Isn’t ignorance of other cultures why these efforts never work? 
We’re just waiting for nation builders to finally figure that out.
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Sure, that’s part of it, and it seems like further proof of incompetence, and of malice when it’s fueled by racism.
Seems to me that in the two recent US “wars,” a bigger part was played by greed. For many people situated amidst TPTB, the whole scheme in both cases functioned as a giant funnel for money to flow into their pockets. Ignorance of other cultures was a good thing from their perspectives, because it kept the wars/grifts going all that much longer.
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Here’s the NYT take on Biden re Afghanistan (David Sanger). Make of it what you will:
Biden’s foreign policy priorities
Before the Taliban marched through the gates of Kabul, before the desperate scenes of a makeshift airlift, before a baby was passed over the barbed wire on the airport walls, President Biden had one simple way of framing his decision to end the endless war in Afghanistan: national interest.
“The United States cannot afford to remain tethered to policies creating a response to a world as it was 20 years ago,” he said on July 8. “We need to meet the threats where they are today.”
It was a classic — and at the time broadly popular — bit of realpolitik. America today has a lot of important interests. To name a few: countering nuclear proliferation, standing up for human rights, combating terrorism and promoting democracy, which George W. Bush said in his second inaugural address would be the mission of the U.S. for decades to come.
But as Graham T. Allison, the Harvard political scientist, often says to students, “While all of these are important, some interests are more important than others.” So it is in moments like this that we find out what a president’s hierarchy of priorities is all about.
And Biden has been clear about his.
We have an interest in facing down the terrorist threat, the president said, but that threat is no longer centered in Afghanistan. More important, he said, is recognizing that “strategic competition with China” will “determine our future.” Other threats — particularly cyberthreats — have also moved from peripheral issues to center stage.
The logic is hard to argue with. The China challenge is unquestionably the most important and complex problem in American national security — part military, part technological, part economic.
And the attack on Colonial Pipeline this year, which shut off a quarter of the fuel running up the East Coast, was a reminder that a well-organized cyberattack can do a lot more damage than a localized terrorism incident, even if it makes for less dramatic television.
Had the withdrawal from Afghanistan gone as planned, with a relatively orderly return of the remaining 2,500 American troops and a relatively smooth handover of the defense of the country to the Afghan National Security Forces, Biden would likely be basking in praise for his Kissinger-like realism.
But as they say in the military, the enemy also gets a vote. What the Taliban have done, with a brutally effective strategy that forced the collapse of the American-backed Afghan government a year or two faster than intelligence assessments thought possible, has forced Biden to defend his priorities. It is hard to get Americans to focus on a China strategy when their screens are filled with images of desperate Americans, and the thousands of Afghans who helped them over two decades, trying to get out of Afghanistan before they are hunted down.
So, does Biden’s argument still hold up? Yes, but with some major caveats.
To rescue his focus-on-the-vital strategy, Biden knows he must first rescue those Americans and Afghan allies, whatever it takes. One of his closest aides told me last week that his legacy on Afghanistan might be decided not on how he did in the past two weeks, but on how he does in the next two. No matter how good his geopolitical strategy, if the on-the-ground execution does not improve, the withdrawal will likely be remembered as a disaster.
Second, superpowers need to be able to walk and chew on their competitors at the same time. The resources needed to deal with the Afghan airlift — the one Biden on Sunday compared to the challenge of the great Berlin airlift of Cold War fame — are drastically different than the ones needed to compete with China, or to deal with cyberattacks originating from Russia.
Third, the president has to deal, sooner or later, with the built-in contradictions in the Biden doctrine. He has repeatedly said that the great struggle of this century will be between the forces of democracy and the forces of autocracy. This has been a bad week for the forces of democracy and a fabulous one for autocrats, who are delighted to see America’s reputation for managing the globe take a hit.
Biden disagreed yesterday. History, he said, would ratify his judgment that Afghanistan was the wrong war, and that the leaders of China and Russia would “love nothing better for us to continue to be bogged down there.” They certainly would. But avoiding being bogged down is about more than getting out — it’s about getting out in a way that enhances American leverage and stature. We’re a long way from that.
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August 23, 2021 (Monday)
Today, the Food and Drug Administration gave full and final approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, which had previously been in use under an emergency authorization. The FDA approved the vaccine for people 16 and older. It has not yet been fully approved for people aged 12 to 15; for them it is still under an emergency authorization.
The good news about the vaccine’s approval sent the stock market soaring, as investors hoped the approval would lead to a surge in vaccinations, which would, in turn, strengthen the economy.
While this full authorization may help convince those hesitant about the vaccine to get one, it is more likely to help increase vaccination rates by sparking further vaccine mandates. Today President Joe Biden encouraged private businesses to require their employees to get vaccinated.
With the FDA’s full approval, the Pentagon will move forward with a requirement that all military personnel get the vaccine. In New York City, mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, has announced that all 148,000 public school teachers in the city must have at least one shot of the vaccine by September 27.
In Florida, the current death rate exceeds its highest number of deaths in any earlier wave of the pandemic. Last week the state had more than 150,000 new coronavirus infections, and this morning about 75 doctors in Palm Beach Gardens staged a symbolic walkout from their hospitals in a direct appeal to the public to get vaccinated. They warned that they are burning out from caring for the sick. “It’s the worst it’s ever been right now,” Dr. Robin Kass told Katherine Kokal of the Palm Beach Post. “And I just think that nobody realizes that.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is standing firm on his refusal to permit mask mandates in schools, but the situation has gotten so bad that six school districts that together enroll more than a million students have passed mask mandates anyway. On Friday, the staunchly Republican Sarasota County joined the five Democratic districts of Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and Alachua counties to require masks in schools.
