Biden's Dangerous SpeechBlinken Gets Battered

Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday. His remarks won no friends on Capitol Hill. 

For starters, it was too much for him to make the five-mile trip from the State Department to Capitol Hill, so he testified by Zoom. That alone was totally disrespectful of "the people's House." 

I suspect it was done so people could be in the room with Blinken at the State Department helping him navigate the questions. He is the most unimpressive secretary of state I have seen in decades, and that's saying a lot. Blinken is making John Kerry look good!

During this entire Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco, the Biden Administration has insisted that it had no choice but to follow Trump's withdrawal plan or send tens of thousands of troops to war. Well, this administration has had no problem reversing every other Trump policy it encountered, so why should we believe they stuck to Trump's plan in Afghanistan?

Yesterday, Blinken was asked what kind of plan he inherited from the Trump Administration and he said there was no Trump plan. Well, which is it? Was Trump's plan responsible for this disaster or was Biden's plan responsible for this disaster?

As you may recall, the Biden Administration also insisted that it had no idea that the Taliban would overrun the country so quickly. But the intelligence shows there were plenty of warnings. In fact, Biden even called the former Afghan president and told him to "change the perception" that the government was losing, "whether it's true or not."

During yesterday's hearing, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) ripped into Blinken, accusing him of lying to Congress and the American people by manipulating the intelligence that warned the Taliban was making major gains on the ground. Other House Republicans demanded Blinken's resignation.

Secretary Blinken appeared this morning before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The hearing started with Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ) threatening to subpoena Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin because he refused to voluntarily appear with Blinken this morning.

In his opening testimony, Blinken again said that the Biden Administration expected the Taliban to keep its commitments to humanitarian norms regarding the treatment of women and minorities. That absurd claim prompted Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to blast Blinken and the Biden Administration for "being detached from reality." 

Johnson is absolutely right. There's no reason to trust these terrorists. They just reopened their Ministry of Vice and Virtue, which is responsible for enforcing the brutality of Sharia law. That doesn't bode well at all for women and religious minorities in Afghanistan.

And kudos to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who condemned the Biden Administration for giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" in the form of $64 million in "humanitarian aid."

Paul also pressed Blinken about reports that the Biden Administration may have mistakenly killed an Afghan aid worker in a drone strike last month. Blinken said, "I don't know because we're reviewing" the intelligence. 

Senator Paul shot back, "You'd think you'd kinda know before you off somebody with a Predator drone whether he's an aid worker or he's in ISIS."