Dems Survive To Live Another Day…

Fetterman Wins, Laxalt Pulls Ahead, Senate Hangs in the Balance

By Susan Crabtree – at RealClearPolitics:

November 09, 2022

LAS VEGAS — Shortly after 1 a. m. PST loud cheering rang out in a section of the Red Rock Casino Resort and Casino, the site of a Nevada GOP election night watch party that had ended with a whimper only an hour and a half before.

In a party town where revelers are used to pulling all-nighters, Tuesday night was a nervous low-key waiting game instead of the “red-wave blowout” many had planned.

But in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Nevada Republicans finally had something to celebrate. Adam Laxalt, the conservative Republican challenger to Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, had pulled slightly ahead for the first time – albeit by only 385 votes. Laxalt’s lead eventually grew to 2.7% with 80% of the vote counted, although results remain fluid.

The Silver State’s hard-fought Senate race was supposed to be the exciting eye of the storm on election night – where control of the Senate could be determined. But results only started rolling in at 10 p.m. PST, and final tallies could take days as mail ballots returned on the final day in the state’s largest county may not be counted until early this week.

Still, the results are crucial. As the final result hangs in the balance so too does control of the Senate, with three other Senate races remaining too close to call – and Georgia seemingly heading for a Dec. 6 runoff to decide the race between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.

Close to midnight, Laxalt, with wife Jaime by his side, ended the night with a positive message to supporters – even as he urged patience: “We are exactly where we need to be. With votes coming in across the state yet to be tabulated, we are going to win this race!”

Echoing his stump speeches, Laxalt promised to support police, fight “to make our streets safe again,” re-secure the southern border, open U.S. energy production “to get inflation and gas prices under control,” and gurantee parental rights in schools. He also pledged never to allow COVID lockdowns again in Nevada. 

Laxalt then delivered a very personal jab at Democrats’ efforts to make the race in Nevada and the midterms in general a rejection of the Supreme Court’s early summer decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. After thanking his wife and children, he offered a personal note of gratitude to his mother.

“I would not be here today if she did not choose to bring me into this world, and I owe everything to her,” he said. Laxalt, grandson of the late Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, is also the son of the late Sen. Pete Domenici, a staunch Catholic who was married to another woman at the time Adam was born.

“Unfortunately, we’re in for a long night, and maybe into a few days this week as all the votes are tabulated,” he said. But we’re confident that the numbers are there, and we are going to win this race and take back Nevada and take back America!”

At her own watch party Cortez Masto told supporters that they won’t know the results for several days. “But I am confident in the campaign that we have built to win,” she added, “and I’m so grateful to every Nevadan, who knocked on doors and made phone calls and stood up and fought for our state.”

Across the country, just half an hour earlier, Republican prospects for taking back the Senate narrowed when Lt. Gov. John Fetterman defeated GOP candidate Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania by 2.5 percentage points. The victory marked the first Senate-seat flip of the election, with Fetterman filling the seat of retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.

“We jammed them up – we held the line,” Fetterman told supporters after the cable networks called the race in his favor. “I never expected that we were going to turn those red counties blue, but we did what we needed to do.”

Three other Senate races remained too close to call as of Wednesday morning: Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. If Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson holds on to his slim lead, which seems likely, Republicans will need to win two of the three remaining toss-ups – Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada – to win control of the Senate.

This morning, Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly led Republican Blake Masters, 56% to 41.4%, but with only two-thirds of the vote counted. In Wisconsin incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson, a strong Trump ally, was hanging onto a sliver of a lead, 50.7% to Mandela Barnes’ 49.2% with an estimated 99% of the voted counted. In Georgia, Walker and Warnock were separated by only some 29,000 votes, with Warnock leading Walker 49.1% to 48.8% and 96% of the vote counted.

If neither candidate gets to 50%, they will have to do it all over again in a month, which is what happened in Georgia two years ago when both Georgia Senate races went to Democrats. “We always knew that this race would be close – so you all hang in there,” Warnock told supporters Tuesday night. “I’m feeling good.”

