The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report. Welcome. Welcome, Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Hard to be energetic today as we watch what's unfolding across the United States, across from the United States, in Afghanistan. Very sad day, scary day. And for those men and women who serve in the military and also their families, one of those days that's well, kind of haunting. It is a day that you watch the TV and you you watch the coverage on social media and you just hold your breath. So welcome to the Pro America Report today. And again, I have a hard time feeling particularly good or energetic about things today. We just have to buckle down, say our prayers, and try to figure out the best way to go forward. And, you know, I mentioned yesterday a lot of people were predicting that something like this could happen. A lot of experts were saying, yeah, this is something that could happen. But I think I hope you heard me say yesterday. We need to hope and pray that this gets better. We need to hope and pray that there are people in our highest level of our government, our military, that can get control of this. And the only lesson if I can say in this to me is that weakness begets weakness. Weakness becomes perception. It's almost like perception is reality. Once you're perceived as weak and unable to kind of get a grasp of things, people take advantage of that. And so the reports are now that I don't know, it could be up to 60 people died, at least twelve military men. And I don't know if it's all men, I haven't seen that coverage, but it's eleven Marines and one Navy Corpman, some others wounded, that we may still see more fatalities. So just totally haunting, haunting images, haunting deaths. And it is well, it's beyond belief. And either the one thing I want to pause on is to say again, we have to hope and pray for better. We have to hope and pray that things get better, that the leaders get better at what they're doing and try to get control, but we have to be careful not to celebrate the failure. Meaning I didn't think Joe Biden was up to the job either. But it's no time to celebrate right now. And I was rereading General Mike Flynn's book, Field of Fight, about the threat of the kind of terrorism we're seeing and his approach to it. It probably bears remembering that, reminding ourselves about that and what is possible. One of the real tensions right now in our nation is the fact that we're trying to fight a war periodically for 20 years, we did, but we're trying to address serious threats. But with real time media, you kind of wonder how well people are able to handle what they see. In other words, are they backing off from what needs to be done in part because they are seeing things that are so terrible? That feels like that is part of what's happening. It feels like part of what people are going through, but it is really, really troubling. Now, let me say this. I think there's a couple of things we have to be aware of. Number one, we want to get out of Afghanistan, right? That is the right move. So anybody who's now saying, oh, let's go do this or that or the other thing I think they're wrong on, the approach is wrong to say we have to somehow reengage. But at this point, we're actually in something of a hostage situation. There's still plenty of men and women in our armed forces that are stuck there, and we've got to figure out what to do about that. By the way, the book, again, that I mentioned, is The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies. The chapter that General Flynn recommended last week was How to Win. And what does winning mean? And how do we accomplish this? This is what he starts out with, and he goes through a list of that, and then he goes through how you have to win. But here's the thing. The primary requirement for winning any war is the willingness, determination and resolve to win and do the necessary things required for victory. At the moment, we have a President. This is written in 2014, who said, incredibly, what I'm not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning. I don't know where that quote came from from Obama, but that's the point here. We have to be willing to win. We have to be willing to do what it takes to get our people out of there. And at this point, we have for hours and hours after the events of today, we didn't even hear from the President. The British Prime Minister spoke to to his people. Other international leaders spoke to their people.And we're wondering, we're waiting and wondering, wondering what this story is. So now, again, back to my point. We don't want to go back to war in Afghanistan. We do not want to be drawn back into a war that would be the worst possible outcome for us in this situation to get drawn back in in some dramatic way. Imagine we go racing in to try to do something with more military, and we find out that we do it halfway, and we end up with a situation like Black Hawk Down back in the Somali era. So be careful as we get angry to see what happened to our people. And again, I'm all for condemning the botched handling the botched evacuation of Afghanistan. We should name that. Biden will own it throughout history. It's not going well for him. But right now we've got a problem. And the problem is twofold, one, we've got people that are vulnerable in Afghanistan that need to get out. And two, we've got a world that now perceives us as so weak, or at least as headed by someone who has such weakness. And that's a major problem, because the next attack is going to come now. It feels like. And I hope again, I hope we should hope it's not. We should hope that there's not another attack in Afghanistan or anywhere else. But it feels like it will be. And you know what? Let me ask you this. Under Donald Trump's time in office, did you worry about terrorism? I don't think we did. I think it was off the table, in part because he dropped a couple of MOABs mother of all bombs, they call it in Afghanistan, I think. And he bombed some folks in Syria. And I think people thought, Holy cow, this guy is kind of a cowboy. So those are the two problems we have. We have a problem in Afghanistan. It's got to be addressed. It's terrible now. It's worse and worse. But we have an international problem where I think other nations and other terror elements are going to move against us. And we have to get ready for that. And our response cannot be Biden's an idiot. That's not sufficient. Our response has to be who can lead. How can we do it? We've got a country here. We've got a nation. We've got to come together. It's not easy because I think people are really frustrated about what they've seen and what they're what they've heard and what is happening. So it is a challenge. But today, I just don't want to fight too much over the actions of the people in the White House that have been so terrible and so disjointed. I just don't think it does any good. But we have to move on. We have to move on. We have to I'm thinking about I know that we've got one more show before the weekend, but it feels like the weekend is going to come. And we have to get to our churches and our synagogues, our places of faith. And we have to renew ourselves in prayer, because this is a really, really dark time now. And again, the presence of the evil in the world is nothing new, right? We know that's happening. But the reality of the presence of evil, the problem is we have a inability and to so many of us are living in places, and we're hearing from people who are not acknowledging the evil. The evil is always going to exist. It's what we do about it. It's how we bring light to the situation that matters. And what we're seeing right now is that we're not having a lot of light bringing. And, you know, that some of that comes from the political leadership. I know. But it has to come from our faith communities and our homes and our communities of leaders among us. That's what's got to happen to us and for us every day. And I hope that this weekend will be a part of a renewal for our faith communities to say get focused on what's happening and get ourselves renewed in that way because it's so important. It's a scary time. It's a dark time. There's a lot of darkness around, and we've got to be light. We've got to bring light. We'll do that now. We got a couple of interviews today. We're going to go forward with them because we have great guests that were lined up. We'll talk about some key issues. So we'll talk about the nation with our old friend Joe Johnston, who's written a book called The Decline of Nations. And we'll also visit with a pro life leader about what's happening with pro life. So we'll take a break when we come back. Don't forget, visit Pro America Report com. Pro America Report, com. And sign up for the emails. Get clued in on our great speakers and listen. Number one, first and foremost is say your prayers. Say your prayers. God bless America, especially God bless our troops, and Lord bless the family and those men who have died for these days. We'll take a break and be right back. Ed Martin, Pro America Report, back in a moment.