The airlift out of Afghanistan continues, with about 11,000 people flown out today. Since August 14, the U.S. has gotten about 48,000 people out of Afghanistan. While pundits have compared the evacuation from Afghanistan to that from Saigon in 1975 after North Vietnamese forces took the city, in that case the U.S. rescued about 7000 people in only two days, from April 29 to April 30.
Biden suggested today that the airlift might continue past his self-imposed deadline of August 31, but Pentagon leaders said they would complete the evacuation by that date and Taliban leaders said they would not tolerate an extension. The Taliban faces pressure from ISIS-K, a different extremist group, and cannot afford to appear too weak, especially since it is currently in talks with officials of the former, pro-U.S. Afghan regime to hammer out a government for the country.
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Meanwhile, social media stuff sent to me by someone claims that the German KSK stopped deployment of a KSK unit to Kabul because pictures of the material which was supposed to be deployed, including a helicopter (FFS, a black helicopter…), was posted on social media and thus made public for opposing fighters. Posted, as was added, by the Bundeswehr.
I can’t confirm or rebut this, but Germany certainly is not getting thousands of people out of Afghanistan right now. The “Emirate” has already closed the airport. And the ministry in charge already declared that even the US-announced deadline of next Tuesday could not work to get the people eligible for emergency visas out of the country.
August 24, 2021 (Tuesday)
Since August 14, just ten days ago, the U.S. has facilitated the evacuation of 70,700 people from Afghanistan; more than 21,000 flew out in the last day alone. President Biden maintains that the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan by the August 31 deadline.
The evacuation, which began chaotically as the Afghan army and government crumbled and the Taliban took over the country in less than two weeks, has become far more orderly and efficient. (If there’s one thing the military does exceedingly well, it’s move large numbers of people!)
The administration has refused to say how many Americans remain in the country— the State Department urged employees to leave the country beginning in April—but its reluctance is likely out of concern about passing that information on to the Taliban. This evening, Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, said that the department has called every American who has expressed an interest in leaving Afghanistan, identifying them through a repatriation form on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
News broke today that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William J. Burns, met secretly on Monday in Kabul with a Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, to discuss the continuing evacuation efforts. Regardless of what they discussed, it seems to me a sign that the U.S. feels secure enough about the safety of Kabul to risk sending the country’s top spy there for a parley.
Another demonstration of that security came today when two Representatives, Peter Meijer (R-MI) and Seth Moulton (D-MA), took it upon themselves to fly to Kabul, unannounced (“to conduct oversight on the mission to evacuate Americans and our allies,” Moulton’s office said). The State Department and U.S. military personnel were said to be furious that they had to "divert resources to provide security and information to the lawmakers.” “It’s as moronic as it is selfish,” a senior administration official told the Washington Post. “They’re taking seats away from Americans and at-risk Afghans—while putting our diplomats and service members at greater risk—so they can have a moment in front of the cameras.”
Although no Americans have yet been hurt in the evacuation, that state of affairs is precarious. Threats of an attack on the Kabul airport from ISIS-K, which would like to destabilize the Taliban before it cements its power, continue to loom.
Meanwhile, Congress is busy at home. The House of Representatives has a number of major bills before it. It has the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill for road, bridges, broadband, and other so-called “hard” infrastructure projects, and its counterpart, the $3.5 trillion list of Democratic priorities for “soft” infrastructure, including child care, housing, funding for measures addressing climate change, education, and so on.
These bills represent the largest investment in America since at least the 1960s. They are also a signature effort for the Democrats. They reject the Republican policy of replacing government action with private investment spurred by tax cuts, returning the nation to the era before the Reagan Revolution.
The House is also considering two major voting rights acts. One is the For the People Act, which protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering; reduces corporate money in elections; and requires new ethics rules for elected officials. The other is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which is more limited than the For the People Act but which has been carefully tailored to address the Supreme Court’s previous reasoning for gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013 and again in July of this year.
The John Lewis Act would restore the power of the Department of Justice to prevent states from restricting the vote, as Republican-dominated states have been rushing to do since the 2020 election.
Democrats from different parts of the country and with different constituencies have different priorities. Holding them together, especially on the infrastructure bill, has not been easy. Progressives refused to agree to the bipartisan bill until they were assured it would not replace the larger package. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to move the two forward together, and then, on August 12, nine Democrats from moderate districts demanded a vote on the bipartisan bill without waiting for the larger measure.
Meanwhile, those who see voting rights as the single most important issue for Congress right now have been frustrated as the infrastructure bills have taken up so much of Congress’s time.
Negotiations led today to a House vote on a rule that folded together these concerns. It approved the start of the process of writing the $3.5 trillion bill, guaranteed a vote on the bipartisan bill by September 27, and called for a vote on the John Lewis voting rights measure. The vote on the rule was 220 to 212 with all Democrats voting yes and all Republicans voting no.
The House then passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act by a vote of 219 to 212. Not a single Republican voted yes. The bill now moves to the Senate, where Republicans plan to kill it with the filibuster.
Yesterday’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration has, as expected, led to more requirements for proof of vaccination in public spaces. Today, Louisiana State University announced that no one will be admitted to football games without proof of vaccination or a recent negative Covid test. Ohio State University explicitly said that the FDA’s full approval of the vaccine meant it would require its staff, students, and faculty to be vaccinated. Biden’s efforts to combat the pandemic seem to be gaining ground again.
Each of these major news items shows a remarkably effective political party, especially since the Democrats are accomplishing as much as they are while—with the exception of a handful of Republicans willing to sign on to the bipartisan infrastructure package—Republicans are doing all they can simply to stop the Democrats.
