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Monday, September 20, 2021

Did You Enjoy Your Weekend at the Beach, Mr. President?

Mr. Biden spent the weekend at the beach. Perhaps he was able to relax, but it's hard to see how when, as he soaks up the sun, he reflects on the human suffering and chaos for which his policies are responsible.

Reports out of Afghanistan tell us that the Taliban are methodically hunting down and executing anyone who worked for the West, and that their barbaric savagery extends even to beheading nine and ten-year old children.

In retaliation for the suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed thirteen American servicemen and women and over a hundred Afghans the military launched a drone strike at a vehicle loaded with terrorists. Except there were no terrorists in the vehicle, only seven children, an aid worker and two other adults, all of whom were blown to bits.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Americans are still trapped in Afghanistan and in danger of their lives.

On the home front thousands of illegal immigrants, encouraged to swarm into the U.S. by Mr. Biden's decision to undo his predecessor's measures to prevent just such a humanitarian calamity, are camped out under a bridge that spans the Rio Grande river in Del Rio Texas.

The migrants seem to be mostly Haitians fleeing the awful conditions inflicted upon them by both nature and their fellow Haitians. Drugs and children are being trafficked across the border, no one is tested for Covid and the situation is chaotic, pretty much like President Biden's evacuation from Afghanistan.

Moreover, the legislation the president anticipated to be his signature achievement, the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill loaded with goodies for just about every conceivable constituency, both seem to be dead in the water. The problem isn't so much the Republicans but recalcitrant moderates and progressives in Mr. Biden's own party.

And then there's the widespread resistance to Mr. Biden's perplexing mask mandates, at least if the crowds at college and pro football games this weekend are any indication. Having told us the vaccines are safe and effective, we're then told that vaccinated individuals still must wear masks to protect themselves from the unvaccinated. I'm not sure how to make sense out of that.

On top of all that confusion, nose-thumbing and tragic news was yet another foreign policy bungle. The French were so upset with the Biden administration for deviously undercutting them on a deal to sell Australia $100 billion worth of submarines that they've called their ambassador home.

It's almost unprecedented for allies to recall ambassadors from each other's countries, and it's another example of how the Democrats' claim to have regained the respect of our allies after those "disastrous" Trump years and to have replaced the Trump administration with "grown-ups" looks laughable given how the "grown-ups" have botched almost everything they've touched in the nine months they've been in office.

Anyway, it must've been hard to enjoy the sun and surf amidst all of that failure, but the president had help. Much of our media, which would've been hysterical had any of the above happened during the previous administration, seems to have been vacationing at the beach along with Mr. Biden and blissfully uninterested in the calamities that the presidential sunbather has wrought.