In Washington, things have gone off the rails in a hurry. Many blame an invigorated unthinking progressive agenda for broken government. And they are correct. Think about it.
How else would you characterize the utterly failed “Let’s get out of Afghanistan overnight” move by a president who seemingly had little interest in the advice of his generals or diplomats?
Speaking of which, who made the call to shut down the contractors who maintained American-made Afghan air assets?
You do not have to be a West Point graduate to question why we would give away our dominant advantage (air power) and leave the critical airbase at Bagram on a battlefield populated by seventh-century religious warriors. Or why we would leave so many military assets (vehicles, weapons, helicopters, night-vision goggles, etc.) to the Taliban. Or why our soldiers were ordered to abandon the country before every last U.S. citizen was accounted for and safe.
This last question is, of course, the most important and the most baffling.
Today, the president’s press flack won’t even admit Americans are “stranded,” but the anguished calls for help by trapped Americans and our Afghan allies in and around the Kabul airport (and Thursday’s horrific bomb attacks) speak to a terribly broken policy.
How else would one characterize the chaos at our southern border as an estimated two million people will have migrated by the end of the year?
To make matters worse, an understaffed Border Patrol and a declawed ICE are in no position to stop the tons of fentanyl, COVID-positive migrants and sex traffickers that are the tangible results of a broken policy.
Note that the person allegedly in charge of border security has been on her second foreign junket to Southeast Asia.
How else would you characterize the historic level of violence in cities that have indulged the ludicrous crime-producing “defund the police” movement?
A glance at murder and other violent crime statistics from any of these progressive cities reminds us that the suspension of enforcement against so-called minor crimes and the pro-offender mindset of so many big-city (Soros-sponsored) prosecutors has made life significantly worse off for the good and law-abiding people living in deteriorating marginal neighborhoods.
Whatever did happen to that “let’s replace the police with social workers” initiative?
How else would you characterize a president who just last week begged OPEC to increase its (fossil fuel) oil production in the face of rapidly spiking gasoline prices and increasing world demand?
This pitiful picture is juxtaposed against the greatest accomplishment of the Trump administration: an American natural gas revolution. America’s vast supply of natural gas and modern drilling techniques helped achieve independence (production of more domestic energy than we consume) by Trump’s third year in office. And all during a time greenhouse gas emissions continue to decline.
How else would you characterize school systems that no longer care to teach the three “Rs” and no longer engage in objective measures of academic performance?
You can blame social justice warriors (and their compatriots in the teachers unions) who have infiltrated our local public school boards in order to indoctrinate our kids (as young as kindergarten age) with their unique curriculum of sex- and race-based instruction.
That their campaign is playing out against a backdrop of consistently underperforming (what used to be called “failing”) public schools in our most marginal neighborhoods is not lost on the commonsense majority.
Hence, a newly invigorated parent-teacher resistance to the woke mob’s agenda is born, as well as a new front in America’s culture wars.
How else would you characterize voting “reforms” that eliminate photo identification, scrubbing of voter rolls, signature matches on the inside and outside of mail-in ballots, and vote-counting transparency requirements?
Mistrust of our voting processes ran high among Democrats in 2016 and even higher among Republicans in 2020. Why in the world would either the states or the federal government want to further complicate the way we cast and count votes in our country?
How else would you characterize our out-of-control federal spending and the sudden re-emergence of inflation — that terrible debilitating tax on our nation’s poor that so many in Washington are soft-peddling?
There is a method to the madness, however, as today’s spiking inflation numbers bring back memories of the bad ‘ol days of the 1970s.
A bottom line emerges: What had been working during the Trump era had to be broken (such was the principle and all-consuming commitment of Biden 2020) regardless of consequence.
Indeed, from an incremental, secure withdrawal in Afghanistan to “Stay in Mexico” at the border to re-funding the police in our cities to real American energy independence from the gas fields to school choice in our classrooms, America was heading in the right direction. And then there was a worldwide pandemic — and an election. And now there are predictable short and long-term consequences.
Today, the breaking of Trump-era initiatives proceeds apace. This is what happens under single-party government. It is not a pretty sight. Broken never is.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