Pundits pointed out the top of the ticket in each state – those vying for governor – were either dragging down or helping to boost Senate GOP candidates. That appeared to be the case with Doug Mastriano, the GOP candidate for Pennsylvania governor, who fared poorly Tuesday night and pulled down Oz, while more popular governors and candidates for the highest state office helped pull up other GOP Senate candidates. (Mastriano lost to Josh Shapiro, 42.8% to 55.3%.)

Meanwhile, popular Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine won by 25.8 percentage points, helping boost Republican J.D. Vance to a 7-point win over Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan.

“There’s a reason why Vance thanked DeWine first,” Karl Rove remarked on Fox News after Vance’s decisive win. “We saw the opposite in Pennsylvania where the [GOP] governor candidate was a drag on the ticket.”  

Another way to look at this phenomenon is that voters were willing to split their tickets in cases where one candidate appealed to them more than another. In Georgia, for instance, while the ardently pro-life Walker had to contend with allegations he paid two ex-girlfriends to have abortions, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp won his reelection over Stacey Abrams with room to spare.

All around the country, incumbent senators fared better than many prognosticators and pollsters predicted. Democrats who appeared vulnerable toward the end of their campaigns, including Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and Michael Bennet in Colorado, won solid victories that were called relatively early Tuesday night. Sen. Marco Rubio’s resounding 16-point win over Democratic Rep. Val Demings in Florida was an early boost for Republicans, while Republican Ted Budd is expected to retain his 3.6% lead over Democrat Cheri Beasley in North Carolina to keep that seat in the GOP column.

When it came to the pivotal state of Nevada, GOP pollster John McLaughlin credited popular Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo with helping to pull Republican votes in the traditionally Democratic stronghold for himself and Laxalt. As of the last vote count update, Lombardo was running roughly 5 points ahead of incumbent Gov. Steve Sisolak. He also said Latinos seem to have swung to the GOP more strongly than in previous years.

“There’s a lot of red in Nevada right now,” McLaughlin said early Wednesday morning. “What seems to be putting Laxalt and Lombardo over the top are Hispanic voters right now.”

“The Democrats are doing better in the early voting,” he added, “and in Election Day voting Republicans are doing better – significantly better.”

As Tuesday turned into Wednesday, rank-and-file Republican voters around the country expressed disappointment, while remaining hopeful. Tanner and Amanda Jones, a married couple who strongly supported Adam Laxalt, left the Vegas watch party optimistic that he would prevail, while also feeling slightly chastened that the much anticipated “red wave” did not materialize nationwide.

“It was not surprising…I think we kind of came into the night expecting that,” Tanner Jones said. “And in some ways, it’s good that everyone’s expectations were accurate about how close it would be.”

“I think we expected to see a little bit better in Georgia, a little bit better in Wisconsin, and in Pennsylvania that was really disappointing too,” Amanda Jones conceded. “And I think we were hoping to see a closer New York race for governor – so that was also disappointing red-wave-wise.”

“I had hoped to see a little more movement in this race tonight,” she said. “But we’re still hopeful … very hopeful.”

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.

The Hinderaker Hate OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP CONTINUES!

NOVEMBER 9, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN 2022 ELECTION, ABORTION, DEMOCRATS, DONALD TRUMP, REPUBLICANS

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE

Just kidding. Out of the range of possible outcomes, what we saw last night was about as bad as it could be. The GOP’s failure to make progress stunned everyone, not least the Democrats.

What happened?

* Fantasy vs. Reality. It turns out that there are a great many voters who don’t care much about what traditionally have been considered decisive issues: inflation, crime, illegal immigration, lousy schools, etc. Many millions of Democrats, confronted with these facts, didn’t conclude that they should consider voting for someone else. Rather, they seem to have thought, My team is in trouble! All the more reason why I need to support my team. This was an election in which, to an extraordinary degree, issues were subordinated to party loyalty.

* Abortion. While Dobbs was plainly right as a matter of constitutional law, Justice Alito and his colleagues probably cost Republicans control of Congress. I thought the Democrats were wasting their money when they spent countless millions over the summer, pounding Republicans on abortion. The conventional wisdom, which I shared, was that the issue would likely help to drive turnout, but wouldn’t win over any undecided or middle of the road voters. But driving turnout was decisive: liberals trooped to the polls, while in many areas Republican turnout was not what it should have been.

