The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report. Well, there’s not a lot to say that sounds very good right now.
We have to talk about Afghanistan. We have to talk about failure. We have to talk about a broken swamp, a system of governing that is so foolish and so weak that literally tens of thousands of people will die.
And, well, we have a good program. We’re going to talk with Charles Spiering from Breitbart.com, Breitbart News about what’s gone on in Afghanistan. Breitbart has done phenomenal coverage on this story, but we have to talk about the problem in Afghanistan.
And I would like to try to position this in a different way than you may see. It’s going to sound broader. It’s going to sound more, maybe 30,000 ft because the images are seared in our minds already. People clinging to planes as they take off from Afghanistan, and a feckless President unable to find his way to a camera until a day and a half late. All kinds of things, it’s terrible. It’s all terrible.
But let me pause and pull back and ask you to consider understanding what leadership looks like, in particular when you understand the role of aspects of our lives together. And this is what I want to say. We have always had in this country, from Washington on down to today, a notion of what Phyllis Schlafly called, termed, coined “military superiority.”
And she hearkened back to some of the early writings of Washington – speeches he gave, which were published, in which he said, you have to have a big enough military, big enough army – he called it – to be able to fight and win, and people need to know it. People need to know it.
So, you see, we have and what I mean by that, they have to know not only that you have the military, but you have the will to use it. And with Joe Biden, America, there’s still no doubt that America has the greatest military capability in the world. We have the best technology. We have the best arsenal. We have the best training. We even have the best soldiers.
What we don’t have is the will to lead, the will to act and the country and the world knows it, the world feels it. Which the reality is, military superiority requires both aspects. Consider it a doctrine.
Okay, you have to have a superior military in every way. And then you have to have the world know that you’re willing to use it fearlessly, without question or qualms or hesitation.
And what you saw over the weekend, there’s all kinds of failures that maybe, maybe someday we’ll get to the bottom of it. The rotten bureaucracy in the Pentagon, probably more likely the bureaucracy in the Pentagon, which is unable to confront the President United States because it’s so caught up and so trapped by the woke culture and by careerism.
But the reality is, no one… They say now, they’re probably just covering their tail. The intelligence community had given indications of how bad this is going to be. That’s not the reality.
The reality is this, when Joe Biden came in as President, he assumed, in part because he wanted to contrast with Trump, he assumed a position of sort of meekness. Well, not even sort of meekness.
He was going to be the guy that was going to never be unpredictable. He was never going to be over the top. He was gonna always be sort of going by the same set of norms and rules and habits that he’d done for 50 years in Washington. And that’s what he did.
So what happened was the world looked up and said, when we had Trump in there, it was pretty clear if you messed with him, he was going to be like a cowboy.
By the way, if that goes, it should, They said the same thing about the Gipper, about Ronald Reagan. And actually, they said the same thing at George W. Bush after 9/11. They were like, Holy cow, this guy is unpredictable.
And I think he was put in that position. I’m not sure George W. Bush would have been unpredictable if he hadn’t had a wartime presidency, after a terrorist attack. But what Donald Trump was clear about was he’d make a deal with the worst dudes, and he’d make sure that they lived up to it.
Now, I have always thought that this was part of his strength was that he came out of Manhattan in the 1980s and 70s, 80s, 90s, where you had to make a deal. You don’t tell me that Manhattan didn’t include lots of mafia, lots of Union bosses, all that kind of stuff. And you had to make a deal with bad guys, not bad… people that were gonna be less than savory. And you had to know how to deal with them.
So when Donald Trump got in, he said, I’m not gonna fight with anybody. I’m not gonna fight with anybody for fun. I’m gonna ask Kim Jong Un to stand down. And he did. I’m going to ask President Xi to cut it out. And he didn’t. And when he didn’t, he got tough with him.
And one after another. Take it to Syria. He bombed Syria because he said, you guys are messing around. He said, if you want to stop… Remember the Saudi Arabians executing one of their own people? Khashoggi – and the world said, oh, fight about it, fight about it. What he said was – cut it out. He went to Jerusalem. He said, I’m moving the embassy to Jerusalem. And he said, don’t mess with it.
People knew the Trump would keep his word if you cut a deal. And if you didn’t, he would be a maniac about it. And all you have to do is look at what happened. There was nobody in Afghanistan, it appears, that cared what Joe Biden or his military thought, because they knew he wouldn’t do anything about it.
He set a deadline. He moved it. He moved it back. He said dumb things in a press conference. And then once they started the march, off they go.
Now, we’ve all talked about this over and over again. I did not want the war to continue, so we had to get out. But how you get out matters, too. How you get out of the war matters, too.
And at this point, it doesn’t matter what the total truth of it was. What matters is Joe Biden looked feckless. He looked weak. He looked militarily inferior. He looked every way inferior. We didn’t look like a nation that understood that the best way for peace is to be strong, militarily superior.
Show the world that superiority and then stay out of dumb stuff and honor what you’ve done. Now, we had the worst of all worlds. Not only did we not do what we were supposed to with the people that helped us after 20 years, but the way we left put everybody in danger.
It couldn’t be worse. If you were trying to design a way to make America look bad, it couldn’t be worse. That’s what he just did. That’s what Joe Biden just did.
Again, I don’t have any problem with getting out of Iraq. I don’t have any problem that there was going to be problems. There would have been. What I have a problem is not understanding how fast this has happened, how ugly it’s been, and having no real strength.
Nobody fears Joe Biden. Can you imagine if they did what they’re doing to Trump? Can you imagine? By now he would they would have dropped the Moab in the middle of the Taliban. They would have been droning everybody. I mean, it probably would have been, it probably would have been a new kind of war. But Trump would have done it.
Well, he just wouldn’t, he would have understood the process. He would have understood the principle. I don’t know how long it will take for America to recover from this. I think we will. But I don’t know if people understand this is not just a failure of intelligence. This is not just a mix up. This is a radical failure of leadership.
If you want to lead in the world, you must be militarily superior. You must understand you have to be powerful, you have to be strong, and then you have to be willing. And the world has to know your willingness.
Not just somewhere in the back of your closet, you might do something. You have to be willing to stand up. And Joe Biden, whether in his speech at the White House, finally days later, or in his weird bunker where he was in Camp David, supposedly on vacation.
And he did a call with all these intelligence folks. And by himself, looked like he was barely paying attention. Or, I don’t know, it just looked terrible. Terrible optics. Whoever’s doing this in the White House is just ridiculous.
And meanwhile, our…now the next move that’s happening in our liberal media and liberal leaders is we got to let tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand Afghan refugees in – unvetted. Just let them in. We’ve seen this play out.
Stand up, America. Stand up. We’ve got to stand up right now. We cannot wait any longer. This mess is endangering our Republic now. Maybe it was before. We’ve got to stand up.
All right, we’ve got to take a break right now. Let’s come back and we’ve got some great guests, and we’ll have more.
It’s Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report Report. Please visit ProAmericaReport.com to find out more and follow all that we’re doing. I’ll be right back.