August | 2021 | libertybelle diaries

I’ve been following the American (and NATO) withdrawal from Afghanistan and while it’s certainly a Biden administration created debacle, President Biden keeps insisting there was no way to withdraw that wouldn’t have been this chaotic. There have been all sorts of foreign policy and military experts critiquing and doing Monday morning quarterback takes on the situation, but I’m more interested in the timeline of events rather than fancy debates over the “Biden strategy.” Nothing Biden or his top advisers have said thus far sounds like the chaos unfolding is a strategic failure. To be a strategic failure would require there to be a coherent plan and what happened is the Biden team wasn’t concerned with a planned withdrawal, but was “planning” a media event for the 20 year anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan – just another spin sideshow to sell their narrative.

Timelines matter so, while all the important details of what happened with the Biden team “withdrawal plan” aren’t known yet, many have begun to emerge and I’m going to focus on that.

As the Taliban sped across Afghanistan taking control of province after province with their offensive, the Biden White House kept urging the Taliban to stop their military offensive and work for a negotiated settlement, even as the Taliban moved to surrounding Kabul. The week before Kabul fell to the Taliban, Biden went on vacation. As the weekend of August 14th to15th approached, it was obvious the Taliban was moving to surround Kabul and that Kabul would fall, but still the Biden White House kept insisting they didn’t think that would happen.

The US embassy in Kabul was rushing to destroy sensitive documents and even as the US embassy in Kabul was evacuated by helicopter to the airport, the Biden spokespeople were insisting everything was running smoothly and they had the situation well in hand. On Sunday, August 15th, the White House released a picture from Camp David of the president seated a long table doing a teleconference with top advisers, insisting they had everything under control.

By Monday, August 16th, the president returned to the White House in the afternoon, delivered a speech, took no questions from the press, then resumed his vacation back at Camp David.

Here’s the State Department message to the Taliban on August 16th:

https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1427389269170180109

The White House has continued talking about the Taliban as seeking to become a “legitimate” government continuously and “Taliban legitimacy” has been a key point the Biden team keeps selling, while assuring America everything is going fine with their evacuation efforts in Kabul, because the Taliban is cooperating fully with the efforts.

Across the pond, as Kabul was poised to fall to the Taliban, British prime minister, Boris Johnson, on Saturday August 14th was trying to go on vacation too:

“Johnson, who attempted to head for a holiday on Saturday only to return as the Taliban closed in on the Afghan capital, was accused of “careless leadership” by opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/pm-johnson-says-britain-will-do-all-it-can-prevent-afghan-crisis-2021-08-18/

It’s been reported since that Boris Johnson tried to speak to Biden for over 36 hours and could not get through to him.

Those 36+ hours hold the key to what really happened inside the Biden White House. It’s been reported that at the G-7 earlier this summer Biden promised our European allies that the US would secure Kabul for evacuations when they pulled out. Obviously, Biden failed to live up to that promise and while Kabul was falling, the Biden White House kept the president out of the loop with talking to our closest allies.

The smoke and mirrors spin routine by the Biden team in the past week has so many echoes of the Obama team’s Benghazi spin disaster, which eclipsed the disaster of the US facility falling under attack and the loss of lives there. None of this should be surprising, because the Biden team is pretty much the same Obama team. Following the spin word games closely will lead you to the truth, as they keep trying to deflect, deny, and most of all deceive the American people at every turn.

While the Biden team was avoiding talking to our NATO allies, who had stuck with America in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, the Biden team was in constant contact with the Taliban working out a deal.

I believe the Biden team panicked once Kabul fell and the disturbing images of the US embassy in Kabul evacuating by helicopter and the chaos started appearing in the media. I believe that during those 36+ hours the Biden team cut a deal with the Taliban and offered them “legitimacy” (unfreezing Afghan financial assets/ recognition) in exchange for cooperating with the US evacuation from Kabul.

Those missing hours, where Biden was tucked away at Camp David on vacation, his team was working out a deal with the Taliban and it’s imperative to find out who in the Biden WH made those decisions. What the exact details of that deal have not been disclosed, but gauging by how often Biden and his State Department talk about the Taliban seeking “legitimacy,” I think it’s a safe guess “legitimacy” was the biggest carrot the Biden team dangled. It’s obvious that Biden only reads the scripts these people hand him and is not pouring over details.