* Donald Trump. I thought the Democrats’ endless yammering about “our democracy” and “fascism” was incredibly stupid, born of desperation, and would be ignored by voters. I was partly right: those themes were stupid, and they were born of desperation. But it turned out that they were not ineffective. To cite just one example, a young woman I know posted a photo of herself at the polls on Instagram, with the text, “I’m voting against fascism.”

Contrary to what you might assume, she isn’t an idiot. “Our democracy” and “fascism” were code for Donald Trump. At this point, Trump is a giant anvil around the neck of the Republican Party. In many areas, likely most, he is absolute poison. To be associated with Trump is to lose. Pretty much everything he has done in the last two years has been not just ill-advised but massively destructive to the Republican Party and to the United States. He has teased a “big announcement” in the next few days. I hope he announces that he is moving to Bulgaria.

An off-year election is normally a referendum on the president, which is why the out-party nearly always gains. When the Democrats tried to make this year’s election a referendum on Donald Trump, I thought they were crazy. Trump is not an office-holder, nor was he on the ballot. How could that possibly work? Well, it did work, and Trump, with his inimitable bad judgment, collaborated fully with the Democrats in putting himself front and center, with disastrous results.

The major exception to last night’s gloom was Florida, where Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio both won crushing victories. Why was that? At least part of the explanation is that Florida was one state where the Democrats couldn’t pretend Trump was on the ballot. Ron DeSantis was on the ballot.

* Polls. We Republicans have gotten used to the idea that polls generally underpredict Republican performance. When liberal pollsters started reporting more favorable numbers for Republicans in the days leading up the election, it looked like the usual script was being followed. But this year, if anything the polls may have understated Democratic support, not Republican. What–to cite just one instance–happened to the 26-point swing among suburban women toward the GOP, which led Steve to dub this the “Desperate Housewives Election?” They were desperate, all right–desperate to vote in favor of abortion and against Donald Trump. But how could so many polls be so wrong?

I have no idea why this happened, but I know that it wasn’t just the major public polls that were off-target. I was privy to private poll data here in Minnesota, and it showed far greater support for Republican legislative candidates than actually turned out at the polls. Why? I don’t know. I speculate that a number of Trump voters who are not consistent voters and are lightly attached to the Republican Party didn’t show up. On the other hand, liberals who thought they were voting in favor of abortion and against Donald Trump turned out massively.

Trafalgar was one pollster that had a relatively good record in recent cycles, and Robert Cahaly, who runs Trafalgar, was convinced that his poll, which tried to sample hard-to-reach conservatives, understated Republican support. That turned out to be wrong. On Saturday, I am moderating a panel on the election at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in Phoenix. Cahaly is a member of my panel, and I will ask him what he thinks happened. The answer should be interesting.

There is much more that could be said, but I will leave it there for now.

Will Conservatives Turn Conservative?

Will Conservatives Make Use Of Power This Time Around?

BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD at the Federalist:

NOVEMBER 09, 2022

Election night can be fun, but Republicans should not underestimate their opponents’ ability to keep a tight grip on control in Washington.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD

Election night can feel a rush for conservatives, which makes sense: After a few years, those politicians who rejected the country’s history, attacked the police, weaponized science, and persecuted Christians and their children were finally sent packing.

It’s always good to get a little separation from something as destructive as the modern Democratic Party, but there’s one problem, and it’s what comes next?

Really. Most of us lived through Scott Brown’s special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Just two years after he’d been elected in a historic victory, President Barack Obama had launched his signature legislation to increase government control over health care, and the reaction to his (and the GOP’s) elitist overreaches had finally brought out a previously quiet base of Americans. If he won the election, Scott Brown would break Obama’s supermajority, and stop Obamacare from becoming law.

