Category Archives: Commentary

A Prayer for U.S. Soldiers in Kabul

Commentary, News

In part simply to try and retain my own tenuous grasp on reality in this ever more deranged world, I’m offering the following review of the situation in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, this August 20th of 2021.

  • For the first time in 20 years, the Taliban are operating at will, without fear of bombardment by the U.S. or anyone else. They are free to organize, bring in reinforcements, prepare and plan future actions.
  • The Taliban surround the airport in Kabul, in which are currently penned something like 6000 American troops.
  • The Taliban are free to operate because Joe Biden has invested everything in the hope of getting out of this situation without a fight. In any other circumstance looking anything like this over the last 20 years, all holy hell would have been rained down on the Taliban long ago in order to prevent them from building up strength to attack a U.S. position.
  • The American troops in this situation are at a strong additional disadvantage because they were inserted on an emergency basis, with limited numbers and equipment and assigned an uncertain mission in an impossibly volatile environment. Over the past 20 years, nothing like this ever happened. Troops were only deployed intentionally, with ample preparation and planning. No massacre of U.S. troops was ever going to happen under those circumstances. But now it is different.
  • This is not a situation that all the smart and highly-paid people should have allowed to develop, in case that’s not obvious.

At this point, there are simply no positive resolutions possible, unless the Taliban are actually changed men, and desire to allow the U.S. troops (who have spent the last 20 years blowing thousands of Taliban soldiers to pieces) to complete their mission and leave peacefully and proudly. I would suggest (albeit that I would prefer to YELL it from the roof) that this potential positive scenario is simply not going to transpire. The Taliban have a golden opportunity — and they surely see it as handed directly to them by Allah — to do to the Americans what has been done to all other invaders over the course of Afghanistan’s history; that is, to deliver them such a brutal parting blow that they will never, ever consider returning.

And please add the following to the mix, in case the Taliban might have any hesitation on their own (which I seriously doubt):

  • The Iranian regime dearly wants to repay the U.S. for Soleimani (and just on general principles for being the Great Satan). They look on Kabul airport today and they see fish in a barrel. They will not attack directly, but they must be scrambling to find any and every way they might aid and encourage the Taliban to turn this into a massacre of U.S. troops.
  • The Chinese regime is already delighted beyond expression with the way in which the U.S. has made itself appear impotent and untrustworthy in this turn of events, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like it to get much, much worse. What are the odds that they are informing the Taliban that if they should see it clear to doing whatever they can to massacre the U.S. troops at Kabul airport, that they will be taken care of, with future military supplies, trade, outright bribes? — you name it.
  • The Russians would also be delighted to see the U.S. deeply damaged by a catastrophe in Kabul, but whether Putin really has the money to spend to underwrite it is another question. (If he does, he’s spending it.)

Bottom line: This is a much deeper and difficult-to-solve predicament for the U.S. military than anyone seems to be acknowledging (least of all the ones who have the most solemn obligation: Joe Biden, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff). The advantages the U.S. had over the Taliban for the last 20 years have all evaporated. We should all be praying intensely for the lives of the American soldiers in Kabul. And for the rest of the Americans still in Afghanistan, likewise: God please help them, and in the same way all of those Afghans who have sincerely if vainly tried to serve the cause of freedom in their nation.

…

In terms of Joe Biden himself: We have been living the story of the Emperor Who Had No Clothes, and we are quickly approaching the final page. That’s all.

The others — Joint Chiefs’ Chairman Milley, Defense Secretary Austin, Secretary of State Blinken — ought already to have resigned, because the situation they allowed to develop is already inherently a catastrophe. In truth, they ought to have resigned in advance rather than attempt to implement Joe Biden’s rambling senile goal of removing all U.S. troops before September 11th, in the middle of the long-established Afghanistan fighting season, and regardless of the success that the Taliban were having on the battlefield.

