Free Republic

Joe Biden’s emergency Afghanistan press conference Monday accomplished exactly the opposite of instilling confidence in the American regime, by neither promising accountability for this catastrophic failure nor releasing a plan to stabilize the situation, reassure our allies, and recapture at least some deterrence against our watching enemies. This is a disaster with evil consequences that will reverberate long and far.The lack of accountability worsens the debacle by teaching Americans, our friends, and our foes that things this grossly incompetent will happen again. As Ben Domenech pointed out Monday, “Whoever Biden doesn’t fire, their performance Biden believes is acceptable. If this...

That the decrepit state of planning in the leadup to a known and announced withdrawal deadline persists so late in the game is unforgivable.That the decrepit state of planning in the leadup to a known and announced withdrawal deadline persists so late in the game is unforgivable. …U.S. officials have insisted the military will be able to keep terrorism threats in check through what’s known as over-the-horizon operations, or those launched from outside the country. But plans for exactly how those operations will work and where those troops could be based are still being crafted. The United States does not...

<p>Rumsfeld was a true American patriot but also the archetype of disaster in the republic in the modern era, an outstanding tactician and an overmatched strategist.</p><p>It is one of the irritating defects of genius that, particularly when surrounded by crushing mediocrity, the audacity of having ideas becomes a source of recurring controversy. To have the most ideas means you have the most good ideas, but also the most bad ideas. I have had the great fortune to know and meet more than a handful of figures in my life who truly qualify as men of genius, and one of them was certainly Donald Rumsfeld, who passed away yesterday at the ripe age of 88.</p>

A team of amateur sky watchers has pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the debut flight of the nation’s first robotic spaceplane, finding clues that suggest the military craft is engaged in the development of spy satellites rather than space weapons, which some experts have suspected but the Pentagon strongly denies. Last month, the unmanned successor to the space shuttle blasted off from Florida on its debut mission but attracted little public notice because no one knew where it was going or what it was doing. The spaceship, known as the X-37B, was shrouded in operational secrecy, even as civilian...

The Berger whitewash -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: April 4, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com I knew it. You knew it. When Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser to the president of the United States, was caught red-handed stealing highly classified documents from the National Archives more than a year ago, he was permitted to go free. He was allowed to go out and give speeches. He was even permitted to serve as a national security adviser to a presidential candidate and was talked about as a possible secretary of state for John Kerry, should he have been elected to...