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The ADVANCE, August 25, 2021 /Page 6A
(Site Ahumtce
A free press is not a privilege but
organic necessity in a great society.
—Walter Lippmann
COMMENTARY
out of
CONTEXT
A compilation of quotations on a variety of
issues by national, state and regional writers,
well-known personalities, just plain everyday
people and from various publications
collected by the editors of THE ADVANCE.
Quotes for our Times:
Greg Gutfeld, host of Gutfeld! and co
host of The Five: Our leaders botched the
Afghanistan withdrawal, they were too
busy destroying the US.
I'm not bashing the decision to leave.
It's how the atrocious exit negated so
much sacrifice. This is truly a man-made
disaster. In Biden's speech yesterday he
defiantly defended his botched exit. As if
we were critical of leaving. But we weren't.
We were critical of his incompetence in
carrying it out.
Judith Miller, Fox News contributor, au
thor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning investiga
tive reporter formerly with The New York
Times: Biden's Afghan debacle is devas
tating. It's been made worse because he
won't own his mistakes.
Reasonable people can disagree
about whetherthe U.S. should have kept at
least a modest troop presence in Afghani
stan for the foreseeable future to prevent
a Taliban takeover. But Biden himself is to
blame for the disaster sparked by the man
ner of his withdrawal.
His decision to send 6,000 more soldiers
to the country reflects recognition of that
error, and of his failure to plan adequately
for the evacuation of the 18,000 Afghans
(with their 57,000 family members) who
worked with the American military.
John Stossel, author of "Give Me a
Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats,
and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge
of the Liberal Media": Silenced!
The U.S. military is highly skilled at NEO
(Noncombatant Evacuation Operation
— "the departure of civilian noncomba
tants and nonessential military personnel
from danger in an overseas country to a
designated safe haven ... Even a NEO
involving an area as large as Afghanistan
could have been planned and prepared
in 30 to 45 days if the Joint Chiefs of Staff
had coordinating power and the State
Department arranged for temporary refu
gee housing in third-country safe havens.
The decision to withdraw from the huge air
base at Bagram was utterly stupid, at least
until threatened Afghans were extracted.
Matt Vespa, Senior Editor at Townhall.
com: Why one ex-CIA agent says we could
enter one of the most dangerous times in
history post-Afghanistan.
Strong leadership is required to keep
the US level and there is no way Biden
could handle China and Russia and ter
ror groups challenging American power.
Biden can barely handle evacuating the
US Embassy staff out of Kabul. The man
gave some remarks about how he was
awesome in Afghanistan and how it's ev
eryone else's fault...and then goes back
on vacation? He can't do the job. And if
I were America's enemies, I'd be plotting
perpetually. This guy will never be able to
handle the pressure. He's already on the
verge of stroking out.
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President Biden’s
Man-Made Disasters
RICH 1
LOWRY
COLUMN |
President Biden arrived in
office with the southern U.S.
border secure and Afghanistan
in a state of fragile equilibrium.
Eight months later, the
border continues to be deluged
with migrants overwhelming
our capacity to properly house
and process them, and we are
evacuating our personnel from
Hamid Karzai International
Airport in Kabul overrun by
desperate Afghans fleeing the
Taliban.
The crisis at the border and
the stunningly swift defeat in
Afghanistan are entirely on
Biden. He took sustainable
situations and overturned them
out of ideological fixity and
fantastical wishful thinking.
The outcomes were utterly
predictable. Indeed, anyone
who knew anything about the
border or Afghanistan warned
what would happen.
The debacles haven’t been
the product of forces beyond
Biden’s control; events didn’t
take a hand, he did. These are
man-made disasters.
Throw on top the crime
wave in U.S. cities that is a
product of the left’s enthusiasm
for fashionable anti-cop
sentiments, and the picture is of
a party that is unable to
maintain order or rationally
calculate the downside
consequences of its rhetoric
and policies.
One hallmark of the Biden
approach has been laughably
false assurances. He maintained
at a press conference in March
that there was nothing unusual
going on at the border, when
the historic surge had already
begun. Only last month, he
confidently predicted that
there’d be no dramatic rooftop
evacuations from Kabul, when
a rapid collapse of the
government was always a
distinct possibility.
Then, there are the
ineffectual warnings. Biden
officials have repeatedly told
migrants to stop coming to the
U.S. border, when they have
every incentive to continue to
do so, and his representatives
tsk-tsked the Taliban about
sweeping to power by force —
something that they have
fought to do for 20 years —
because it would supposedly
harm the group’s international
image.
And, finally, the rank
blame-shifting. Biden’s team
has outlandishly tried to argue
that President Donald Trump
somehow created the
conditions for the border
spinning out of control, when
the truth is that Trump, after
false starts, figured out how to
get a handle on it. Biden points
the finger at Trump, too, on
Afghanistan.
