Occam's Razor

 Ron DeSantis's biggest donor is Kenneth Griffin, CEO of Citadel.  Citadel makes a covid drug called Regeneron, which sold last year for only $1,500 a dose.  Ron DeSantis has done everything he can think of to infect people with covid and now promises to cure a lucky few with his pal's wonder drug.  See how simple that is?  Watch and learn, Jared Kushner -- this is how you do corruption.  (We should check and see how many other plague-loving governors are on Griffin's Christmas card list.)

Millions of words have already been produced about the bug-out in Afghanistan, none more cogent than Simon Jenkins's essay about the twenty-year "post-imperial Western fantasy."  It has been nearly forgotten that Tony Blair was Bush's enthusiastic partner in folly without even the excuse of the 9/11 atrocity, and that in 2006 his defense secretary said that only "remnants" of the Taliban remained.  I remember that one of the goals of the occupation was to wean Afghani farmers off opium poppies and get them to grow corn or something.  We were going to solve drug addiction and terrorism at the same time!   Yeah, not so much.  

If Blair has had anything to say for himself this week I can't find it, but George Bush has spoken up, if only to praise the troops who "kept America safe from further terror attacks."  Apparently he hasn't heard about the invasion of the Capitol last January.  (Admittedly there isn't much US forces can do when the commander-in-chief sends in the terrorists.)   No acceptance of blame for this monumental SAPFU, but at least Bush advocated allowing Afghani refugees into the US.  Perhaps we could start with Zarifa Ghafari, the mayor of Kabul, unless she has already been killed.

That won't sit well with the White Replacement Axis.  Last night Fox News was wall-to-wall panic about the "couple hundred thousand Ilhan Omars" that Biden is yearning to welcome, putting an end to the Norman Rockwell vision of America we all love.  That's been his evil plan all along!  That's why he ended American involvement instead of pumping in more blood and more billions and passing the parcel along to the forty-seventh president.  The fiend.  Speaking of which, I wonder how many immigrants will be welcome in the UK, where xenophobia is official post-Brexit policy.  Boris just spent 300,000 pounds to deport seven people to Jamaica, which is hard-core commitment to Making England Great Again.

HANNITY: There is a stampede, not only out of Afghanistan, but a stampede away from high prices, overpriced service from the big carriers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. The average family making the switch to PureTalk.

That is authentic ad copy from SpongeSean Squareface's radio show.  You can't make it up.

But life goes on.  Across the seas Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian is appalled that people are paying a lot of money for the paintings of Hunter Biden.  "The whole situation screams nepotism," she huffs.  Well, people buy art as an investment -- other such artists have included John Wayne Gacy and George W. Bush.  I have a CD somewhere whose cover art is a watercolor by HRH the Prince of Wales.  Somebody just paid $6.6 million at auction for a Honus Wagner baseball card.  (That means somebody dropped out at $6.5 million, muttering, "What am I, insane?  I don't even like baseball.")  It's not as if Joe Biden brought his vapid daughter to a G-20 meeting.  Calm down, Arwa.

New Zealand is entering three days of national lockdown over one (1) case of covid.  That's proactive.

The Afghanistan catastrophe has brought out the funny side of Six-Gun Lauren Boebert.  When several men fell to their death clinging to a military plane as it departed the Kabul airport, the Joan Rivers of the Colorado Third tweeted, "At least they won't have to read 'mean tweets.'"  She also praised the new overlords:  "The Taliban are the only people building back better."  Boebert declined to re-post her tweet from last February:  "We need to end the endless wars."  It's so hard to know when witty people are being serious.  As Eric Swalwell observed, "You tried to overthrow the US government so of course you support the overthrow of the Afghan government."  In one respect, Afghanistan is lucky -- it won't have women like Boebert in its government.

Happy now, J.D. Vance?  Pete and Chasten Buttigieg are no longer "childless cat-ladies" (cat-gentlemen?).  They have begun the process of adopting a child.   So shut up.