The Blame Game

Buddhas of Bamiyan:  In March of 2001 under the orders of Mullah Mohammed Omar the civilized world watched and kvetched as the Taliban blew up two sixth century monuments called the Buddhas of Bamiyan.  Then the horror of 9.11 happened.  The images of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the plane crashes in Washington and Pennsylvania and the accompanying deaths turned the destruction of those antiquities into a mere footnote in history. Mullah Omar went on to firmly cement his place atop the list of evil doers by harboring al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.  He and Bin Laden are now long dead but the Taliban aren’t and sadly after twenty years of a war that was initiated by the George W Bush/Dick Cheney team and at times surged by Barack Obama and was supposed to be all about getting Bin Laden but continued on even after he was found and killed in what was by then a hideout in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan the Taliban are back in full force.  Twenty long years, more than 800 billion dollars spent, the death of 2300 soldiers and injuries to 20,000 more and those are just the Americans, all that arming and training of the Afghan military so that they could take over the responsibility of running their own country and it’s all over or almost over, up in smoke in one long weekend. There’s nothing positive to say, the suffering particularly among women has only just begun, but apparently there are lots of fingers to point and so the blame game is on and is likely to continue for some time.  The Former Guy and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are getting blamed for starting the withdrawal and for cozying up to those nice Taliban leaders, the guys who they said could be trusted to do the right thing when the FG came close to hosting them at Camp David last September 11^th.  President Biden is being blamed for living up to his promise of ending the endless war by ripping the band aid off too fast and for not anticipating how quickly the Afghan government would fall to the Taliban. Quite a few Republicans are pointing their fingers at both Biden and Trump, using this weekend’s events to damage Biden while also distancing themselves from the FG.  To that end no one should be surprised that Republican “darling” Liz Cheney, whose father was among the biggest proponents of the Afghan war, is out there attacking both while saying nothing about the failings of her father.  Anyway, expect to see more dreadful pictures, hear lots of pundits and foreign correspondents bemoan our intelligence failures and countless comparisons to the US pull out from Saigon. Also don’t be surprised if the very same Republicans who are throwing daggers at Biden start complaining about all those Afghan refugees as they are resettled in the US because if or when they figure out that their Afghan related tarring and feathering of Biden isn’t working or inflicting as much damage as they want they’ll revert to their usual, fear mongering over migrant surges.

Viral Musings:  Delta is still surging everywhere but especially in those places with lower vaccination rates and among those who think that mask mandates are a mark of the devil and/or a violation of their right to get sick, take up hospital beds and die.  One bright note is that the pace of vaccination is up all over particularly in those parts of the country that have been lagging  possibly because some people who until now believed that the coronavirus was just a bad cold are finally getting that it is potentially deadly or possibly because some of the new vaccine mandates are starting to go into effect.  Of course, despite the dire situation in their states, Florida’s Governor DeSantis who one Florida school board member is calling the mad king of the COVID era is lashing out at everyone and standing by his so far unenforceable threats to defund schools that mandate masks.  He does have ample competition in the race to the bottom from Texas Governor Abbott who, together with his state’s indicted but effectively nefarious Attorney General Ken Paxton, is fighting somewhat succesfully in the Texas courts to prevent Texas towns and cities from imposing school mask mandates, all while a number of early starting Texas and Florida schools are already being forced into COVID lockdowns.

Stay safe.

Mask up indoors.

Get boosted when you are eligible.