As the election approached, the excitement spread. My parents took a commercial flight a few days before Election Day where the pilot pranked the intercom system, asking a “Sen. Scott Brown to please come to the front of the plane” to raucous applause. When the day finally came, I was off at the D.C. bar I was working at, so flew home to vote and spend my last dollar sharing a room at the campaign’s hotel. “Tonight’s Gonna Be A Good Night” blasted out of the speakers, while a smiling Gov. Mitt Romney gave television interviews from the ballroom risers.

I still have the issue of the arch-liberal Boston Globe announcing Brown’s win that night. I saved it because I thought he’d stopped Obamacare from becoming reality. And Brown did try! (At least on that issue.) The Republican Party, however, underestimated the lengths their political opponents would go to wield power and defeat their opponents. Twelve years later, Obamacare is still the law of the land and by now, not even talked about.

Ten months after the special election, Americans got another go at sending their men to Washington. The “tea party wave” was so strong, even the always-confident president appeared quiet and chastened, admitting to reporters his party had lost touch and taken “a shellacking.”

But he didn’t give up, eventually warning his opponents, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” before embarking on an ambitious agenda (that included remaking American citizenship) wielding solely executive power.

There was something to 2016, sure. A total outsider was elected president and, despite years of conspiracy theories, owed nothing to anyone. He’d serve as a wrecking ball, fighting the left on every front they opened, but by 2021, was gone. If just under two years on, Republicans are back, to what end?

Sure, neither Mitch McConnell nor Kevin McCarthy will be winning the presidency (a fact they’ll remind you of ad nauseum), but if they win the power of nominations and the power of the purse, how viciously will they wield the power they’ve been handed?

Will they halt the president’s extremely successful judicial nomination record? Halt it completely, without exception?

Will they ask where the billions in dollars and arms going to Ukraine ended up, or just keep sleepwalking toward a nuclear standoff?

Will they claw back the IRS’s newfound funds, or leave their tens of thousands of new agents on the job?

Will they continue to send $45 billion to America’s hard-left universities without a word of objection, as they have for years?

Will they demand funding for a wall, end funding toward abortions here and abroad, and refuse to confirm ambassadors and other posts devoted to spreading the left’s culture war to Vatican City and further abroad?

Will they break up the Big Tech companies who wield their power to control the flow of information to voters?

Or on all these issues, will they just tinker around the edges and go on Fox News to crow about it?

While election nights like last night can be a whole lot of fun, the reality is voters often wake up next to a stranger who’s planning to stick around for the next two years.

Conservatives have been losing for about a century now, and at this point rightly find little to conserve. If this will change any at all, they’ll need to think of themselves not as conservatives, but as revolutionaries. If they’re going to make a difference, they might as well: They’ll be up against a powerful executive, its sprawling army of lifelong employees, its allies in the intelligence agencies, Pentagon, corporate media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and beyond.

Like an addict realizing the vicious power the drug holds over them, some among us have finally realized the vicious power being wielded against the West. We’ve been losing for a century, yes, but really, we’ve only begun to fight. Maybe 2022 will be different from all the rest, but not without a fight. You don’t beat the regime by voting on Election Day — you beat it by making hell each and every day.

Christopher Bedford is the executive editor of the upcoming Common Sense magazine, from the Common Sense Society. From December 2019 through October 2022, he was a senior editor at The Federalist.

Females VOTE LEFTISM For Their Fascist Security!!!

 NOVEMBER 9, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

WOT HAPPENED?

There is no way to sugarcoat this pitiful Republican showing. What went wrong?

For much of this year I had in the back of my mind the possibility that this mid-term could be a rerun of the 1978 midterm, when Republicans also underperformed in a very favorable political climate. Between Jimmy Carter’s sagging approval, rising inflation, and the flood tide of the tax revolt in the wake of Proposition 13 in California in the spring, Republicans should have done very well. Yet Republicans gained only 12 House seats and three Senate seats in 1978 (bringing them to only 159 in the House, and just 41 in the Senate). “The ineptness of this party has almost no parallel in history,” Henry Fairlie gloated in The New Republic. “The Democratic party is still without any real opposition.” Political scientist Nelson Polsby said the midterm election left Republicans no more than “halfway back to where they have to get to be even minimally competitive.” Michael Barone was more specific in his diagnosis: “There can only be one reason for the Republicans’ relatively poor showing in House races: they simply do not have enough good candidates.” But Barone predicted that this would begin to change in the 1980s, as the shadow of the Nixon years receded. 

