Who Is Neil Patel?

            My VIP for this week is Neil Patel. Patel is a co-founder of The Daily Caller (an online news outlet) and The Daily Caller News Foundation (a nonprofit that trains journalists, produces fact checks, and does investigative reporting. I did not choose him as VIP because of either of the news outlets. I chose him because he had the courage to outline the failures of the Biden administration. In his article on this topic, Patel lists the ways and events that historians will use to define the Biden failures. 

            Patel put Joe Biden at the top of his list. Historians will recognize as they study the Biden disaster “a president who is clearly just not up to the job” and “not up to the job.” Biden is a “weak president,” and Patel listed several reasons without designating a single cause.

Is Biden such a bad POTUS because of his age? Age alone cannot be the reason for Biden’s failure. Russell M. Nelson, the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is 97 years old and as energetic and alert as men 20 to 30 years his junior. Could Biden be suffering from cognitive decline? He shows numerous signs that Americans have seen in parents and grandparents as they declined cognitively. Could Biden just be unqualified? Definitely. He has been in the federal government for fifty years, but he has nothing to show for his time in the Senate, in the office of Vice President, or as President.

Americans do not want or deserve a weak POTUS, but we have one. Not only do we have a weak president, but we also have a less than qualified vice president and staff members who push Biden with their “rigid, left-wing ideology.” The lamestream media recognize Biden is weak and desperately “keep propping him up.” In spite of the media’s attempts, the polls show “Biden’s approval ratings are at all-time lows.” His low ratings reflect the dropping support from the “normally rock-solid Black and Hispanic base of the Democratic Party.”

The disaster in the Democrat Party does not mean that Republicans will definitely win. We all know that Republicans have a habit of turning a sure win into a loss. However, Independents and Democrats do not like what they are seeing from Democrats and are moving toward Republicans.

Most Americans are unhappy, and they are shocked at how fast America has fallen so far under the direction of the Biden administration. Patel mentions the divide in America that continues to widen as Biden and his administration move left. He also mentions how “Biden immediately dismantled many of former President Donald Trump’s border security policies.” We had a secure border with “policies that were working,” and Biden changed all the policies and left the border wide open. More than a million people have entered the United States with millions more heading toward our southern border.

According to Patel, Biden’s biggest problem is not the disaster at the border. His biggest liability is “the rising prices hammering the American people. Knowing the political price they are likely to pay for skyrocketing inflation, Team Biden is desperately trying to spin this away as the ‘Putin Price Hike,’ but Americans are not accepting their spin. Americans are not blind, and they see the prices of fuel and food going higher and higher. Bill Clinton won the presidency using the slogan “It’s the economy, Stupid,” so the Republicans can possibly pull out a win.

When Will Truth Prevail?

            The Trump haters are out in full force again and are blaming President Donald Trump for the invasion of Russia into Ukraine. The ironic fact of the matter is that Russia went into Crimea during the Obama administration and invaded Ukraine during the Biden administration but made no such moves during the four years that Trump was President of the United States.

            David Harsanyi also finds this fact ironic. After listing several headlines blaming Trump for the invasion, he wrote that similar comments from so-called experts can be found across social media. He suggested that Trump’s “most passionate antagonists must be slightly curious” about why Putin did not make any moves during the Trump administration. 

What better time could there have been for an invasion or annexation? Why now and not then? Then again, the notion that President Joe Biden has shown firmness or deftness on foreign policy is at odds with not only recent events – most notably the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan – but also 50 years of his history.

            Harsanyi then proceeded to give example after example of how “Biden has been relentlessly wrong” in his foreign policy.

… In 2009, Biden went to Munich and delivered the Obama’s administration’s first major foreign policy speech, arguing that it was “time to press the reset button” after eight years of purported American antagonism toward Russia.

It was Biden who then spearheaded the effort to reward Moscow by giving Russia access to the World Trade Organization….

Biden loves to take credit for Obama-era foreign policies. Well, it was the Obama administration that also spent years trying to kill the Magnitsky Act, which listed corrupt Russian officials and barred them from American financial markets, before bipartisan pressure compelled them to flip-flop.

In his book “Red Notice,” Bill Browder, the driving force behind the act, wrote that “ever since Barack Obama had become president, the main policy of the U.S. government toward Russia had been one of appeasement.”

Even before Obama was caught on a hot mic telling Putin puppet Medvedev that he would have more “flexibility” on missile defense after the 2012 presidential election, he had already canceled long-promised missile defense systems to our allies in Poland and the Czech Republic.

It was the Trump administration that approved the sale of Patriot missile system to Poland. For that matter, it was Trump who, finally, approved the sale of defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine.