It looks like the Biden plan is more a spin effort to keep talking about the Taliban as a trustworthy and responsible partner in our evacuation effort and a “legitimate” government. We’re being massively duped by another Obama team media narrative, while Biden is rolled out only to read prepared scripts and do ice cream run photo-ops.

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08/24/2021: I wanted to add a few more thoughts. It’s not only timelines that matter in figuring out what happened here, but the weekend Kabul fell, with Biden at Camp David on vacation and his administration working out some deal with the Taliban, while not taking calls from British prime minister, Boris Johnson OR calling and coordinating with our NATO allies does speak volumes.

I often feel like I’ve been studying the Dem/liberal media spin information war more closely and longer than anyone I can think of, because it affected me personally and since 1998, I have been worried about corruption at the highest level of our government and the willingness to corrupt the US military chain of command for partisan political reasons. That said, the ways in which top Dems manage and bury major crises are very predictable and often repeating the same spin playbook. This Biden WH deal with the Taliban is a repeat of John Kerry’s 2016 Iran playbook. My gut feeling is this Biden team debacle in Afghanistan is going to me 100X more humiliating for America than the US sailor incident in 2016 and may lead to so much domestic and foreign fall-out that no amount of crappy spin (lies) will be able to contain it. We might be very close to a tipping point in American history.

In 2016, Iran captured US sailors. John Kerry negotiated the release of the sailors and just as John Kerry was taking a victory lap waxing on about the new era of diplomacy with Iran this release represented, Iran released embarrassing hostage video of US sailors on their knees and sailors crying. Every American adversary knows exactly who this Biden team is, because it’s the same corrupt, weak, fools who made up the Obama team:

“There is no truth in reporting that Secretary Kerry apologized to the Iranians,” Kerry spokesman John Kirby told reporters, later tweeting that the claim had “zero” validity. “As the Secretary said in his statement this morning, he expressed gratitude to Iranian authorities for their cooperation in swiftly resolving this matter, and noted that the peaceful and efficient resolution of this issue is a testament to the critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure, and strong.”

The White House said that its approach was vindicated with the rapid return of the sailors.

But several Republicans criticized President Barack Obama for not addressing the incident during his State of the Union on Tuesday night, which came shortly after the sailors and their two ships were taken.

“At the White House we reached the conclusion that further elevating the situation by including it in the State of the Union address would not be the most effective way for us to ensure the safe return of our sailors,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. “And I think the outcome, which is the release of the sailors just hours after the President completed his address, is a pretty powerful endorsement of that strategy.”
Another video of the captured sailors showed them on their knees with their hands on their heads.

The video was aired just as Kerry credited diplomatic strength and newly developed ties with Iran in helping secure the quick and safe release of the sailors.”
https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/13/politics/iran-us-sailors/index.html

The past few years have been the hardest years of my life. I’ve written about my husband’s long-term illness in other posts and about his death in March of this year, but I want to write about some care decisions along the way, especially vaccines.

My husband, as my regular readers know, had late stage COPD and normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). He was diagnosed with COPD in 1999 and NPH in 2012, although he had the symptoms of NPH from around 2006-2007, when he started walking with a strange side-to-side gait and falling frequently. Along the way significant short-term memory problems became apparent too.

The initial VP shunt in his ventricle drained the fluid from his ventricle and he regained some mobility, walking with a walker, but his short-term memory problems never improved and continued to worsen.

In 2018 he was hospitalized with sepsis and the neuro-surgeon did shunt revision surgery, after my husband recovered from sepsis and spent two weeks in a rehabilitation hospital, to regain his strength. He never regained much mobility and that declined steadily, as did the memory problems.

In Dec. 2019, the neurosurgeon told me that some NPH patients develop symptoms very similar to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. My husband had both, with increasing dementia and tremors in his right hand and right leg. He was mostly wheelchair-bound by 2019 and needed assistance with all basic care.

In late January 2020, our son got a very bad upper-respiratory infection and had a lot of difficulty breathing, but he refused to go to the doctor. And shortly thereafter my husband got sick, coughing and lots of lung congestion. His primary care doctor prescribed antibiotics and a steroid. A few days later, things declined much more and my husband was very weak, I could hear his chest rattling even a few feet away, but he didn’t want to go to the ER. He fell forward off of his chair onto the floor. My son helped get him into the wheelchair and I took him to the ER.