This week, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania announced they are starting hearings on the 2020 election to address their concerns that it was fraudulent. Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature, too, are revisiting the 2020 election. An “audit” of the 2020 election in Arizona has been plagued with irregularities, errors, and problems: it was supposed to announce its “results” this week—three months behind schedule—but three of the five leaders from the Cyber Ninjas conducting the audit are sick with Covid.
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Meanwhile, the right wing efforts to stack the courts are bearing fruit, as the courts have intervened in efforts to improve the asylum system by demanding the re-institution of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, effectively dictating foreign policy from the bench (ironic, considering their hatred of “activist judges”) as well as overturning the Biden policy to stop selling drilling rights in public lands. Watching to see what happens with the public health policies, but guessing the Trump appointed judges will do “their job” of stopping any Democratic movements toward actual effective policies.
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August 25, 2021 (Wednesday)
Today the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol asked eight federal agencies for records. The chair of the committee, Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), gave the agencies two weeks to produce a sweeping range of material that showed the committee is conducting a thorough investigation of the last days of the Trump administration.
Thompson sent letters to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which keeps the records for the government; the Defense Department; the Department of Homeland Security; the Interior Department; the Department of Justice; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the National Counterterrorism Center; and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
While the House had previously asked the National Archives for all the records it had covering the events and federal actors involved in the events of January 6 itself, the select committee is using a much wider lens. It has asked the departments not just for records covering January 6, but also for those reaching back as far as April 1, 2020, to see if the Trump administration had plans to contest and ultimately, should he lose, overturn the election.
The committee has asked the departments for any records about plans to derail the electoral count, organize violent rallies, declare martial law, or use the government positions to overturn the election results. It has also asked for any “documents and communications” about foreign influence in the 2020 election through social media and misinformation.
And then there was this tidbit. The last items the committee asked NARA to produce were: “All documents and communications related to the January 3, 2021, letter from 10 former Defense Secretaries warning of use of the military in election disputes.”
That letter, which was published in the Washington Post and signed by all ten of the living former defense secretaries, warned that “[e]fforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.” The letter reminded then–acting defense secretary Christopher C. Miller and his subordinates that they were “each bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration, and to do so wholeheartedly. They must also refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.”
It was an extraordinary letter, and its authors thought it was important enough to write it over the holidays, for publication three days before the January 6 electoral count. The driving force behind the letter was former vice president Dick Cheney.
Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney (R-WY) sits on the House select committee.
Trump has threatened to invoke executive privilege to stop the release of the documents.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said the committee’s action proved it is not looking for truth but rather is engaging in politics. The committee asked NARA for records of communications between the president and “any Member of Congress or congressional staff.” This will sweep in McCarthy, who had a heated conversation with Trump on the phone as rioters invaded the Capitol. “They come for members of Congress, they are coming for everybody,” he said.
But, in fact, such a sweep is precisely how scholars actually figure out what has happened in historical events. Limiting research before you know the lay of the land simply obscures the larger picture.
Just such a limiting view is on the table for the Republicans right now as they are proposing to investigate President Biden’s exit from Afghanistan if they regain control of the House in 2022, saying it “makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue.”
The first days of the evacuation after the Afghan army crumbled and the Taliban swept into control of the country in nine days were chaotic, indeed, but since August 14, the U.S. has evacuated more than 82,300 people, bringing out 19,000 people yesterday alone. It has evacuated at least 4500 U.S. citizens and has sent more than 20,000 emails and made more than 45,000 phone calls to Americans who had notified the embassy they were in the country (since Americans do not have to register with the embassy, it is unclear how many citizens are there). A rough estimate says there are probably 500 U.S. citizens who want to leave, while another 1000 are not certain or want to stay.
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a press conference pointing out that the evacuation “is one of the largest airlifts in history, a massive military, diplomatic, security, and humanitarian undertaking,” and noted that “[o]nly the United States could organize and execute a mission of this scale and this complexity.”
Blinken said that the success of the airlift to date has been “a testament both to U.S. leadership and to the strength of our alliances and partnerships.” He reiterated that the Biden administration is not abandoning Afghanistan but is shifting its focus from military power to diplomacy, cybersecurity, and financial pressure. He said that the administration has worked hard to build alliances and that the U.S. will continue to work with allies both in Afghanistan and elsewhere going forward. He pointed out that the Taliban has made both public and private assurances that they will continue to allow people to leave the country, and that 114 countries—more than half of the countries in the world—have warned the Taliban that they must honor that commitment.
Tonight, it appears the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. Russia, which backed the Taliban in its struggle against the U.S. and which originally said Taliban control would restore stability to Afghanistan, has begun to evacuate its citizens from Kabul. And tonight, the U.S. government warned of security threats and urged U.S. citizens to leave the area around the airport immediately. According to a State Department spokesperson: "This is a dynamic and volatile security situation on the ground.”
When asked by a reporter about investigations into the evacuation, Blinken said he and the president accepted responsibility for it. He seemed fine with scrutiny of the last few months but suggested that that period should not be looked at in isolation if we are going to learn from our experience in Afghanistan. “[T]here will be plenty of time to look back at the last six or seven months, to look back at the last 20 years,” he said, “and to look to see what we might have done differently, what we might have done sooner, what we might have done more effectively. But I have to tell you that right now, my entire focus is on the mission at hand.”
Today, President Biden signed into law H.R. 3642, the “Harlem Hellfighters Congressional Gold Medal Act,” giving the Congressional Gold Medal to the 369th Infantry Regiment, commonly known as the “Harlem Hellfighters,” in recognition of their bravery and outstanding service during World War I.
In that war, the 369th Infantry was made up of 2000 Black men, 70% of whom were from Harlem. Since many white men in Jim Crow America refused to serve with their Black comrades, army leaders assigned the unit to the French Army, where, although they still wore the U.S. uniform, they were outfitted with French weapons.
