#Interventionism met its end in Afghanistan and other commentary

Conservative: The End of Interventionism

Summing up her colleague Mollie Hemingway’s remarks on the ­Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, The Federalist’s Evita Duffy laments how “two decades of disastrous nation-building in Afghanistan that have resulted in strategic failure and a resurgence of the Taliban upon the United States’ exit from the country.” As Hemingway noted on Fox News’ “Special Report,” “This is the natural result of 20 years of failed strategy. We went from using our military to fight and win wars into the impossible task of nation-building. When we were attacked on 9/11, we needed to have a swift and serious response. We did that, but then-President Bush took his eyes off the ball. He and Cheney and Obama and Biden took on this task of nation-building in ­Afghanistan — the country historians call the ‘graveyard of empires.’ ”

Feminist: Why Cuomo Got #MeToo’d

“In the murky forest of American politics,” sighs Kat Rosenfield at ­UnHerd, “there’s only one weapon powerful enough” to take down liberal “werewolves” like Gov. Cuomo: “a good old #MeToo-ing by an army of brave women warriors.” The problem is that the allegations — some damning, some less so — obscured the governor’s bigger sin: “This was the man who mandated that COVID-infected patients be admitted to nursing homes without testing,” killing thousands and then trying to cover it up — crimes he got away with for months because the media class preferred him to “those science-denying yokels in, say, Florida, who wouldn’t even wear masks at the beach.” The lesson: “If the government and media would stop providing partisan cover for political werewolves, maybe desperate citizens wouldn’t feel the need to use #MeToo as a silver bullet.”

Culture critic: The Blight of Cuomo

With sexual-harassment claims dominating headlines, “far less has been said of” Gov. Cuomo’s “aesthetic abuse of New York. And Cuomo was a ­serial abuser, wantonly so and without remorse,” snarks James Panero at Spectator World. “From Albany, he dreamed of the glories of Rome. Regrettably, he was only looking as far as the City of Rome in Oneida County.” The Penn Station “debacle” was just one of “Dandy Andy’s many design ambitions.” He “had a chance to right a historic wrong by rebuilding Old Penn,” but “why fix a broken neighborhood when you can break even more?” He earlier “wasted $30 million” to replace some of the Midtown Tunnel’s white tiles with his favored blue and gold. “By the time he released his poster called ‘New York Tough,’ an art-brut collage of every flatten-the-curve cliché, our collective immunity to the Cuomo-esque was at its lowest point.”

Hunter watch: The Latest Biden Blackout

“The media blackout on Hunter Biden’s laptop remains in force” despite “a videotape that purportedly shows Biden claiming that one of his laptops was stolen by Russians for blackmail purposes,” fumes ­Jonathan Turley at his blog. Reported largely by foreign media, the tape features Hunter talking “after filming having sex with an alleged prostitute in a Las Vegas hotel,” telling her of the drug-fueled benders he went on with Russians “from penthouse suite to penthouse suite.” The president’s son “was receiving massive payments from dubious foreign figures from China to the Ukraine to Russia during these years,” claiming “they needed his guidance on issues like ­energy development and financial dealings.” Let’s be real: “Why would these sources be forking over millions to a self-admitted hopeless addict other than buying access and influence with his father?” 

From the right: YouTube’s Mask Hypocrisy

“YouTube deserves every shred of scorn and ridicule we can still muster in these crazy, exhausting times,” rages The Washington Times’ Charles Hurt in response to the Google-owned video platform’s decision to ban Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). In a video, Paul, a physician as well as a lawmaker, had dismissed the “false sense of ­security that cloth, store-bought masks provide people who are concerned about COVID-19. Lobbying for mask mandates, Dr. Paul warned, could be ‘potentially deadly misinformation.’ ” Of course, national virus guru and elite darling Dr. Anthony Fauci has fulminated against masks even more adamantly before flip-flopping. The difference is that Paul “openly calls on American citizens to stand up for their constitutional liberties.” 

Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari & Kelly Jane Torrance