Here, he has more of a case
— the so-called peace deal that
Trump cut with the Taliban was
a travesty that undercut the
Afghan government. But
nothing forced Biden, who has
happily reversed field on most
Trump policies, to abide by an
agreement that the Taliban
violated from the outset or to
execute a withdrawal that
kneecapped the Afghan army in
the midst of fighting season and
a gathering Taliban offensive.
He was the one whose exit
denied the Afghan army the
U.S. air support and logistics it
had always depended on, who
left without securing a nearby
base in the region, who didn’t
care enough about Afghan allies
who had risked their lives for us
to ensure that they could get
out of the country, who sent a
message of abandonment that
was a blow to Afghan morale
from the top all the way down.
It’s a particularly galling
Biden rhetorical move to use
the catastrophic failure of the
Afghan forces that he helped
bring about to insist that his
decision to leave was the only
responsible one. He’s gone
from claiming we could safely
Please see Lowry page 8A
GRITTY
Debacle in
Afghanistan
Symptom of
Confusion at Home
President Joe
Biden was right in his
speech to the nation
about our withdrawal
from Afghanistan,
that a long legacy of
American
involvement there
preceded him.
But across the
board, in domestic as
well as foreign policy, any new president
inherits realities that precede him. The issue
confronting every president is what
principles and policies will he put in place
to deal with these existing realities that will
define his administration.
Most clear now is that America’s
withdrawal from Afghanistan is surrounded
by a perception of confusion, weakness and
humiliation.
For anyone who believes that our
nation should be a beacon of strength for
freedom in the world, that beacon has been
deeply tarnished.
According to The Jerusalem Post, these
are the nations that will most benefit from
this moment: Q_atar, Russia, China,
Pakistan, Turkey and Iran. According to the
Post, “Most of these countries have hosted
the Taliban or tacitly backed them.”
In other words, this round has been
won by forces in the world for whom
freedom is not a value.
Biden in his remarks said, “We went to
Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear
goals: get those who attacked us on Sept.
11,2001, and make sure al-Qaida could not
use Afghanistan as a base from which to
attack us again.”
This is inaccurate. Months after the
attack on Sept. 11, 2001, President George
W. Bush defined a two-pronged strategy of
retaliation in his State of the Union address.
One, “Shut down terrorist camps, disrupt
Please see Nitty page 8A
By Star Parker
COMMENTARY
Susan DeRose
Movies
have provided
entertainment
for us, dating
back to the
prime years of
Thomas Edi
son’s inventive
mind. Since
Americans
began putting
“another nick
el in the nickelodeon” in the early
1900s, we can’t get enough of mov
ing images across silver screens.
One of the greatest perks of my
life came about in my undergradu
ate days when Elrod Sims, manager
of the Georgia Theatre in Athens,
gave me two season passes for all the
movies that took place at his estab
lishment on North Lumpkin Street.
My dating options were en
hanced considerably to say the least.
I couldn’t wait for new movies to be
listed on the marquee. It was not un
common to take in the same movie
twice or more. With the passing of
time, I lost interest in movies. Until
last weekend the most recent movie
I had seen was “Saving Private Ryan,”
which came out in July 1998.
I was delightfully uplifted with
the accommodations at a local cin
ema, (never watched a movie before
in La-Z-Boy rocker style), where we
accompanied friends to enjoy the
premier of “Charming the Hearts of
Men,” which has a decided “local”
connection. Susan DeRose, with
family ties to Athens (she still owns
a home in the Five Points section of
town), wrote the script and codirect
ed this entertaining and racy produc
tion which was shot in Athens and
Madison.
DeRose was born in Los Ange
les to a father who was a pilot who
distinguished himself at the historic
Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II,
in which the Allies reinforced their
dominance in the Pacific which led
to the ultimate defeat of Japan.
Her mother, Judy Farr, grew up
in Athens, and her uncle, Judd Farr,
was an outstanding track athlete at
Georgia and became a passionate
alumnus.
With the family ties to the Red
and Black, it was only natural that
she would enroll at UGA, which she
did one summer in the seventies but
what most would say was for a “cup
of coffee.” She later transferred to
Brenau, in nearby Gainesville. How
ever, the brief matriculation at UGA
allowed for her to connect with
Richard Lewis, who became her life
time partner.
Those vagabond early years for
the two of them, Richard, a native of
Indianola, Miss., wound up at Dar
lington Prep in Rome and then on
to Georgia. They met at a Christmas
party in Athens in 1976. Each had
crashed the party.
Before they settled in Atlanta in
the late Seventies, Susan was a flight
attendant for American Airlines in
the days when travelers in first class
were served big steaks and hot fudge
sundaes for dessert. It was the era
Please see Loran page 12A
By Loran Smith
