Blue man bad

Have you noticed the convenient and universal scapegoating that’s going on over President Biden’s Afghanistan debacle? In normal times, a cock-up on this scale would indeed be seen both as a major scandal, but also as a complete aberration or (like the Vietnam withdrawal) as an historical inevitability. In living memory, presidents of greater or lesser competence have come and gone, with their errors usually well-covered, or in some cases (think, for example, of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco) seen as blots on otherwise decent records. To err, after all, is human.

But the very scale of this policy failure beggars belief… if it weren’t already obvious to all that something strange has been happening throughout this administration, with a clearly senile POTUS apparently being manipulated by shadowy powers managing the policy failures.

Remember the indications that a powerful “deep state” of corrupt politicians and leaders in the intelligence, judicial and military services was behind much of what happened during the Trump regime. Remember how many suspicions have remained about the electoral process, the quelling of opposition since and so on. Remember how much evidence exists that the mainstream media has become blindly (or studiously) uncritical of every problem of government, and this has been (rather naively, in my view) attributed to hatred of Trump addling their critical faculties, when it is far more likely to be a deliberate policy. Do we really believe that seasoned journalists dismissed the lab-leak theory just because Trump mentioned it?

Well, I guess it’s possible that Biden is both corrupt enough, and stupid enough, and powerful enough, to have bulldozed through a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan despite his own team’s hestation, but there has been no indication of such resolve hitherto. Whether the policy itself came from himself or from “movers and shakers” behind the scenes, there must have been input and advice from all the institutions of power with sufficient knowledge to protest and, if necessary, make a public stir. Either that or none of them even had the wit that any infantryman who fought in Afghanistan has about the situation there.

Yet we see, for the first time, the whole media immediately turn out in force to condemn Biden,as if a trigger has been pulled – and the target is not his administration, note, but the man himself. His administration has pointedly remained on holiday and incommunicado, putting him up on a platform alone for his car-crash of a press-conference, and picturing him absurdly sitting alone handling the crisis by Zoom in a room noticeably empty of the Vice-President or any one else, for that matter. Can he really still be working from his basement, albeit it transplanted to Camp David? have all his policy decisions been made at a vacant table?

All this begins to make sense in the context of the persistent idea that Biden was elected as a mere figurehead, subsequently to be removed on health grounds in favour of the equally incompetent but (for reasons yet unclear) highly favoured Kamala Harris. Pundits have been saying for months that Biden would be removed within a year. What better way to do it than to set up his already cognitively challenged decision-making with misleading intelligence and/or policy advice, and then dump him in it so that it is easy to remove him by whatever means are available? Note that this scenario for political power would bespeak the same total indifference to human life and welfare that we have seen manifested over COVID, but not only in America, but around the world.

So for all that Biden clearly deserves all he gets, and the people of the world, arguably, deserve better (except that when God sends his final deception on the world, remember that it will be as a judgement on a sinful race, not just on a bad President), I am suspicious when I see all the blame being loaded on his shoulders.

In particular, I note that in my own country, Boris Johnson’s name has been largely kept out of the (obediently loyal) press, pending his address to a hastily recalled Parliament. The almost equally silent Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, had to curtail his foreign holiday amid his excuses that “Nobody could have predicted this.” I suspect we’ll see the same blame-shifting from Johnson in Parliament that we saw from Biden at the press conference.

The claim of unpredictability hardly sits well with the fact that many people have been publicly predicting a Taliban walkover since Biden first announced his intentions – and even before that, when Trump announced a more nuanced and controlled policy of withdrawal last year. We hear that Biden didn’t trouble to consult his allies such as the UK, despite our own military and administrative presence in Afghanistan, but we never heard a peep about Johnson or Raab objecting, or that they were frantically making contingency plans to compensate for a clearly doomed policy. They clearly, from the outcome, were not. Instead, the people in charge say “Nobody could have predicted this,” thus demonstrating that the Western World’s political class is uniformly incompetent, or else uniformly controlled.