Sent into the field, they stayed out for 191 days, the longest combat deployment of any unit in the war. At the Second Battle of the Marne and Meuse-Argonne, the unit had some of the worst casualties of that mangling war, suffering 144 dead and about 1,000 wounded. “My men never retire, they go forward or they die,” said their commander, Colonel William Hayward. Germans called them the “Bloodthirsty Black Men.” The French called them “hell-fighters.” A month after the armistice, the French government awarded the entire 369th the Croix de Guerre.
And now, in 2021, the unit has, at long last, been awarded a U.S. Congressional Gold Medal.
Sometimes it takes a while, but accurate history has a way of coming out.
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Benghazi always looked like a much smaller issue than pretty much anything.
Unless you are particularly interested in the US using retired military as gun runners liaising with their on the ground diplomatic assets to work out which faction gets the guns. Which, in general, people aren’t.
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The whole Republican strategy is to make sure this never, ever happens again. They seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.
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26 posts were split to a new topic: Afghanistan Pullout: The Best Biden Could Do, or Total Clusterfuck?
August 26, 2021 (Thursday)
In Afghanistan today, two explosions outside the Kabul airport killed at least 60 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. troops. More than 100 Afghans and 15 U.S. service members were wounded.
ISIS-K, the Islamic State Khorasan, claimed responsibility for the attack. ISIS-K is an extremist offshoot of the Taliban organized in Pakistan about six years ago by younger men who think the older leaders of the Taliban now in control of Afghanistan are too moderate. The ISIS-K leaders want to destabilize the Taliban’s apparent assumption of the country’s leadership after the collapse of the Afghan government.
The Taliban joined governments around the world in condemning the attack, illustrating their interest in being welcomed into the larger international sphere rather than continuing to be perceived as violent outsiders. Increasingly, it seems their sweep into power surprised them as much as anyone, and they are now faced with pulling together warring factions without the hatred of occupying U.S. troops to glue them together.
Taliban leaders continue to talk with former leaders of the U.S.-backed Afghan government to figure out how to govern the country. Western aid, on which the country relies, will depend on the Taliban’s acceptance of basic human rights, including the education of its girls, and its refusal to permit terrorists to use the country as a staging ground.
The attack was horrific but not a surprise. Last night, the U.S. State Department warned of specific security threats and urged U.S. citizens to leave the area around the airport immediately.
Later in the day, observers reported explosions near the airport. Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief of Task and Purpose, tweeted that he had heard from a source that the explosions were controlled demolitions as U.S. troops destroyed equipment.
Tonight, President Joe Biden held a press conference honoring the dead as “part of the bravest, most capable, and the most selfless military on the face of the Earth.” He told the terrorists that “[w]e will hunt you down and make you pay,” but on our terms, not theirs. “I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command,” he said.
Despite the attacks, the airlift continues. Today, General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., commander of United States Central Command, said that more than 104,000 people have been evacuated from the airport, including 5000 U.S. citizens.
I confess to being knocked off-keel by the Republican reaction to the Kabul bombing.
The roots of the U.S. withdrawal from its 20 years in Afghanistan were planted in February 2020, when the Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban agreeing to release 5000 imprisoned Taliban fighters and to leave the country by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban did not kill any more Americans. The negotiations did not include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the time Biden took office, the U.S. had withdrawn all but 2500 troops from the country.
That left Biden with the option either to go back on Trump’s agreement or to follow through. To ignore the agreement would mean the Taliban would again begin attacking U.S. service people, and the U.S. would both have to pour in significant numbers of troops and sustain casualties. And Biden himself wanted out of what had become a meandering, expensive, unpopular war.
On April 14, 2021, three months after taking office, Biden said he would honor the agreement he had inherited from Trump. “It is perhaps not what I would have negotiated myself,” he said, “but it was an agreement made by the United States government, and that means something.” He said that the original U.S. mission had been to stop Afghanistan from becoming a staging ground for terrorists and to destroy those who had attacked the United States on 9-11, and both of those goals had been accomplished. Now, he said, “our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear.”
Biden said he would begin, not end, the troop withdrawal on May 1 (prompting Trump to complain that it should be done sooner), getting everyone out by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks that took us there in the first place. (He later adjusted that to August 31.) He promised to evacuate the country “responsibly, deliberately, and safely” and assured Americans that the U.S. had “trained and equipped a standing force of over 300,000 Afghan personnel” and that “they’ll continue to fight valiantly, on behalf of the Afghans, at great cost.”
Instead, the Afghan army crumbled as the U.S began to pull its remaining troops out in July. By mid-August, the Taliban had taken control of the capital, Kabul, after taking all the regional capitals in a little over a week. It turned out that when the Trump administration cut the Afghan government out of negotiations with the Taliban, Afghan soldiers recognized that they would soon be on their own and arranged “cease fire” agreements, enabling the Taliban to take control with very little fighting.
Just before the Taliban took Kabul, the leaders of the Afghan government fled the country, abandoning the country to chaos. People rushed to the airport to escape, although the Taliban quickly reassured them that they would give amnesty to all of their former enemies. In those chaotic early hours, seven Afghans died at the airport, either crushed in the crowds or killed when they fell from planes to which they had clung in hopes of getting out.
Then, though, the Biden administration established order and has conducted the largest airlift in U.S. history, more than 100,000 people, without casualties until today. The State Department says about 1000 Americans remain in Afghanistan. They are primarily Afghan-Americans who are not sure whether they want to leave. The administration is in contact with them and promises it will continue to work to evacuate them after August 31 if they choose to leave.
