So, it you were currently in hiding in Afghanistan, running low on money, food and knowing that at any time your door could be kicked in and you’d either be shot there or dragged in the street to be beheaded, would you have any optimism that the U.S. Department of State (under Joe Biden) would be soon coming to get you out?

On Monday Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared ‘a new diplomatic mission has begun’ in Afghanistan to try and get those remaining Americans out. He vowed to use diplomacy and leverage to bring out any Americans, allies, or Afghanis who assisted the US and want to leave, as critics pounded Biden for allowing the withdrawal before all Americans were out, comparing those who remained to hostages.
— Daily Mail, 8/31/21

While the left and their media have been gaslighting the American people on a variety of issues for years, their latest is the whole Afghanistan debacle is the fault of Donald Trump and with regards to those left behind, oh well. Let’s move on to things more important, like January 6th.

One thing is for sure: Donald Trump would NEVER leave hang Americans out to dry behind enemy lines and wouldn’t leave it solely to the State Department to use “diplomacy” (“strongly-worded” letters) on tyrants.

He’d didn’t rely solely on the impersonal Department of State bureaucracy to deal with some of the United States’ prominent adversaries (North Korea, China, Iran, Yemen) and his track record gave room for optimism.

For example….

Otto Warmbier, an American sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor by North Korea for alleged “anti-state acts,” has been released. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced Tuesday morning that Warmbier, 22, was on his way back to the U.S. to be reunited with his family.

Warmbier has apparently been in a coma since shortly after his trial, according to The Washington Post. He was sentenced in March 2016. A statement from his parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, dated June 13, stated: “Otto is on a medevac on his flight home. Sadly, he is in a coma and we have been told he has been in that condition since March 2016. We learned of this only one week ago. We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalized and terrorized by the pariah regime in North Korea. We are so grateful he can finally be with people who love him.”
— Newsweek, 6/13/17

Three UCLA basketball players released from China for shoplifting thanked President Donald Trump, who later said, “you’re welcome.” Freshmen LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill spoke at a news conference Wednesday at the UCLA basketball stadium, the first time they had spoken publicly since Nov. 7, when they were held in Hangzhou. The three athletes were arrested a day before Trump’s arrival in China, and Trump said he spoke to his Chinese counterpart about the situation.

I had a great conversation with President Xi,” Trump said aboard Air Force One on Tuesday. “He was terrific, and they’re working on it right now. And hopefully everything is going to work out.”
— NBC News, 11/16/17

Since President Donald Trump took office, his administration has secured the release of 17 prisoners foreign governments had detained.

“We’ve had 17 released, and we’re very proud of that record. Very proud. And we have others coming,” Trump said Saturday evening as he welcomed home Joshua Holt, an American citizen who had been detained in Venezuela for two years without trial. Unlike his predecessor, the president has managed to bring these prisoners home without freeing terrorists or paying millions of dollars in suspected ransom payments.
— Daily Caller, 5/27/18

The names of the released include Sabrina De Sousa, Aya Hijazi, Mohamed Hassanein, Sandy Phan-Gillis, Joshua Boyle, Caitlan Coleman, Kim Dong-Chul, Kim Hak-Song and Kim Sang-Duk.

And that was as of 2018. Who knows how sooner these could have occurred had it not been for the partisan, and in some cases, manufactured scandals that took up valuable time and attention of the Trump Administration.

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that Lebanese-American Amer Fakhoury has been released from prison, describing the development as “very big.”

“Today we are bringing home another American citizen, big thing, very big,” Trump said at the beginning of a coronavirus task force briefing. Trump also said that the US is working hard to secure the release American journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012. Separately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Iran has released American Mike White on medical furlough.
— CNN, 3/9/20

President Donald Trump has secured the release of two American hostages held captive by Houthis in Yemen, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday. The two Americans, Sandra Loli and Mikael Gidada, and the remains of a third, Bilal Fateen, were released in exchange for the return of about 250 of the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from Oman, according to the White House.

Kash Patel, a deputy assistant to Trump who worked on the deal, told The Wall Street Journal that Loli had been held by the Houthis for about three years and Gidada was held captive for about a year.
— Fox News, 10/4/20

One would think President Joe Biden would personally understand and appreciate the American tradition of not leaving anyone behind.

Erik Prince, the co-founder of defense contractor Blackwater, ​is responding after the White House took a shot at him for offering to fly people out of Afghanistan on charter flights for $6,500 a seat — recalling that Blackwater ​soldiers had to rescue Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel when they got lost in a snowstorm in 2008.

“They were on a congressional visit to Afghanistan in the winter and their US Army helicopter got lost in a blinding snowstorm and set down in Taliban territory on the side of a mountain,” he told Tucker Carlson. “And the US military launched a ground convoy to get them and they got lost and the Blackwater guys launched and they did not get lost. And we recovered them. We rescued them from Taliban territory. That was the winter of ’08,” he said.
— New York Post, 8/26/21

Meanwhile…

An Afghan interpreter who helped rescue then Senator Joe Biden and two other senators in a valley in Afghanistan is stranded in the country under Taliban rule pleading to be rescued on Tuesday.

