Disaster: The image of the day out of Afghanistan yesterday was of a body falling from the undercarriage of an American C-17 cargo plane as it departed Kabul airport. It recalls desperate Vietnamese clinging to the skids of American helicopters and falling as America departed Vietnam.

  As American planes rolled down the runway, desperate Afghanis ran alongside, clung to the fuselage and the wheel struts. They mobbed the gangways feeding the planes. One picture shows 640 people packed into a cargo plane.

  Now the fourth president to deal with Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks, the disaster falls on the watch of President Joe Biden, who said yesterday, “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building. It was never supposed to be creating a unified centralized democracy. Our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been, preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland.”

  Biden has long said he wants the US out of Afghanistan but the last days make it look like his administration did not plan for the worst, and in a way, didn’t plan at all for pulling out American staff and the thousands of Afghans who helped the US and their families. It should have been happening for months.

  He was honest about being caught surprised at the speed of the collapse by Afghanistan’s American-trained army. “The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” he said. In short, they screwed up.

  Biden said, “When I came into office, I inherited a deal that President Trump negotiated with the Taliban.” He continued, “The choice I had to make, as your President, was either to follow through on that agreement or be prepared to go back to fighting the Taliban in the middle of the spring fighting season.”

  He said the quick collapse is further proof that he did the right thing.

  Republican leaders instantly criticized, even though the war was opened by one Republican president and led by another. 

  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the withdrawal an “unmitigated disaster, a stain on the reputation of the United States of America.”  He said, “At least you should have had adequate concern not only for the Americans who are still in Afghanistan, but the Afghans who cooperated with us, the interpreters, the people who were part of the government, the people who are on our side through these 20 years.”

  Former President Donald Trump, who claims he should still be president, said, “It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan.” 

  Biden, in his statement, said, “So I’m left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay, how many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives, American lives, is it worth? How many endless rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery?”

Aftermath: The number of dead after the weekend Haiti earthquake is over 1,400. Thousands of people were injured and many more left homeless before they were hit yesterday Tropical Storm Grace that dropped anywhere from 5 to 10 inches of rain and even 15 in some areas.

Covid Nation: Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the Catholic Church’s most conservative senior clerics who has preached from the pulpit against the Covid vaccine, is on a respirator in  and a vaccine skeptic, said he has COVID-19 and his staff said he is breathing through a ventilator.

  The 73-year-old has preached that, vaccines have been developed “through the use of the cell lines of aborted fetuses” and that “a kind of microchip needs to be placed under the skin of every person, so that any moment he or she can be controlled by the state regarding health and about other matters which we can only imagine”.

  Burke, who oversees the Vatican’s supreme court, became infected during a visit to Wisconsin and is in a hospital there. Before he went on a ventilator, he said in a tweet, “Please pray for me as I begin my recovery. Let us trust in Divine Providence. God bless you.”

The Spin Rack: For the first time with major reservoirs and the Colorado River at 40 percent of capacity, the federal government on January 1 will cut supplies to the West and Southwest serving more than 80 million people.  The affected states will be Arizona, Nevada, California, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. — A lawsuit filed in New York charges that 80-year-old singer/songwriter Bob Dylan drugged and sexually abused a 12-year-old girl in Manhattan back in 1965. 

The Obit Page: Maki Kaji, the Japanese creator of the puzzle game Sudoku has died at age 69.  

  Sudoku is played on a grid of squares with some numbers already in it. The player has to fill out sequences of numbers without repeating any. It’s become a worldwide craze. 

Oh Brother: CNN anchor Chris Cuomo returned from vacation last night and spoke for the first time about the resignation of his brother as governor of New York. “It’s never easy being in this business and coming from a political family especially now,” Cuomo said.

  He said that he had been careful not to cover his brother’s troubles, but that privately he advised his brother to resign. 

  Cuomo was deep into his monologue before he mentioned the ghost in the closet, that he had advised his brother and the governor’s staff on how to respond to accusations of sexual harassment. “I acknowledged it was a mistake,” he said. “I apologized to my colleagues and I stopped and I meant it. It was a unique situation being a brother to a politician in scandal and being part of the media. I tried to do the right thing.”

  He did the wrong thing and few people in the news business would still have their job after doing that.

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