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Quote of the Day: ‘Whether It Is True or Not…’
It’s my fond hope (I’m using the word “fond” in the old-fashioned sense of “foolish,” because I really do know better, given the fondness–using it this time in the modern sense–of the mainstream media for memory-holing inconvenient facts), that those words, spoken by Joe Biden to the President of Afghanistan on July 23, 2021 as follows (emphasis mine):
Hey look, I want to make it clear that I am not a military man any more than you are, but I have been meeting with our Pentagon folks, and our national security people, as you have with ours and yours, and as you know and I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.
live to haunt Joe Biden for whatever remains of his sorry time in office, every time he opens his mouth.
As in, something like this:
Whether it is true or not, Joe Biden today assured the American people that the fact that only one-third as many new jobs were created in August as has been projected (235K vs 720K), is evidence that “the Biden plan is working.”
Over to you.
Published in General
Where did you get the illustration? I’m pretty sure the same illustrator did my copy of Narnia, which is a large-format edition I found at Costco.
At his age it’s going to be hard for him to change.
Maybe someone following his style? I usually search Wikimedia Commons for public domain images, and this one is a nineteenth-century illustration by Enrico Mazzanti of Le Avventure di Pinocchio.
Nothing Biden says or does seems to “follow” him. Few people seem to care about his false accusations of drunk-driving against a truck driver regarding the death of his daughter and first wife.
He’s difficult to listen to and impossible to understand, so I can see why people don’t take notice.
This probably won’t go down in history as notably as “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Or before that, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.”
Or, “That all depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”
Or, (once more from Bill Clinton, and my personal favorite) “I didn’t inhale.”
Or even “If you like you doctor you can keep your doctor.”
All of Biden’s lines are eminently forgettable.
His nose isn’t long enough.
You lie.
Can you imagine the roasting SNL would give the Donald if he tried to gaslight the entire country like this? They won’t though. “Saturday Night Live” has been deader than Elvis for twenty five years.
So there seems to be a disapproval of the idea that it’s wrong to try to project optimism in a bad military situation, “whether it is true or not.”
How does this proposition stack up against Churchill’s use of the successful Dunkirk evacuation to give the impression that things were going well, whether it was true or not? It wasn’t true, as the fall of France was an absolute catastrophe. But the propaganda value of Dunkirk was pretty important in fortifying British morale, as far as I can tell.
Was Churchill wrong too? Or is it just that leaders aren’t supposed to actually say such things?
You are comparing withdrawing from the Continent after the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg through France with Grandpa Joe unilaterally bugging out of Afghanistan because he wanted a line for his Sept. 11th speech?
From Their Finest Hour, Churchill writing:
“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”
My son said he wonders if the reason Nancy Pelosi has not called Congress into an emergency session is that there are enough Democrats against him now that if she did, he would be forced to resign.
On the other hand, if Pelosi leaves Congress to their own devices, they might go off to Afghanistan on their own and that will make the mood in Congress even worse. :-)
As the Republican congressman Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma did:
When they reconvene September 13 for the Senate and September 20 for the House I think Congress will have reached a tipping point. If Biden doesn’t resign quickly in the next three weeks, I imagine Mitch McConnell, who has said he does not want to impeach Biden, will be removed by the Senate Republicans to be replaced by a senator who does see the need to act.
The governors will also be irreconcilably angry about the 50,000 Afghan refugees–many pf whom pose a risk to the people in their state because they have not been vetted–being sprinkled around the country this coming week.
Unfortunately, we waited too long. Many of the bad actions that Biden has taken are unfixable at this point.
Heh. Gary Varvel and myself think alike.
President Biden called the Afghanistan withdrawal a success and bragged about no one could have evacuated as many people and blamed the problems on the last administration (Trump).
Hat tip to Powerline for displaying this.
?? I don’t understand any of this. The Senate doesn’t impeach, and the Republicans couldn’t remove Biden from office if they wanted to.
I’m not suggesting a process or procedure here at all. That’s beyond my understanding of congressional process and law. What I am predicting is a massive congressional temper tantrum of some kind, and they will figure out some way to get Biden to resign.
I don’t know how they are going to do it, but I’m guessing they will figure something out.
Thank you.