The parallels are obvious. Nixon’s shadow was long gone by 1980, but Trump’s shadow is still very much with us. In fact Trump’s late campaigning may have backfired on Republicans, and he is the biggest loser yesterday, which may not be a bad thing. Candidate quality matters after all (as it did in several winnable Senate races in 2010 that the GOP threw away). Some of the GOP losers were quite worthy, like Tiffany Smiley in Washington (though also a first-timer on the ballot). But others were clearly not, such as Dr. Oz.

The big winner yesterday is clearly Ron DeSantis, and therein lies a tale. How come DeSantis and other Florida Republicans romped to victory, while Republicans struggled most everywhere else? Maybe the fact that DeSantis has a strong record to run on, and moreover is always on the attack, helped. What was the general Republican issue message this year for the House? I know the House GOP put forward some kind of new “Contract with America,” but did you ever hear about it? It was a mistake to think you can win by just not being the other guy. Anyway, I had put the over/under line for a winning presidential run DeSantis’s margin of victory at 15 percent, and he won by 20.

But the scene isn’t entirely bleak. We remember what happened two years after that dismal 1978 midterm. And while Joe Biden has to be reckoned a big winner yesterday, it means in due course that the big loser was . . . the Democratic Party. The “Dump Joe” campaign is going to be put back in the deep freeze, and Biden is more likely to run again because of this election result. And if Biden chooses not to run again on his own because of age or some other cause, Democrats are likely stuck with Kamala, because anyone who challenges Kamala will infuriate the identity-politics base of the Democratic Party.

I can guarantee you that there are many old-line Democrats who secretly hoped Democrats would get crushed, so they could ease Biden out and clean out the crazy progressives who have hijacked the party. Instead Democrats are certain to take their relative success as evidence that there is nothing wrong with their message or their policies. Let them persist in this view. In the meantime, lots more gridlock ahead, but as Stan Evans liked to say, gridlock is the next best thing to having constitutional government.

Meanwhile, I’m putting away my surfboard.

Uncle Sam’s Fascist DEMS Star Well At The Voters’ Box Yesterday!

 NOVEMBER 9, 2022 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN 2022 ELECTION, POLL

AFTER LAST NIGHT

I offer just a few comments — ranging from personal self-evaluation to national results to the local Minnesota scene — on the fiasco this time. Here are my thoughts more or less in the order they occur to me with the results of a few races still in doubt:

• I was pessimistic as usual, but I prefer to think of my pessimism as the higher realism.

• I expected the worst and hoped for the best, but I had no ken that the elections could have played out as poorly for Republicans as they have.

• I regret having served up optimistic “tea leaves” over the past week. I was deluded. I was misled most of all by the polls served up by Robert Cahaly’s Trafalgar Group. They were not reliable indicators of what was to come. I think Cahaly was in good company in his errors, but I thought his recent record distinguished him from the pack. He has reverted to the professional polling norm, if not worse. I would like to know why.

• What happened to the red wave? It was buried in an open grave. It began and ended in Florida. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had a great night romping over Charlie Crist, an opponent who has distinguished himself by losing statewide races as a Republican, an independent, and a Democrat. Andrew Stiles gives him his due in the Free Beacon column “Charlie Crist Defends Historic Triple Crown Title.”

• I may be mistaken, but I don’t think Donald Trump is the cure for what ails the Republican Party.

• By far the biggest disappointment last night was John Fetterman’s victory in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Oz’s defeat was overdetermined. I thought he had an uphill battle from the outset selling himself as a Pennsylvanian. I commented at the time “I do not love thee, Dr Oz.” A friend of mine working on the Oz campaign went ballistic when I raised the point with him the week Oz won the primary, but I wasn’t completely off. Oz’s success in the Republican primary — a race he won by fewer than a thousand votes — can fairly be attributed to President Trump’s endorsement. See point 4 above.