            As you may remember, Democrats mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 when he said that “Russia was our top geopolitical threat.” It was Biden who went on the Sunday shows to depict “the Putin kleptocracy as a burgeoning ally and partner.” “Though ‘we have disagreements with Russia,’ Biden noted, they were ‘working closely with us’ on a slew of issues. ‘This is not 1956,’ he scoffed, a few years before Putin’s special forces dropped into Crimea.” Harsanyi was not finished with his examples.

Obama also allowed Russia to operate with impunity in Syria, almost surely to protect the prospects of the Iran nuclear deal. Trump, unencumbered by the need to kowtow to the Iranians, killed a few hundred Russian mercenaries in Syria.

            Biden bragged during the 2020 presidential election that Putin’s “days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.” According to Harsanyi, Biden has “done little to uphold his promise of deterring Russian expansion” and continued to give more examples of Biden’s blunders.

In his first year in office, the president who promised to stop “rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions” killed the Keystone pipeline, which would have left us less susceptible to the vagaries of the international energy market.

Biden also strengthened Putin’s hand by waiving Trump-era sanctions on a company building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany. Last year, Biden sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Arctic Council for another shot at a “reset,” in which, as Bloomberg explained it, “Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin can reinvigorate U.S.-Russia relations that have been in a deep freeze for years.

            With all Trump’s faults – and he has plenty, his foreign policy of “peace through strength” was far more successful in keeping America safe and strong than Biden’s policy of appeasement. As the facts listed above illustrate, this appeasement policy “has been a 15-year project.” Putin is no dummy, and he obviously recognized that “this is the time to strike.” The real problem is that Biden’s policies – foreign and domestic – are digging America into a hole that is getting deeper and deeper as time goes along.

What Are the Costs of the Fighting in Afghanistan?

            The last member of the United States military left Afghanistan before midnight on August 30, 2021 – about 19 years and 47 weeks after they entered Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Approximately 800,000 Americans have served in Afghanistan over the past nearly 20 years.

            The Joe Biden administration botched the final exit from Afghanistan – much like they have done in every other single thing that they have done in the past seven months. The presence of Americans in Afghanistan has kept America safe from terrorist attacks for 20 years. The military has been successful in this mission. After all the successes of the military, the civilians in the Biden administration surrendered to the Taliban, the terrorist group that now controls Afghanistan.

            There have been many complaints about the cost of the equipment that Biden left in Afghanistan. The failure to bring out the equipment will damage America for many years. However, the costs of being in Afghanistan has been many times greater. According to Emily Crane the costs of Americans being in Afghanistan are as follow: 

·         Deaths of U.S. service members from the Afghanistan war: approximately 2,400.

·         Wounded Americans from the Afghanistan war: 20,000.

·         Number of other allied troops killed in the Afghanistan war: about 1,144.

·         Number of Afghan troops killed: 66,000.

·         Number of Afghan civilians killed: 48,000.

·         Number of Afghans injured in the Afghanistan war: 75,000.

·         Number of U.S. service members killed last week: 13.

·         Number of Afghans killed by the ISIS suicide bomber last week: 170.

·         Number of journalists killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and April 2021: 77.

·         Number of humanitarian aid workers killed in Afghanistan between 2001 and April 2021: 444.

·         Total estimated financial cost for fighting the Afghanistan war: $2.313 trillion – or $300 million per day.

·         Financial costs for the fighting alone: $837 billion.

·         Financial costs for rebuilding things such as Afghanistan’s security forces, government institutions, and the economy: $145 billion.

·         Financial costs for buildings and vehicles since 2008: $7.8 billion.

(About $2 billion “was essentially wasted” because those buildings and vehicles “fell into disrepair or were no longer being used as intended.”

·         The exact value of the weapons and equipment left in Afghanistan was not available, but it is most “likely to be in the tens of millions of dollars.”

·         Number of people evacuated by the United States and its allies over the past two months: more than 122,000.

·         Number of civilians flown out of Kabul on U.S military aircraft since August 14: 79,000.

·         Number of American civilians flown out on U.S. military aircraft since August 14: 6,000.

·         Number of Afghans and other-country citizens flown out on U.S. military aircraft since August 14: 73,500.

·         Number of Americans left behind: somewhere between 100 and 200 who wanted to leave Afghanistan but were unable to catch a flight.

If the Biden administration had followed the plan presented to them by the Trump administration, all the civilians would have been taken out first, then the equipment, and then the military. However, Biden could not follow a plan made by Trump because of his “Trump = bad” attitude, but he erred badly. Trump’s plan would have gotten Americans out by May 1, 2021, before the “fighting season” in Afghanistan that takes place in the summer months.

However, Biden wanted a big photo op for the twentieth anniversary of September 11, so he changed the date for leaving Afghanistan to August 31, 2021. He chose the date, and the Taliban held him to it. He took out the military first and essentially gave the territory and the equipment to the Taliban before he took out the civilians. He made a huge mistake, and he should be forced to leave office. Biden is casting in concrete his status as the WORST President of the United States in history – much worse than Jimmy Carter or even Barack Obama!