In the past, when American troops were targeted by terrorists, Americans came together to condemn those attackers. Apparently, no longer. While world leaders—including even those of the Taliban—condemned the attacks on U.S. troops, Republican leaders instead attacked President Biden.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blamed Biden for the attack and insisted that troops should remain in Afghanistan under congressional control until all Americans are safely out. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who replaced Liz Cheney (R-WY) as the third-ranking Republican in the House when Cheney refused to line up behind Trump, tweeted: "Joe Biden has blood on his hands… This horrific national security and humanitarian disaster is solely the result of Joe Biden’s weak and incompetent leadership. He is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.”
The attacks on our soldiers and on Afghan civilians in Kabul today have taken up all the oxygen in the U.S. media, but there is another horrific story: the continuing carnage as the Delta variant of Covid-19 continues to rip through the unvaccinated.
In Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has forbidden mask or vaccine mandates, 21,000 people a day are being diagnosed with coronavirus—more than twice the rate of the rest of the country—and almost 230 a day are dying, a rate triple that of the rest of the country. Right now, Florida alone accounts for one fifth of national deaths from Covid.
Ten major hospitals in Florida are out of space in their morgues and have rented coolers for their dead; those, too, are almost full. Intensive care units in the state are 94% occupied. Sixty-eight hospitals warned yesterday that they had fewer than 48 hours left of the oxygen their Covid patients need, a reflection of the fact that 17,000 people are currently hospitalized in the state.
Appearing on the Fox News Channel last night, DeSantis blamed Biden for the crisis. “He said he was going to end Covid,” DeSantis said. “He hasn’t done that.”
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The absolute gall of this monster is astounding.
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There is no depth to which the GOP/GQP will not sink. At this point, it seems like the best strategy is to repeatedly show their supporters how evil their leaders have become. Hopefully, enough of them will decide not to vote for them in the next election. In the meantime, it’s also important for the Dems move forward with programs that support and assist the public. Even if they believe all pols are bad, they might choose the lesser of two evils.
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You’re so right. Seeing the evil so blatantly day after day is eating me alive though, and I can’t get my head around how anyone can act so shamelessly awful.
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August 27, 2021 (Friday)
America is in a watershed moment. Since the 1980s, the country has focused on individualism: the idea that the expansion of the federal government after the Depression in the 1930s created a form of collectivism that we must destroy by cutting taxes and slashing regulation to leave individuals free to do as they wish.
Domestically, that ideology meant dismantling government regulation, social safety networks, and public infrastructure projects. Internationally, it meant a form of “cowboy diplomacy” in which the U.S. usually acted on its own to rebuild nations in our image.
Now, President Joe Biden appears to be trying to bring back a focus on the common good.
For all that Republicans today insist that individualism is the heart of Americanism, in fact the history of federal protection of the common good began in the 1860s with their own ancestors, led by Abraham Lincoln, who wrote: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”
The contrast between these two ideologies has been stark this week.
On the one hand are those who insist that the government cannot limit an individual’s rights by mandating either masks or vaccines, even in the face of the deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus that is, once again, taking more than 1000 American lives a day.
In New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has required teachers to be vaccinated, the city’s largest police union has said it will sue if a vaccine is mandated for its members.
In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott on Wednesday issued an executive order prohibiting any government office or any private entity receiving government funds from requiring vaccines.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has also forbidden mask mandates, but today Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper ruled that DeSantis’s order is unconstitutional. Cooper pointed out that in 1914 and 1939, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that individual rights take a back seat to public safety: individuals can drink alcohol, for example, but not drive drunk. DeSantis was scathing of the opinion and has vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, NBC News reported this week that information about the coronavirus in Florida, as well as Georgia, is no longer easily available on government websites.
On the other hand, as predicted, the full approval of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration has prompted a flood of vaccine mandates.
The investigation into the events of January 6, when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, also showcases the tension between individualism and community.
Yesterday, after months in which Republicans, including former president Donald Trump, called for the release of the identity of the officer who shot Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt, Capitol Police officer Lieutenant Michael Byrd, the 28-year veteran of the force who shot Babbitt, gave an interview to Lester Holt of NBC News.
Right-wing activists have called Babbitt a martyr murdered by the government, but Byrd explained that he was responsible for protecting 60 to 80 members of the House and their staffers. As rioters smashed the glass doors leading into the House chamber, Byrd repeatedly called for them to get back. When Ashli Babbitt climbed through the broken door, he shot her in the shoulder. She later died from her injuries. Byrd said he was doing his job to protect our government. “I know that day I saved countless lives,” Byrd told Holt. “I know members of Congress, as well as my fellow officers and staff, were in jeopardy and in serious danger. And that’s my job.”
The conflict between individualism and society also became clear today as the House select committee looking into the attack asked social media giants to turn over “all reviews, studies, reports, data, analyses, and communications” they had gathered about disinformation distributed by both foreign and domestic actors, as well as information about “domestic violent extremists” who participated in the attack.
Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) immediately responded that “Congress has no general power to inquire into private affairs and to compel disclosure….” He urged telecommunications companies and Facebook not to hand over any materials, calling their effort an “authoritarian undertaking.” Banks told Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson that Republicans should punish every lawmaker investigating the January 6 insurrection if they retake control of Congress in 2022.
Biden’s new turn is especially obvious tonight in international affairs. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a country we entered almost 20 years ago with a clear mission that became muddied almost immediately, has sparked Republican criticism for what many describe as a U.S. defeat.
Since he took office, Biden has insisted on shifting American foreign policy away from U.S. troops alone on the ground toward multilateral pressure using finances and technology.