Take your pick on which is true. But I anticipate the first woman of colour being in the White House – and achieving nothing of worth – within a fairly short time. I suspect it won’t do the cause of diversity and inclusiveness any more good than transgender Olympic weightlifters have. It might help billionaires, the Chinese Communists and the technocratic utopians, though.

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About Jon Garvey

Training in medicine (which was my career), social psychology and theology. Interests in most things, but especially the science-faith interface. The rest of my time, though, is spent writing, playing and recording music.
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5 Responses to Blue man bad

  1. Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

    The above post was prompted merely by a gut-feeling that if the all-too-evidently controlled mainstream media begin to turn on Joe Biden, mere political disillusionment is unlikely to be the cause. Don’t you, too, find that your antennae become tuned to the bad smell of manipulation?

    It seems I’m not alone. This analysis by an “extremist right wing Christian” (nowadays a pointer to sober rationality) seems to me to put some flesh on the bones of my suspicion. It seems to me virtually the only explanation for top US generals talking about equity and diversity at the very height of the biggest international crisis for the US since 9/11. Or for Biden himself causing jaws to drop by prioritising discussion of a finance bill over thousands of lives, including American citizens and military.

    “Incompetence” is about as lame an explanation as blaming Boris Johnson’s obsession with Net Zero on a nagging Green wife. And so, as I was feeling my way in Seeing through Smoke, all these disparate yet simultaneous events – Afghanistan, woke churches, Climate Change, vaccinating children without parental consent, Drag Queen story hour – only begin to escape the fog of insanity when they are brought together as one plan.

    That does not necessarily mean one global human conspiracy: there is plenty of room for overlapping interests, mass psychology and genuine incompetence. But for the Christian, of course, universal end-times deception was never about a human conspiracy. We have to fight the deception – but with the weapons of gospel truth, as we remind ourselves (as I point out in another post ) that even Satanic deception is the involuntary servant of God’s sovereign purposes for ushering in the reign of Christ.

    • Elizabeth B. says:

      Jon,
      Interesting commentary. Yes, all the MSM turning on Biden was strange. It may have been short lived. NPR was leading the charge against him, but for the past two days has been more restrained. On World Magazine’s Culture Friday podcast, John Stonestreet noted that the media seem to be dialing back the criticism.

      Too bad, if so. I was lulled into thinking that those MSM leftists had taken a sudden turn toward more moderate liberalness, no matter how unlikely. I was feeling like I had fallen down a hole to a place 20 years past before every other NPR story was LGBTQpluseverything and CRT was a mere hint on a breeze. It was short lived, today there are headline stories about trans bathroom rights and “voting rights”protests.

      I guess we’ll see what happens in the next week. In any case, everything about the situation is suspect.

  2. Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

    It was short lived, today there are headline stories about trans bathroom rights and “voting rights”protests.

    New news cycle as the biggest defeat in American history takes place! It reminds me of a comedy programme on British TV back in the early 1960s, in which a spoof newscaster talked abouthow “a fleet of flying saucers has landed, destroying Birmingham and Manchester, and an army of robots is now marching on London. And now cricket: in the test match at Lords…”

  3. Robert Byers says:

    Yes Bidens vice was picked just because of being a woman and black. I accuse. Otherwise, even in the democratic party, they could not prevail over others.
    the left wing press sees itself as the real forceful players for the left. not the democratic party. They simply would reason they must ALLOW some criticism of Biden on things not really his fault and ongoing and that republicans themselves can’t easuly fix. they must not be seen as too partisim before the part of the public that trusts them as neutral.
    no excuses. Any opposition can easily take them on. They should of question , accused, why the vice was picked. they didn’t have the moral courage.
    In america equity and diversity is satisfied if the person picked was based on quality alone. Thats the law. The republicans are useless and so was Trump in defending the great American law.

  4. Avatar photo Jon Garvey says:

    And so fall all worldly powers…

    Though we non-US types need to remember that what is falling is not the country, but the civilization. In Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the EU we are not spectators, but participants.

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