal we witnessed last month.
"The (congressional) hearing underscored that the president acted against the advice of the military in yanking the residual U.S. force from the country," the Wall Street Journal observed, adding that Biden continued to deny that he had overruled his top military advisers.
Milley and McKenzie testified they recommended keeping a minimum of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in an August interview with ABC News, Biden denied that his commanders had recommended keeping a residual force in that country. "No, no one said that to me that I can recall," he told ABC.
So, who do we believe, Biden or the generals? I believe the generals because I agree with President Obama's Defense Secretary, highly-respected career Foreign Service officer Robert Gates, who wrote that "Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past 40 years." And he was wrong again on Afghanistan.
"The scandal isn't that the president ignored military advice — he's the decision maker," the Journal opined. "It's his refusal to own his decision. Mr. Biden wants political credit for ending America's involvement in Afghanistan, but he's not willing to admit… that he overruled the brass in the process." It was left to beleaguered Press Secretary Jen Psaki to explain what the president really meant to say.
This message confusion is another reason to wonder who's running things in the Biden White House. My guess is that Chief of Staff Ron Klain is calling the shots, aided and abetted by longtime Washington swamp-dwellers like Susan Rice.
When Biden goes off script, he talks pure malarkey, one of his favorite words. We hear plenty of malarkey when he talks about Afghanistan or about the increasingly dangerous crisis along the U.S. - Mexico border, where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are swarming across the Rio Grande River and into the United States.
"The border is closed," Biden and his inept Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas keep telling us, but we can see with our own eyes that the border is wide open as illegal immigrants are practically welcomed by Mayorkas and the overwhelmed Border Patrol, which is blamed when anything goes wrong. The Biden/Mayorkas kinder, gentler immigration policy tells illegal immigrants they'll be treated well and given lots of "free" stuff if they can make it across the border.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents on horseback are accused of whipping black and brown immigrants, conjuring up images of slavery in the South, a narrative promoted by the White House while promising a fair and impartial investigation of what really occurred. "Those people (the agents) will pay," Biden vowed. Fair and impartial? Maybe not.
USPS ‘customer service’
The U.S. Postal Service has just announced that mail delivery is about to become slower and more expensive. Meanwhile, USPS "customer service" here in Carson is deficient. Twice in the last few days the cluster mail box in my Kings Canyon neighborhood has been left wide open, thereby exposing our mail to anyone who wants to pull it out of the box. The local Post Office sent someone to close the box on both occasions, but seemed to have a "business as usual" attitude, which is unacceptable.
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal's senior political columnist.
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