…

A final reiteration of the current reality: If the Taliban choose, at their own discretion and on their own timing (and with all of these days to prepare) to initiate a battle to the death for Kabul airport, there is no big red button that Joe Biden can press to somehow instantly defeat them and rescue the U.S. troops. The Bagram airbase was surrendered on July 1st. There is no way to bring in U.S. reinforcements to the airport in Kabul under intense fire. There is nowhere to go at that point except a return to all out war in Afghanistan, albeit beginning from a considerably greater disadvantage than the U.S. faced in the autumn of 2001, when there was a strong organized opposition to the Taliban in the form of the Northern Alliance.

And yet Joe Biden’s intention here was to end the war in Afghanistan?! The bind that he now finds himself in is far beyond his mental capacity to comprehend and deal with in practical fashion. For him, however, we need have no care or regard. It is — as far as this writer is concerned — a criminal matter that a clearly cognitively impaired individual occupies the office of the presidency of the United States.

But for the soldiers at the airport in Kabul, dropped there to clean up this inconceivable and insoluble catastrophe, we ought to be praying. Let us truly pray.

Mourning Rush Limbaugh

Commentary, News

Maybe the world’s always been divided between those who’ve actually listened to Rush Limbaugh on the radio and those who never have. Today, however — the day of his death — this feels dramatically true.

Rush was a phenomenon on multiple levels. With all that’s being said about him today, it would be redundant of someone like me to go on about how much he transformed the American radio industry and influenced the political landscape. However, you could never appreciate what Rush did or how he did it without having listened to his show. It was his ability to be there for three hours a day, five days a week, and to be engaging, entertaining, provocative and human: this is what made him without peer. If one was getting one’s view of Rush from what the big media outlets said about him — generally only in moments of controversy and/or ginned-up outrage — then one would merely know a caricature. What made Rush tick with his audience was not the single soundbite, but the whole of what he did, even the rare uneven moments. Listening to just one show was always a journey of sorts — let alone the decades of indefatigable work.

As much as he was a giant, proven by all the achievements and numbers, I wonder how people in the future who never listened to him in full roaring topical context will possibly be able to understand what he was all about and how important he really was. Perhaps this is similar to how no one really knows anything about Will Rogers today, except that he was huge in his time. Yet, even if so, that’s OK: Rush’s thirty-plus years of ruling the moment from behind that golden EIB microphone will stand in the ether of time and resonate forever. There’s just no taking it back.

He’ll be missed not only by those who loved him and what he did, but also by those who hated him, even if they don’t realize they’ll miss him yet (and even if they never consciously realize it). If he did anything at all, he made those who felt scorned and ignored by the east coast/left coast media elite feel that they had a voice in their corner, and it was a big, cheerful voice, a reason not to despair in depressing times. Despair is dangerous. After the last 12 months of general horror and chaos in much of America, this writer can’t escape the nagging but unwelcome perception that Rush’s death and disappearance from the radio constitutes one more brick taken away from what remained of coherence in America’s body politic, after so much else has already fallen apart.

In a time of waiting for the next shoe to drop, a very big one just did.

…

I remember well when I first listened to Rush. Maybe all of us Rush-listeners do. It was about 25 years ago, when I was working an office job in New York City — a mind-numbingly boring niche in publishing — and one of my co-workers would have his headphones on through a large part of the day, and was frequently laughing to himself, albeit vainly trying to suppress his giggles. (In other moments, he seemed pretty normal.) One day he made reference to who he was listening on the radio: Rush Limbaugh. He emphasized that he didn’t agree with his politics — and I believe he meant it — but said that he just found him funny. Having no concept myself about Rush Limbaugh other than the media caricature already referenced — ideas like “blowhard,” “hate radio,” everyone knows the rest — one day I decided I might as well get a laugh if one happened to be available, and I fired up my Sony Walkman AM/FM cassette player and stuck the headphones on. American talk radio was a world unknown to me (one factor at least being my growing up in Ireland). Politically speaking, I was out of my youthful socialistic fantasies but not particularly committed to any other ideology. Rush was in a way a perfect voice to clarify the thoughts then floating around in my cranium about political correctness, which I’d flirted with as a young skull full of mush but had come to loath. Rush made me laugh about it.

