Afghanistan was abandoned by #TFG - Former guy had no intention to help Afghan people

Everyone who has worked with the U.S. government knows that "red tape" is frequently abandoned when it is evident or convenient for people to be moved for urgent reasons.  This catastrophic attempt at helping to evacuate the Afghan allies was totally preventable. In my opinion, #TheFormerGuy fully intended to abandon Afghan. Trump never intended to create an evacuation plan. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden was unprepared for this humanitarian disaster. #intelligencefailure

This article echo is reported in the New York Post by Kenneth Garger.

Afghan refugees in Kabul- Afghanistan is in a humanitarian crises.

Former President George W. Bush on Monday urged President Joe Biden to “cut the red tape” and allow for the swift evacuation of Afghan refugees following the Taliban’s takeover of the country.

Responding to the fall of Afghanistan’s US-backed government, Bush said the Afghans “at the greatest risk are the same ones who have been on the forefront of progress inside their nation.”

The costly US-led war in Afghanistan began just shy of 20 years ago after the 9/11 attack while Bush was president.

Bush, in his Monday statement, noted Biden has promised to evacuate the Afghans who assisted Americans and its NATO allies over the past two decades.

“The United States government has the legal authority to cut the red tape for refugees during urgent humanitarian crises. And, we have the responsibility and the resources to secure safe passage for them now, without bureaucratic delay,” he said in his statement.

“Laura and I are confident that the evacuation efforts will be effective because they are being carried out by the remarkable men and women of the United States Armed Forces, diplomatic corps, and intelligence community.”

The Taliban claimed complete control of Afghanistan on Sunday — and since then, scores of Afghans, Americans and other allies have been scrambling to flee the war-torn country.

Anti-vaxxers are COVIDIOTS - Summary echo about stupidity

Echo opinion editorial by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times.

Nothing better exemplifies the gaping political divide in this country than our embarrassing and asinine vaccine response. #TFG Trump’s scorched earth political strategy has fooled millions of Americans into flirting with death. 

Anti-vaxxers are choosing to be stupid rather than live.

And now thousands are once again dying for it.

Almost from the beginning, the efforts to combat the virus were met with disdain from #TFG (a once upon a time failed president) who felt the crisis made him look bad. 

Unbelievably, the science was denied. We came to live in a world where masking was mocked and ingesting disinfectant was offered up as a possible cure.

All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.

And then, a miracle.

In response to this raging, deadly virus, scientists developed multiple, highly effective vaccines with breathtaking speed. It was like a prayer had been answered. An antidote to the plague had arrived.

We should all have been celebrating in the streets and running to a lifesaving serum with our sleeves rolled up and a smile on our face. But not enough of us were.

(Caused by #TFG incompetence)...The public had been poisoned by partisanship. Masking was a political statement. Social distancing was a political statement. Receiving the vaccine, for far too many, was a political statement.

And so, countless Americans responded with a political statement of their own: (stupid!) defiance.

They hated that businesses were forced to close, and being asked to wear masks inside when they reopened. They hated their children having to stay home from school and being made to wear masks when they returned.

But, the simple truth is that all of this could have been avoided if all Americans eligible for the vaccine — and that’s pretty much every adult at this point — had simply chosen to be vaccinated. But they didn’t. They haven’t. They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.

In the beginning, as the vaccine was rolled out, there were some access hurdles and some understandable apprehensions. But now, billions of people worldwide have received the vaccine, and very few have had adverse effects.

The vaccine is safe, incredibly safe.

There are no microchips or magnets in it. It does not cause Covid and it is not more dangerous than Covid.

Believing all these lies is a luxury of people who have not sat by a hospital bedside, or watched from behind glass, because Covid regulations prevented them from comforting a relative or friend as they drew their last breath, struggling against a virus that choked that breath off.

It is a luxury to be irresponsible in a society where others will be responsible for you, where you simply assume that you are safer because others take the appropriate precautions to be safe: You do not need to get the shot because others have.

But the Delta variant is testing that faith.

You will not be safe as an unvaccinated person riding on the coattails of the vaccinated. Delta is extremely transmissible and unremitting. It is stronger than its progenitor.

As the Delta variant surges there is an uptick in the pace of vaccinations in the country. It’s almost like religion: Many disbelievers will call out to whatever God there may be when the reaper is at the door. Fear of ideological defeat is no match for the fear of imminent death. And yet, it shouldn’t have taken another surge of sickness and death for good sense to set in.

Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that “among those who admit they will not get the vaccine if they can avoid it, 70 percent either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party while just 6 percent align with the Democrats.”

The optics of countless socially distanced funerals is less offensive to those conservatives than the optics of being socially distanced in a Fuddruckers.

It was all lunacy. It is all lunacy. This should never have happened. There are people dead today — a lot of them! — who should still be alive and who would be if people in the heights of government and the heights of the media had not fed them lies about the virus.

But apparently, after you get so used to so much blood on your hands, you forget — or make yourself forget — that you weren’t born with red palms.

So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy.

This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.

Charles M. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994, and became an Opinion columnist in 2008.

Fact checking the Former Guy (TFG) to protect against conspiracy theories

You know better!

Echo editorial board opinion published in the The Topeka Capital-Journal newspaper, in Kansas.

The world is, most of the time, exactly as it appears. There are no giant secrets, no great conspiracies. Fact checking in real time prevents the toxic spread of conspiracies. 

#TFG- deluded by ego

There are good people and bad people, honest folks, and thieves and most of us try to muddle through, day to day.

Yet over the past half-decade, encouraged by an ex-president (aka #TFG), deluded by ego and will to power, everyday folks — including Kansans just like us — have begun believing nonsensical things.

Lies! Barack Obama was born in Kenya. The “Deep State” was out to destroy right-thinking Americans. Ballots in Arizona were secretly printed in China. The list goes on and on, with each claim more outrageous and easily disproved than the last.

But we were especially dismayed by an especially recent example.

Shortly after the partial collapse of an oceanfront condominium in Surfside, Fla., the rumors sprang up. They claimed that John McAfee — the antivirus software entrepreneur and international fugitive — owned a condo there.

According to these tall tales, McAfee was hiding evidence against the government at Champlain Towers South Condo. And surely that explained his death by suicide in a Spanish prison June 23, awaiting extradition to the U.S. on criminal tax evasion charges,

It didn’t matter that the rumor was untrue. As USA Today reported, a Tweet offered as evidence was doctored. The rumor felt scandalous and a little exciting, and thus spread like wildfire through Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and blogs of dubious provenance.

Folks can’t be banned from falsifying tweets and starting lies on the internet. Goodness knows, if it was possible, someone would have figured out how to do so by now. 

But seriously, what’s the point?

#TFG versus the truth! "...I have never seen a president in American history who has lied so continuously and so outrageously..." (Yahoo.news) 

If you don’t want to undermine democracy and alarm your friends and neighbors unduly (and who would want that?), please check those rumors first.

There are a number of legitimate, nonpartisan fact-checking sites you should go to first: USA Today ● FactCheck ● Truth or Fiction ● PolitiFact ● Snopes ● Washington Post.

Every one of us, the great teeming mass audience of social media, has a responsibility. Before sharing a rumor or tall tale, ask yourself: Do I know this information is accurate? 

Does it seem too incredulous to be true? Am I being gullible?

You know better.