My husband had acute respiratory failure. He had received his flu shot and was up to date on his pneumonia vaccine too. Yes, I’m one of the countless people who believe it was Covid, before the date of the first verified case in the US, but that’s not the point of this post – it’s about vaccines. My husband was in very poor health for a long time and any respiratory infection in his condition was potentially life-threatening.

After a few days in the hospital, my husband was discharged on home hospice and there began probably the most challenging experience of my life – full-time caregiver to someone who is completely bed-bound.

My husband “survived” that infection, but he never recovered to even the level of function, where he had been before that infection. He would have a few days, occasionally even a few weeks of appearing better, followed by days or weeks where he slept most of the time and I’d think he was close to the end. The hospice nurses monitored his condition and told me these ups and downs are common with hospice patients. This went on for 13 months.

I had no idea what hospice care actually does, since most people I had known who opted for hospice care died very quickly. The doctor did not expect my husband to survive very long either, with the condition of his lungs. During those 13 months, my husband had several infections and was prescribed antibiotics. The hospice nurse told me that while antibiotics won’t change the outcome of his condition, treating infections relieves suffering and helps keep him comfortable.

My husband’s hospice provider also administered flu vaccines to patients who wanted them. I had them give my husband the flu vaccine, because although I knew my husband was going to die, I wanted him to die as painlessly as possible and having the flu is awful, especially for someone who already has a debilitating lung disease. If Covid vaccines had been available and recommended for hospice patients, I would have talked to my husband’s hospice team and had him receive a Covid vaccine, for the very same reason..

If you ever watch someone in acute respiratory failure, you would want to do everything you can to prevent that.

Luckily, the overwhelming majority of people who receive the Covid vaccine can just go about their lives. It’s free and easily accessible all over the country.

There’s so much politicization of everything pertaining to Covid. There’s also information and misinformation overload in our digital age. I’ve listened to experts talk about spike proteins and all sorts of potential long-term risks with the Covid vaccines.

I’ve listened to some experts minimize risks too, making it sound like there are absolutely no potential serious side effects., but here’s my opinion about “risk” when it comes to medications and especially vaccines.

The evidence of vaccines literally changing the world and saving millions of lives is overwhelming.

Yes, I know, the Covid vaccines are experimental. When my doctor prescribes FDA-approved medications, I still read the warnings on the medication and many have a lot of serious potential adverse reactions, that are rare. I take that into consideration and almost always opt to take them, because I trust my doctor’s advice and because I think about the risks vs. benefits. Life isn’t risk-free, it’s about weighing options. There seems to be a pervasive mass Covid hysteria, I think, mostly because of the unknown nature of Covid and compounded by political and media fear-mongering, that’s creating unnecessary fear and panic reactions, that impede people’s ability to calmly assess, not only the risk, but the potential benefit.

I received the Moderna vaccine in March (2nd shot in April) and have not for a moment regretted that decision. I had more anxiety with radiation treatments many years ago, and although years later I had some long-term problems from the radiation treatment, they were not life-threatening and the alternative was I probably wouldn’t be alive today, if I had not had those 8 weeks of radiation treatment.

In America, we all have the right to decide for ourselves on medical treatments, but I urge anyone on the fence to talk to their doctor and discuss Covid vaccines. I do know someone with a serious medical condition, whose doctor recommended he not get the vaccine and we should all respect that some people will opt not to get the vaccine.

I am completely opposed to mandatory masking, mandatory lockdowns and absolutely against mandatory vaccines. I am against all of the surveillance state type tracking of social distancing monitoring being tried in several countries and I am completely against vaccine passports and these corporate efforts to punish, silence, and now even force employees to get vaccinated or be fired. What I refuse to do though, is look at vaccines through a political lens and I hope many conservatives, Republicans, and MAGA supporters resist the urge to diss vaccines to “own the libs.”

Both Republicans and Democrats have politicized Covid, as have many of our public health officials, but the truth is we all need to try to work together as Americans and pull together to get through this Covid challenge a stronger nation.

Monthly Archives: August 2021

Biden Afghanistan crisis team same as Obama Benghazi team

Don’t diss Covid vaccines to own the libs

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