“Hello Mr. President: Save me and my family. Don’t forget me here”, the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying.

Mohammed’s (who asked not to use his full name) visa application became stuck after the defense contractor he worked for lost the records he needed for his application. The Afghan interpreter tried to join the thousands of people who swarmed Kabul airport in an effort to get on one of the evacuation flights out of the country, but he was “rebuffed by US forces.” He says he could get in but US forces would not allow him to take his wife and four children with him.
— Al Arabiya English, 8/31/21

Obviously some people are more deserving and entitled to rescue than others and it must’ve been a relief to Joe Biden as it’s doubtful “strongly-worded” letters from the State Department would have been of any meaningful assistance when HE needed it.

Last week, three UCLA basketball players were detained in China, accused of shoplifting designer sunglasses from an upscale store near the team’s hotel.

Three UCLA men’s basketball players — including LiAngelo Ball, the younger brother of Los Angeles Lakers rookie Lonzo Ball — were arrested in China just days before Friday’s season-opening game against Georgia Tech in Shanghai. One source told ESPN the group of players — which also included freshmen Cody Riley and Jalen Hill — was arrested on shoplifting charges.

The players are being questioned about stealing from a Louis Vuitton store that is located next to the team’s hotel in Hangzhou, where the Bruins had been staying before moving on to Shanghai on Wednesday.
— ESPN, 11/8/17

As we all know, crimes like that are punished harshly by Chinese authorities, especially when committed by foreigners. The previous administration allowed Americans to languish in horrific foreign prisons for crimes far less egregious, yet President Trump wasted little time to bring up the accused UCLA players with expeditious, definitive results.

Three UCLA basketball players detained in China on suspicion of shoplifting are on a plane back to Los Angeles.

Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott thanked President Donald Trump, the White House and the State Department for their efforts in resolving what he called “the incident with authorities in Hangzhou, China.” He indicated that UCLA made “significant efforts” on behalf of its three players.

Trump said Tuesday he had a long conversation about the three players’ status with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
— Yahoo, 11/14/17

Of course, the black activist left will never acknowledge President Trump’s intervention into what could have been a long, drawn-out State Department negotiation that normally leaves the detained Americans in nasty jails for weeks, months, or worse. They’ll probably insist President Trump was simply doing his job and probably could have had the three released a couple of days earlier had he not been so indifferent to the plight of incarcerated black people.

“What they did was unfortunate,” Mr. Trump had said of the players. “You know, you’re talking about very long prison sentences. They do not play games.“

The UCLA players are suspected of stealing from a Louis Vuitton outlet around the corner from the hotel, where some sunglasses go for $740.

Mr. Trump had said that he hoped the Chinese president would help the players: LiAngelo Ball, a freshman guard; and Cody Riley and Jalen Hill, both freshman forwards. He emphasized that it was a “very, very rough situation, with what happened to them.“
— New York Times, 11/14/17

Those of us who’ve served overseas remember the stern warnings given not to break the law on foreign soil because the protections we enjoy in the United States are null and void outside our border. It would appear such a warning was not given to the UCLA players as they might have been considered demeaning, and as aimed at predominantly black players, racist.

Aside from the players (whose irresponsible behavior became an embarrassing bump during important diplomatic, president-level, foreign policy negotiations), don’t expect any thanks directed to President Trump, either by the media, Democrat politicians and/or social justice activists.

In fact, it’s sad how quickly some bite the hand that freed your son AFTER his ass was saved.

“Who?” LaVar Ball told ESPN on Friday, when asked about Trump’s involvement in the matter. “What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.“

“As long as my boy’s back here, I’m fine,” LaVar Ball told ESPN. “I’m happy with how things were handled. A lot of people like to say a lot of things that they thought happened over there. Like I told him, ‘They try to make a big deal out of nothing sometimes.‘ I’m from L.A. I’ve seen a lot worse things happen than a guy taking some glasses. My son has built up enough character that one bad decision doesn’t define him.”
— ESPN, 11/19/17

Life is funny sometimes as things tend to be cyclical.

LiAngelo Ball’s father dismissed the intervention of the President of the United States to keep his son and others out of a Chinese prison, essentially said shoplifting is no big deal, and CNN’s “media critic” Brian Stelter took the opportunity to speak for all black people and turned the whole episode into an exercise in “racebaiting”.

Let’s put it this way; the next time anyone in the Ball family gets in trouble, there may not be a lot of people who’ll want to help them and rightfully so.

UPDATES

12/5/17: LaVar Ball pulls son LiAngelo Ball out of UCLA

Because it’s not about teaching your son right-from-wrong, consequences of actions, an education… no, it’s all about making sure LiAngelo is eligible for the NBA draft and all the money that comes with living off your children.

12/11/17: LaMelo, LiAngelo Ball agree to one-year deals with first-division Lithuanian team
12/12/17: Ball brothers picked ‘worst possible place,’ says American who played in Lithuania
12/20/17: How This Lithuanian Outpost Lured LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball

Being banished to the middle of nowhere is somehow quite fitting for the bouncing Balls.

12/22/17: Cody Riley, Jalen Hill Suspended for Season for Arrests Involving LiAngelo Ball

They can always leave the country….