It was the Clinton years, his second term, and El Rushbo was firing on all cylinders. There was zero real fear of what Bubba might do to the nation, at least as I recall; it was instead all powered by laughter at the looney things the left was trying to do, undergirded by a certainty that it would backfire and fail. Halfway between agreeing and disagreeing with Rush’s stance on various issues (idiot that I was), I couldn’t help but be carried along by his good humor and humanity about it all. Paul Shanklin’s musical parodies were delightfully outrageous and in the same spirit.

Having discovered AM talk radio via Rush, I naturally thought that there must be so much more great stuff out there. However, keeping the radio on didn’t take me to similar places. It turns out that it’s kind of hard to talk for three hours on topical issues and keep it fresh and entertaining. Other hosts veered into repetition and excessive reliance on callers and other gimmicks, and too often fell into being shrill and monotonously negative. Of-course there are — now as then — ones who are better and ones who are worse. But — now just like then — there are none with the perfect touch that Rush was able to deploy, that deft way with the microphone that simply recreated radio and gave an unexpected gift to America. It can only be something he was born with. Exactly like he said to his dying day, “Talent on loan from God.”

God has called back that loan. His timing is His business. He always has a plan.

Times changed for yours truly, and I couldn’t always listen to Rush at length in recent years, but he was always there, like a good friend, someone who’s point of view mattered, and with whom I could check in and share a laugh. Millions of us have lost that very good friend, and I think we all wish him Godspeed on his next adventure.

…

As much as Rush was so funny about so many things, he was serious about some. You could tell these things if you listened to him. He was serious about his love for America and the ideas of its founding. And he was serious about his joy on hearing about people who bypassed the weaponized misery of the American left — sometimes thanks to time spent listening to his show — and who took their fate into their own hands and embraced optimism, by starting their own business, or just by shaking off the shackles of victim-think, and learning to love freedom.

There’s much else that could be said about Rush, and much else being said. The hate-filled things that are being widely propagated only highlight the mindset of those who are unwilling to tolerate honest discussion. They are the ones saying “Shut up!” all the time: a command increasingly being enforced these days by Big Tech and other sanctimonious authorities, some of them armed. Rush was the one they never succeeded in shutting up, despite extraordinary efforts to do so. We shall all see what happens next. And we are all going to miss El Rushbo.

Such a Night

Commentary, News

As the lights go down, this January the 8th, 2021, it is certainly an incredible night, albeit in all of the wrong ways. Nobody is listening to anybody else, as people and their “platforms” are being banned, in the apparent belief that simply silencing the discontented will make everything alright. It is the crowning moment of “Social Media.” Let’s all get along! Hooray.

Well, for the record, count me out.

Paul Westphal, rest in peace

Commentary, News

I was deeply saddened to hear that Paul Westphal passed away yesterday, at the age of 70, having been diagnosed with brain cancer last August. He was a legend in the world of basketball, but, as the remembrances currently flowing out everywhere are indicating, he was also legendary in a much more important way: that is, as a truly good man who touched and impressed just about everyone he brushed up against during his life.

In the archives of this website is an interview I conducted with him some years back, when I was pursuing all things related to Bob Dylan, and talked to a few public-type figures about their own interest in Bob. Paul was enthusiastic and insightful on Dylan’s music. He was deeply tuned-in to the spiritual grounding of Dylan’s work, and very sensitive to Dylan’s journey in Christianity (an area where many of the famous critics seem to find themselves quite lost). Being privileged to meet Paul a few times — he was generous in his friendship and his support of my little bits of writing on Dylan — there was never any mistaking his own deep, intelligent and burning faith in God. Nor his love for his wife Cindy and his family. And these are the things that carry on, to be sure.

May God bless and keep him always.