• Fetterman is a monumental fraud whose lying extended to his purported personal physician.

• Fetterman presents himself as someone who will fight for “everyone who’s been knocked down.” He’s fighting for you and me. Woo hoo!

• Republicans didn’t win a single sleeper Senate race. They weren’t even close. Don Bolduc, Joe O’Dea, and Tiffany Smiley went down to defeat by wide margins in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Washington.

• It took the intervention of big bucks supplied by Cocaine Mitch to raise up J.D. Vance after the Ohio Republican primary. Yet President Trump chooses to aim is rhetorical guns on Cocaine Mitch. I believe Trump himself kept his financial powder dry in Ohio.

• Assuming Adam Laxalt wins his race in Nevada, Ron Johnson his in Wisconsin, and Blake Masters loses in Arizona, I think Herschel Walker would need to win a runoff with Raphael Warnock in order for Republicans to take a one-vote majority in the Senate. I wonder what the odds are.

• Republicans may come away with a slim majority in the House. It’s not nothing, but it is far short of their own expectation and the Democrats’ wildest dreams. Prospective Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave brief remarks claiming victory overnight. His remarks were most notable for their dispirited nature.

• Each of the four Republican candidates vying for constitutional offices on a statewide basis went down to defeat in Minnesota. Governor Tim Walz handily defeated Dr. Scott Jensen. Even Attorney General Keith Ellison — I rate him the man most unfit for his office in the USA — eked out a narrow win over a decent opponent in a race that has officially yet to be called. My guess is that Democrats will hold legislative majorities in both the senate (where they had a one-vote minority) and the house, although we await final results in too many races to be sure.

• Minnesota Democrats had a huge financial advantage in the election. Now they have a huge budget surplus to play with in the next legislative session. The Democrats have a functioning party and a strong metro area base. The Republicans have no party organization and a smaller rural base.

• Walz represented a slightly conservative, mostly rural area in Congress before running for governor. He has abandoned even the pretense of moderation to peddle every jot and tittle of the current left-wing manias.

• If you’ve been watching television or listening to the radio in Minnesota over the past few months, you will have heard that Republicans are too extreme for Minnesota. Minnesota Democrats convey an ardent belief in abortion that is a tad over the top given the fact that the “right” is not in issue here.

• A concluding personal note. I try to write on the elections at least as much as an analyst as a cheerleader. Despite my best efforts, I found that the easiest person to fool was me. I tried to resist wishful thinking and keep in mind Churchill’s admonition: “Facts are better than dreams.”

NOTE: I have slightly corrected this since I originally posted it with the intent of getting the arithmetic on the current balance in the Minnesota senate and the prospective balance in the United States Senate right. I got up overnight at 3:00 a.m. to write this. I was not operating on all cylinders.

“It may surprise you to know there is actually a government agency tasked with tracking where our money goes after we give it to our sworn enemies.”

November 8, 2022

Even As We Fund Ukraine, Our Money’s Going To Putin

By Ed Sherdlu at American Thinker:

Less than half of American families paid any income tax last year. But those who did have a right to expect the money we fork over to Uncle Fed will do at least some good for us. Of course, we all realize a trillion or two disappears into the DC swamp. But learning we sent more than a billion dollars to Taliban-run Afghanistan, whose favorite song on the radio is “Death to America, Cha, Cha, Cha,” does raise the hackles somewhat. Even worse, the Biden government has illegally decreed that we poor American working stiffs should never know where that money went once it arrived in Kabul.

It may surprise you to know there is actually a government agency tasked with tracking where our money goes after we give it to our sworn enemies, such as the Taliban. That agency is called SIGAR. (No, that’s not a misspelling of Bill Clinton’s favorite toy.) SIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. SIGAR is tasked under the law to conduct and supervise audits and investigations of programs that you and I pay for to help rebuild Afghanistan.

As you might expect, this Inspector General has been about as successful as other American generals were in Afghanistan over the past twenty years. But this time, the enemy is not AK 47-bearing bearded men in man dresses. This time, high-level Biden administration bureaucrats ensure this Inspector General fails in his mission to account for your money.

