as seen on tv
Senator
Pictured Above - Afghanistan's Taleban leaders convene to discuss education for girls
Not Shown - women of Afghanistan attending the meeting.
But once you parse those AI composed/plagiarized Finnish happiness reports, it dawns on you that everyone completely ignored the 10 LEAST happy countries. Drumroll please, while I open the envelope.
And the winner (loser) is . . . Afghanistan! AFGHANISTAN? Gesus . . isn't this the place we turned over to the Taleban? The same Taleban that killed thousands of US citizens at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and was narrowly prevented from taking out the White House too? THAT Taleban? How could ANYONE have foreseen that giving them an entire nation – without elections or human rights guarantees – would have resulted in a problem?
To get the answer to questions like this I attempted to interview President Biden. And was told “he's sleeping now and can't be disturbed.” Normally at this point I dream up some satiric “imaginary” interview and put words in the mouth of clueless politicians. But we all know (and try to ignore) that Biden isn't really running anything. We've seen countless videos of him waving off reporters, mumbling “they tell me I'm not taking questions”. Or being led away from a crowd by the easter bunny, or a 10-year-old girl bearing a flower basket a little flag.
I totally get it. Why we told Afghanistan to take this war and shove it. We weren't fighting to win – just to stabilize a corrupt government. And there WAS a US midterm election coming up. You don't want to have YouTube videos of Kabul in flames in the runup to the voting, do you?
There's probably no way we could have “won” in Afghanistan. Years of stalemate proved that. When psychopathic religious extremists set their hearts on something, you need a better strategy than confining yourself to a “green zone.” Only venturing out occasionally to check for roadside IEDs. But still, it IS kind of stunning to kowtow to the Taleban. Not that long after Malala Yousufzai won the Nobel Peace prize for surviving an Islamic assassination attack on her way to school, no? What . .. you don't remember that? Neither do our political leaders, apparently.
We have short attention spans. Everyone. DeSantis tried to blow off Ukraine the same way, only to reveal yet ANOTHER fault line in the already fractured republican party. The fallout – this probably locks Biden (his advisors, actually) into supporting Ukraine for-evah, unless they want to be accused of being as dumb as DeSantis. The man who bills himself as the only MCU Avenger able to stop Thanos – er – Trump. DeSantis has pivoted back to his core expertise. - Library books and drag shows. No more foreign policy initiatives.
But still, if you live in Ukraine, you have to doubt America's sincerity when we “friend” you. It clearly didn't work out for Afghanistan. That's probably at least part of the reason why Putin thought he could pull off a blitzkrieg invasion using mercenaries and prison inmates and Iranian garage made drones.
Rounding out the bottom 10 unhappiest places – besides Afghanistan: the most unhappy places on earth include a bunch of African dictatorships, several muslim theocracies, and India (!!) which runs all the toll free help desk for all of planet earth. Oh . . .and “Madagascar”. Yeah – the place Disney made a musical cartoon about. Full of adorable talking/singing animals. Madagascar is actually one of the unhappiest places on earth. But don't tell Disney's execs. They live in a bubble. All of America does. Including the White House and Montana.