Let me be perfectly clear (said She with a disconcerting change of subject) that I think Ralph Waldo Emerson was, for most of his life, not a very nice man. However, on the principle that one should not (usually***) throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, he did say that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Sometimes, it’s quite easy to determine the difference between what is right and what is wrong, on the same basis that Justice Potter Stewart described obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
And jonesing for a September 11 speech and photo opportunity on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (I don’t forget that Biden’s original order was to have the troop evacuation end by September 11, as if he could not have telegraphed that intention any more clearly); backing up that date to August 31 in the face of the outrage the original deadline engendered; doing very little to start an organized evacuation of the actually relatively few Americans in the country and to identify, and provide exit plans, to those Afghans already holding SIVs and those legitimately in the process of acquiring them (yes, yes, I’ve heard all the arguments about how this would have caused a hysterical rush for the exits. HELLO?); telling the President of Afghanistan to lie about what was an impending, fast-moving catastrophe in his own country (at the same time as Biden was lying to the American people about the possibility of the ANA holding the country after the troops left–all to gin up more support for his mania to remove them by the date certain); and then betraying his pledge to that same Afghan President that American air support would hold up at least through August 31, while Biden was preparing to desert Bagram AFB in the dead of night without even notifying his allies, starting with the Brits), is behavior so utterly reprehensible that my womanly gut has no hesitation in condemning it outright, Churchill or no Churchill.
If Biden and his minions hadn’t figured out By July 23, 2021 that Ashraf Ghani, like Karzai before him, was a paper tiger of its own creation–intent only on feathering his own nest at the expense of tens of thousands of his own people, billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money, and the blood of thousands of American troops, and that he was looking out only for himself–and if they thought he was somehow going to muster Churchillian cojones to lead his troops, mobilize Pashtu and send them both into battle, then I despair. If they knew that’s what Ghani was, then attempting to conspire with him in the execution of a ignominious and dangerous plan they knew Ghani couldn’t possibly bring to fruition is even worse.
Sometimes, as another not-very-nice man is supposed to have said, “A cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes, wrong is just wrong. And no amount of sifting through history’s tea leaves and finding false parallels to justify, or even try to sanitize it, will make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, or put lipstick on this pig.
**There are a few for whom I am quite willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, starting with Roman Polanski, moving through a number of entertainment and media icons, and on down to all those whited sepulchers who occasionally find themselves in the news for manipulating thousands, if not millions of gullible people into willing discipleship, and a few I’ve met in my own life of a similiar sort, who are eventually outed as the mountebanks and hypocrites they are. But, I think the fact that I allow for exceptions simply proves the truth of Emerson’s maxim, again.
Wait, what?? These are the Republicans we’re talking about. 😂😂😂
Yes, and Biden and the above aforementioned all talked in that same “folksy” sort of way, like a relative telling you how good the blue plate special was at the diner this afternoon, and by the way, I did nothing wrong, and we need to take care of those folks over there, and I’m never guilty, and these folks need our help and we promise to be there for them, and define if? You get the picture.
Optimism isn’t the same thing and lying. And optimism isn’t the denying of reality. If “things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban” then saying otherwise is an outright lie. It’s not optimism.
Cheaters never prosper.
If only that were true….
I’m not agreeing that the Senate will force Biden out, but I agree that even impeachment is a political process, for political ends. And it’s not the only one.
People of the left recognize each other by mannerisms, habits of speech, and the scent of their anus, and by the recommendations and attitudes of more senior lefties. But they recognize each other mainly by the drive to divide and destroy, which all people of the left share and respect. They are the common enemy of civilization, and that binds them tighter than blood.
No, I am comparing President Biden wanting to spin something positively for purposes of morale, to Churchill doing the same thing.
Joe doesn’t have Churchill’s style.
(wheezing chuckling)
Great job.
Pick one sentence out of context to criticize President Biden, then pick two sentences out of context to defend Churchill. Other portions of his June 4, 1940 speech were quite triumphant. He also blamed the Belgian king quite harshly, though not unjustly. You can read the whole thing here.
While we’re on the topic of lying, here is what Churchill said in that speech about the air battle at Dunkirk. The sentence immediately preceding the two that you quoted was:
The two sentences immediately following the two that you quoted were:
Well, it looks like Churchill’s claims about the RAF turned out to be wrong. According to this RAF museum webpage, The RAF “lost 87 airmen and over 100 aircraft to enemy action over Dunkirk whilst the Luftwaffe lost 97 aircraft to the RAF, with others damaged but repairable . . ..” Per this review, a 2017 book concluded that the RAF lost “432 Hurricanes and Spitfires” while “German aircraft losses totaled an estimated 402 planes.”
So Churchill was claiming a 4:1 air victory, while modern scholarship seems to indicate that the RAF lost slightly more planes than the Luftwaffe.
I’m a fan of Churchill, actually. I write these things to point out that the criticisms of President Biden for one sentence, taken out of context and which is a reasonable effort to build morale in a bad military situation, are silly, in my opinion.
About telling the truth, but the way, there’s another Churchill quote: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”