One quick caveat. This $1.1 billion is not part of the $7-plus billion in high-tech military equipment we left behind when we fled Kabul airport with our tails between our legs. This is an additional $1 billion in cold, hard cash we gave them after our cut-and-run evacuation!

The $1.1 billion was a partial payment on useless virtue-signaling programs to help reconstruct Afghanistan after the war. How you reconstruct a country whose first acts included blowing up the schools we built for them during the war escapes me.

Unfortunately, we will never know where the money went. It’s not that the Taliban won’t tell us. This time it’s our government doing it to us. Specifically, the Biden-appointed heads of the US Agency for International Development and the Treasury Department, won’t tell us where your cash went.

Both departments “refused to cooperate with SIGAR in any capacity” in tracking your money shipped to Afghanistan. That is not an overstatement. That “refused to cooperate…” phrase is an exact quote from SIGAR head John Sopko’s report to Congress. Sopko did not mince any words in his report. He reminded Congress that hiding any information about this billion-dollar boondoggle is “in direct violation of Section 1229(h)(5)(A) of the NDAA for FY 2008 (requiring the agencies to provide information and assistance upon request) and Section 6(c)(1) of the Inspector General Act of 1978.”

Steve Bannon was just sentenced to 4 months in the Crossbar Hotel for refusing to wallow before Nancy Pelosi’s January 6th Congressional Kangaroo Court. Does anyone want to bet the Biden acolytes who broke the law and refused to tell us where our money went will ever receive anything more than a quiet “attaboy” from the White House? SIGAR’s report mentions that these violations have been reported to Congress. I wonder how much overtime one of Nancy Pelosi’s staffers earned working late to shred the report?

There should be more to this story. Crusading reporters from the MSM should be digging into this like the FBI dug into Melania Trump’s undies drawer. I’ll give you great odds if you want to wager that this will ever happen.

Government accountants should dig into overseas accounts to see whose wallet grew fat.

Fat chance.

Some might argue that, regardless of where the money goes in radical-ruled Afghanistan, it helps build a future bond between our country and the militant extremists. They think we can play nice with men who only want to return their country to the 14th Century, with the ability to enjoy Baywatch reruns while they take a break from shooting women who don’t cover enough of their hair. All the Super Glue in the world would not create such a bond.

As proof of our government’s continued idiocy, the Biden administration announced yet another $3.5 billion in Afghan aid on September 14. Less than two weeks later, the Taliban leaders demonstrated the type of links they want with our country by committing to buy one million tons of Russian gasoline, another million tons of Russian diesel, 500 tons of LP gas, and two million tons of Russian wheat. These purchases give Moscow a vast infusion of American-supplied cash, just when Putin’s war on the Ukrainians is straining the Kremlin budget.

Why did the Taliban wait 13 days to rub this into our faces? They probably wanted to ensure the U.S. government check cleared the bank before they announced they are shafting us yet again.

Needless to say, these are not the failure facts Team Biden wants to be broadcast on the evening news. When someone, especially when that someone is a government employee, chooses to keep something secret, always ask yourself, “Why?” The law authorizing this Afghan aid specifically prohibits your money from going to the Taliban itself. But since the Taliban runs everything in Afghanistan, and Uncle Fed won’t tell us where our money went, I think we know who got it. I wonder how deep the pockets are in those man dresses?

Finally, the worst part of this fiasco; SIGAR’s report of this billion-dollar debacle only covers three months of 2022. As proven by the September 14th foolishness, the cash handouts and DC coverup have not stopped.

The money secretly slipping out of Washington’s piggy bank continues every day. Think about that when you cough up $5-plus per gallon for gasoline soon after Election Day. Think about that when you file your income tax return. Think about it when you see Biden and Harris, better known inside the Beltway as “Mumbles and Giggles,” tell you everything is just peachy keen in “all 54 states,” especially when you ride in a big, yellow, electric school bus.

Try not to think about it as you attempt to go to sleep tonight.

Ed Sherdlu is a pseudonym.