After yesterday’s bombing in Kabul took the lives of 160 Afghans and 13 American military personnel, Biden warned ISIS-K: "We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
Tonight, a new warning from the State Department warning Americans at the gates of the Kabul airport to “leave immediately” came just before a spokesman for CENTCOM, the United States Central Command in the Defense Department overseeing the Middle East, announced: “U.S. military forces conducted an over-the-horizon counterterrorism operation today against an ISIS-K planner. The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar Province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties.”
Biden’s strike on ISIS-K demonstrated the nation’s over-the-horizon technologies that he hopes will replace troops. Even still, the administration continues to call for international cooperation. In a press conference today, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby responded to a question about U.S. control in Afghanistan by saying: “It’s not about U.S. control in the Indo-Pacific. It’s about protecting our country from threats and challenges that emanate from that part of the world. And it’s about revitalizing our network of alliances and partnerships to help our partners in the international community do the same.“
Meanwhile, this afternoon, news broke that the Taliban has asked the United States to keep a diplomatic presence in the country even after it ends its military mission. The Taliban continues to hope for international recognition, in part to claw back some of the aid that western countries—especially the U.S.—will no longer provide, as well as to try to get the country’s billions in assets unfrozen.
A continued diplomatic presence in Afghanistan would make it easier to continue to get allies and U.S. citizens out of the country, but State Department spokesman Ned Price said the idea is a nonstarter unless a future Afghan government protects the rights of its citizens, including its women, and refuses to harbor terrorists. Price also emphasized that the U.S. would not make this decision without consulting allies. “This is not just a discussion the United States will have to decide for itself.… We are coordinating with our international partners, again to share ideas, to ensure that we are sending the appropriate signals and messages to the Taliban,” he said.
Evacuations from Afghanistan continue. Since August 14, they have topped 110,000, with 12,500 people in the last 24 hours.
Perhaps the news story that best illustrates the tension today between individualism and using the government to help everyone is about a natural disaster. Hurricane Ida, which formed in the Caribbean yesterday, is barreling toward the U.S. Gulf Coast. When it hit western Cuba today, it was a Category 1 storm, but meteorologists expect it to pick up speed as it crosses the warm gulf, becoming a Category 4 storm by the time it hits the U.S. coastline. The area from Louisiana to Florida is in the storm’s path. New Orleans could see winds of up to 110 miles an hour and a storm surge of as much as 11 feet. Louisiana officials issued evacuation orders today.
The storm is expected to hit Sunday evening, exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina did. But this time, there is another complication: this is the very part of the country suffering terribly right now from coronavirus. Standing firm on individual rights, only about 40% of Louisiana’s population has been vaccinated, and hospitals are already stretched thin.
Today, President Biden declared an emergency in Louisiana, ordering federal assistance from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the region ahead of the storm, trying to head off a catastrophe. The federal government will also help to pay the costs of the emergency.
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August 28, 2021 (Saturday)
Today, Americans across the country marched for voting rights.
They recognize that our right to have a say in our government is slipping out of our hands. At a rally in Washington, Martin Luther King III told the crowd, “Our country is backsliding to the unconscionable days of Jim Crow. And some of our senators are saying, ‘Well, we can’t overcome the filibuster,’… I say to you today: Get rid of the filibuster. That is a monument to white supremacy we must tear down.”
Since 1986, Republicans have worked to limit access to the polls, recognizing that when more people vote, they lose. Those restrictions took off after 2013 when, in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to voting in states with histories of racial discrimination.
That decision opened the way to voter restrictions, but voting laws have come especially fast and furious this year. Republicans have refused to accept that the election of Democrat Joe Biden was legitimate and, in Republican-dominated states, have worked to make sure Democrats do not have the power to elect another president in the future. Between January 1 and July 14 of this year, at least 18 states have enacted 30 laws restricting access to the vote.
Their plan is clearly to make sure those states stay Republican, no matter what the voters actually want.
This lack of competition destroys Democrats’ chances of winning elections, but it also pushes the Republican Party further and further to the right. With states sewn up for a Republican victory, potential Republican presidential candidates have to worry less about winning a general election than about winning the primaries.
Because primary voters are always the most energized and partisan voters, and because for the Republicans that currently means staunch Trump supporters, those vying to be Republican front runners are the Trump extremists: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, and even Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently have been touring the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire attacking mask requirements and vaccine mandates, critical race theory and the infrastructure bills currently under discussion in Congress.
Vote-rigging in Republican-dominated states leads logically to a Republican extremist winning the White House in 2024.
Congress has before it two voting rights bills that would help to restore a level playing field between the two parties. One, the For the People Act, protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering, limits corporate money in elections, and requires new ethics rules for elected officials. The House passed the For the People Act in March.
On Tuesday, August 24, the House passed the second of the two voting rights bills, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021, also known as H.R. 4, which expands the system of preclearance that had been in the 1965 Voting Rights Act before 2013. Under the John Lewis bill, the Department of Justice has to sign off on voting changes not simply in states with a longstanding history of discrimination, but also in states anywhere in the country that have shown a pattern of violations of voting rights.
Both of these measures are stalled in the Senate, where Republicans, who insist that states, not the federal government, must have the final say in who gets to vote, have vowed to filibuster them. Unless the Democrats can agree to carve out an exception to the filibuster for voting rights, the measures will die.
And today, Americans across the country marched for voting rights.
Today is the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was on this day in 1963 that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Dr. King anchored the speeches for the day, though: before him spoke the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a young John Lewis. Just 23 years old, he had been one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.
Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.
The attack in Selma created momentum for voting rights. Just after the attack, President Lyndon Baines Johnson called for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. It did. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented.
Today is also the anniversary of the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single senator. On this date in 1957, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond began his filibuster to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1957, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was designed to protect the right of African Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls.
On a day that harks back to both John Lewis’s fight for voting rights and Strom Thurmond’s fight against them, I wonder which man’s principles will shape our future.
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August 29, 2021 (Sunday)
Tomorrow the sun rises on a new school year at my university.
I’m going to take the night off to gather my wits (and get a decent night’s sleep).
I’ll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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August 30, 2021 (Monday)
At 3:29 ET on August 30, 2021—early on the morning of August 31 in Afghanistan—the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan ended. It was the longest war in American history.
Among the last to come home were the 13 Americans killed in an ISIS-K attack last Thursday. They arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware Sunday morning from Germany. President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and 8 aides attended the dignified transfer between the plane and a waiting vehicle.
In the last 17 days in Afghanistan, U.S. troops evacuated more than 120,000 people, making up the largest airlift in our history. For comparison, as Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post pointed out, the U.S. evacuated no Americans from the civil war in Yemen in 2015, and only about 167 from Libya in 2011.
While critics have suggested that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will hurt American credibility abroad, President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have called for combatting terrorism through financial sanctions, bombing, and drone strikes like the one they used to retaliate against ISIS-K for the attack on the Kabul airport that killed more than 160 Afghans and 13 Americans last Friday, and by strengthening democracy at home.
There is plenty of work to do on that last front.
Last week, Peter Wehner, who served in the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations, pointed out in The Atlantic that the right wing has moved to such extremism that former president Trump, whose behavior seemed so shocking in 2015 and 2016, is now being sidelined by lawmakers and pundits who are even more extreme.
Yesterday, in an event hosted by the Macon County Republican Party, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) insisted that the January 6 rioters are “political hostages” and said he wanted to “bust them out.” When someone in the audience asked “When are you going to call us to Washington again?” he said, “We are actively working on that one…. We have a few plans in motion that I can’t make public right now.” He called for removing Biden from office under the 25th Amendment and added, “when Kamala Harris inevitably screws up, we will take them down, one at a time.” He concluded by saying: “The Second Amendment was not written so that we can go hunting or we can shoot sporting clays…. The Second Amendment was written so that we can fight against tyranny.”
Increasingly, right-wing agitators are calling for violent overthrow of the government.
Today in Pennsylvania, Steve Lynch, a candidate for Northampton County executive, said: “Forget going into these school boards with freaking data. You go into these school boards to remove them. I’m going in with 20 strong men and I’m gonna give them an option—they can leave or they can be removed.”
At a protest in Santa Monica yesterday before a vote on a mask mandate, a man held a sign with the names and home addresses of each Los Angeles City Council member and said protesters would go to the homes of anyone who voted for the mandate and, if it passed, “Civil War is coming! Get your guns!”
This sort of street-level violence is known for radicalizing individuals as they get swept up in it and then later embrace the larger political arguments behind it. It also forces more reasonable individuals out of government positions as they conclude that their position on a school board, for example, is not worth threats against their families and their lives.
Far from trying to tamp down this violence, right-wing leaders are egging it on. Tonight, on the Fox News Channel, personality Tucker Carlson told his audience that no leader had apologized for “these terrible decisions” in Afghanistan. “This can’t go on,” he said. “When leaders refuse to hold themselves accountable, over time, people revolt…. We need to change course immediately… or else the consequences will be awful.”
The images on the screen behind Carlson were of President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, Defense Secretary Austin, and Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley. Carlson often tries to undermine the current leadership of the military, suggesting that he would welcome its replacement by officers he finds less objectionable.
Republican offense may be an attempt at defense.
Today, Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, announced that the committee has demanded that 35 major communications companies preserve their records from April 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021, for people involved in the January 5 and January 6 rallies in Washington, D.C., or “potentially involved with discussions” about stopping the electoral vote count on January 6 or otherwise “potentially involved with discussions" in planning the January 6 insurrection. According to CNN, the companies affected include cell phone giants Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Sprint. Social media companies covered under the request include Apple, Google, Facebook, Signal, Slack, YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter.
CNN reports that members of the committee have requested preservation of the records of representatives Cawthorn, Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Jody Hice (R-GA), and Scott Perry (R-PA). They have also asked the companies to preserve the records of former president Trump; those of his children Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump; and those of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, who worked on the campaign.
Those determined to regain control of the country from the Democrats also have to contend with continuing good news from Biden’s policies. A new study from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University shows that the first child tax credit payment kept 3 million children from falling below the poverty line and that the child poverty rate dropped from 15.8% in June to 11.9% in July. Coronavirus relief measures kept another 3 million children from poverty. Families are using the money to buy food and pay off debt.
The administration is also coordinating aid to the states hit hard by Hurricane Ida, which brought up to 15 inches of rain to parts of Louisiana and knocked out the state’s power grid. The administration deployed more than 3,600 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, who prepared more than 3.4 million meals, millions of liters of water, more than 35,700 tarps, and roughly 200 generators in the region before the storm hit. They have moved ambulances and search and rescue teams into the area and have opened shelters. The Army Corps of Engineers has mobilized personnel to remove debris and to provide temporary roofing and housing.
The administration is shifting its focus from unilateral military might to multilateral alliances to deal with common problems. Tomorrow, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry will leave for Asia, where he will meet with leaders from Japan and then China to bolster international cooperation on climate change before the meeting of the 2021 U.N Climate Change Conference in early November.
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August 31, 2021 (Tuesday)
This afternoon, President Joe Biden explained to the nation why he ended the U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. He reminded Americans that the purpose of the attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was to destroy the ability of the Taliban to protect al-Qaeda and to capture or kill the terrorists who had attacked America on September 11, 2001. American bombing immediately weakened the Taliban, and when U.S. troops killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, we met those goals.
And yet we stayed on in Afghanistan while the terrorist threat spread across the world. Biden wants the country to face that modern threat, rather than the threat of twenty years ago. “I simply do not believe that the safety and security of America is enhanced by continuing to deploy thousands of American troops and spending billions of dollars a year in Afghanistan,” he said.
Researchers estimate that the war in Afghanistan has cost more than 171,000 lives. It has wounded more than 20,700 U.S. service members and taken the lives of 2461 more. It has cost more than $2 trillion, which adds up to about $300 million a day for twenty years.
“After 20 years of war in Afghanistan,” Biden said, “I refused to send another generation of America’s sons and daughters to fight a war that should have ended long ago.”
The president made it clear he envisions a different kind of foreign policy than the U.S. has embraced since 2002, when the Bush Doctrine, developed by the neoconservatives under Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, committed the United States to launching preemptive military actions in order to change regimes in countries we perceived as potential sponsors of terrorism—the doctrine that led us into invading Iraq in 2003, which diverted our attention and resources from Afghanistan.
“[W]e must set missions with clear, achievable goals,” Biden said. “This decision… is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries…. Moving on from that mindset and those kind of large-scale troop deployments will make us stronger and more effective and safer at home.”
Biden has been very clear that he envisions a foreign policy based less in military personnel on the ground than in technology, the “over-the-horizon” weapons that the administration used to strike ISIS-K leaders the day after that group claimed responsibility for an attack at the gates of the Kabul airport that killed more than 160 Afghans and 13 Americans. “We will continue to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, international influence, and humanitarian aid,” Biden said. “We’ll continue to speak out for basic rights of the Afghan people, especially women and girls…. [H]uman rights will be the center of our foreign policy.”
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have explained that they expect to use modern tools to combat terrorism. Today, Biden said that the way to protect human rights “is not through endless military deployments, but through diplomacy, economic tools, and rallying the rest of the world for support.”
Biden’s new approach to foreign affairs includes finances. As soon as the Afghan government fell, the U.S. and other allies withheld aid to Afghanistan and froze the country’s assets held in western banks. The World Bank stopped funding the country, the International Monetary Fund froze $460 million in emergency reserves, and the U.S. froze about $7 billion of the $9.5 billion of Afghan central bank reserves held in U.S. banks. The European Union, which had promised $1 billion to the country over the next five years, has now said that money will depend on Afghanistan’s human rights record under its new government.
Russian lawmakers and state media have been gloating that the U.S. left Afghanistan. Now, though, they suddenly find their country with the U.S. gone and an unstable Afghanistan on their doorstep. Yesterday, they called on the U.S. and its allies to unfreeze money and to work to rebuild the country, even as they warned that it would never meet U.S. standards for human rights or democracy.
Biden’s emphasis includes working with allies to combat the crises facing the globe in the twenty-first century. Today, John Kerry, the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, left for a four-day trip to Japan and China to advance discussions about the climate crisis, a crisis increasingly obvious in the U.S. as California wildfires have forced the evacuation of the resort town of South Lake Tahoe and the U.S. Forest Service closed all national forests in California until September 17.
More than 15,000 firefighters are combating dozens of fires in California, but the emergency personnel from Louisiana had to return to their home state to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, which has knocked out electric power for hundreds of thousands.
Today, President Biden met with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and the heads of two of the largest utilities in the Gulf Coast to discuss restoring and maintaining the power grid in the face of the era’s new extreme weather events. The president also launched a 75-day comment period on how climate change is changing financial markets, focusing initially on insurers, who have $4.7 trillion worth of assets, much of which is invested. The administration is trying to understand how climate change could destabilize the economy.
Biden and Blinken have also made it clear they think nothing will strengthen America’s standing in the world more than strengthening democracy at home.
Today, the Texas legislature passed SB1, the sweeping voter suppression bill Democrats had tried to stop by walking out of the legislature to deny the Republicans a quorum. The new measure is a microcosm of voter suppression bills across the nation in Republican-dominated states.
It bans mail ballot drop boxes and gets rid of drive-through voting and extended hours. It criminalizes the distribution of applications for mail-in ballots and permits partisan poll watchers to have “free movement” in polling places, enabling them to intimidate voters. Texas is just 40% white and has 3 million unregistered voters, the vast majority of whom are Black or Latino. The new measure is designed to cut young people of color, whose numbers are growing in Texas and who are overwhelmingly Democrats, out of elections. In debates on the measure, Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan asked members not to use the word “racism.”
Meanwhile, today, House Republicans have been on a media blitz to insist that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has no right to examine the phone records of fellow congresspeople. On Tucker Carlson’s show on the Fox News Channel, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said, “These telecommunication companies, if they go along with this, they will be shut down. That’s a promise.”
There is no longer any daylight between the radical fringe like Greene and Republican leadership. Today House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who had at least one phone call with former president Trump on January 6, put out a statement warning that attempts to investigate the phone data of congresspeople from the January 6 insurrection would “put every American with a phone or a computer in the crosshairs of a surveillance state run by Democrat politicians.” If the companies comply with the committee’s request—which McCarthy mischaracterized as a “Democrat order”—he said, “a Republican majority will not forget.”
In response, representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted the legal code: 18 U.S. Code § 1505: “Whoever…by any threatening letter or communication…endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede…the due and proper exercise of the power of inquiry under which any…investigation is being had by either House…Shall be fined under this title, imprisoned…”
“I don’t think enough people understand how much we have asked of the 1 percent of this country who put that uniform on, who are willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation,” Biden said today. He called his listeners back to President Abraham Lincoln’s defense of democracy at Gettysburg when he said: “As we close 20 years of war and strife and pain and sacrifice, it’s time to look to the future, not the past—to a future that’s safer, to a future that’s more secure, to a future that honors those who served and all those who gave what President Lincoln called their ‘last full measure of devotion.’”
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