TV Quote of the Day (‘Desperate Housewives,’ In Which Gaby Assesses Her Husband’s Life Change)

Gaby Solis [played by Eva Longoria] to her suddenly socially conscious husband: “Carlos, you help the poor and downtrodden... a group with a very flexible schedule.”— Desperate Housewives, Season 8, Episode 23, “Finishing the Hat,” original air date May 13, 2012, teleplay by Marc Cherry, Jason Ganzel, and Brian Tanen, directed by David Grossman

This Day in Military History (Afghanistan War Ends in Chaotic U.S. Withdrawal)

Aug. 30, 2021—Less than two weeks removed from the anticipated complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Taliban forces forced that timetable to be radically revised.

Army Major General Chris Donahue represented not just just the last U.S. service member to leave at the end of a chaotic two-week period, but also the failure of America’s two-decade effort at nation-building in the country that harbored the 9/11 terrorists.

More than a few officials bore responsibility for this ignominious end to America’s longest war, but the one left holding the bag was President Joe Biden. Coming eight months into his administration, the images of civilians clinging to a military transport plane and a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members demoralized TV viewers who had never seen or had forgotten similar scenes of disarray in Saigon in April 1975.

Biden’s approval rating fell from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent a month later, according to Gallup polling, and never really recovered after that.

Periodically, American foreign-policy or military failures lead to the question, “Who lost it?”, as occurred in China and Vietnam. The Biden administration was certainly responsible for setting up a symbolic but arbitrary withdrawal date (the anniversary of 9/11) that left inadequate time for planning an orderly transfer to complete Afghan military self-reliance.

But multiple mistakes, as early as America’s initial airstrikes in October 2001, ensured that this would be a waste of American blood and treasure, including:

*Failing to catch Osama bin-Laden quickly: In an August 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis, Eliot Cohen thought that several brigades of light infantry were needed to finish off al Qaeda. Instead, bin-Laden eluded capture and remain the symbol (if not operational leader) of the terrorist network until he was killed a decade later in a raid into Pakistan.

*The Iraq War diverted needed men and equipment from Afghanistan. Five years ago, Jonah Blank, a former policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, observed in an article for The Atlantic, “the original sin of the war in Afghanistan was going to war in Iraq.” Bush advisers sought to convince the American public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in the region, but he did not have weapons of mass destruction, as they claimed. The result of the change in focus was detrimental to the U.S. long-range campaign in Afghanistan, according to Blank: “Too light a troop presence in Afghanistan meant that security was never truly established; too little money actually delivered meant that the fledgling government was never able to prove its credibility to its own people; too little focus from U.S. policy makers meant that a highly centralized governing structure, imposed on a never-before-centralized nation, could not be prevented from degenerating into nepotism, ineffectiveness, and rampant corruption. Failure to provide enough troops, money, and focus on the front end resulted in exponentially more troops, money, and focus down the line."

*Misguided drone use. Some military experts thought that, after instituting a troop surge following his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s announced mass drawdown five years later occurred when Afghan security forces were still inadequately trained. But his authorization of more drone attacks was arguably worse, leading to civilian casualties that turned much of the population (along with then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai) against the continuing American presence.

*Corruption in the Afghan government: As early as August 2012, in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institutions warned, “Afghans have become disconnected and alienated from the national government and the country’s other power arrangements,” resenting “the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of justice that have become entrenched over the past decade.”

*Lies and concealment among American political and military leaders about progress in the war: In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that American officials, fearing the consequences of what might ensue once Americans left Afghanistan, misled the public by spinning casualty counts and other data. Behind the scenes, it was another story, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, throwing up his hands in a September 2003 memo: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

*Donald Trump left a skeletal American force in the country just as Biden was to be inaugurated. The administration announcement that only 2,500 troops would remainat that point came despite the lack of an agreement between Taliban and Afghan government negotiators—and a warning by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that too rapid a drawdown could expose the Afghan regime to collapse.

The public’s overwhelming feeling of futility at the Taliban’s resumption of control was palpable. But a few other aspects of the conflict got lost along the way:

*American concern about oil at least partly accounted for bin Laden’s murderous rage. George H.W. Bush ordered American troops placed in Saudi Arabia to counter a potential threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Those forces remained in the kingdom even after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm to enforce no-fly zones protecting the Kurds. Bin Laden cited that presence as a primary reason for waging jihad against the U.S.

*Questions remain about the full extent of Saudi involvement with 9/11. Though the administration of George W. Bush never specifically claimed that Saddam Hussein collaborated with bin Laden on 9/11, officials mentioned the dictator and terrorist so often together that many Americans jumped to that conclusion. They were far more pointed in claiming there was no high-level Saudi government support for the attack. But most of the 9/11 hijackers (as well as bin Laden himself) came from the country. A lawsuit by 9/11 victim families turned up a growing body of circumstantial evidence that the Saudi government was being disingenuous about these connections.

*The overarching War on Terror distracted from countering the growing Chinese threat in Asia. The phrase “War on Terror” itself provided the Chinese regime with vocabulary to justify cracking down on the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. Moreover, military and intelligence resources that the Bush administration could have devoted to monitoring Chinese saber-rattling in the Far East were devoted instead to Afghanistan and Iraq.

(The image accompanying this post, of U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain Division standing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, was taken on Aug. 15, 2021, by Sgt. Isaiah Campbell.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on Love and Worthiness)

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.” —American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), “The Power and Meaning of Love,” in Disputed Questions (1960)

Quote of the Day (Mila Kunis, on Advice That Has Stuck With Her)

“Don't make permanent decisions on temporary feelings. Also, it's OK to change your mind. That's the biggest thing I wish I could go back and change about my youth. It’s all right to say, ‘You know what, I don’t like this anymore. I’m going to move on.’”— Ukrainian-American actress and model Mila Kunis, now 43, on advice given that she's found useful, quoted by Ava Mason, “My Monday Morning: Mila Kunis,” WSJ. Magazine, December 2025-January 2026

The image accompanying this post of Mila Kunis, speaking at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International in San Diego, CA, was taken on July 12, 2012, by Gage Skidmore of Peoria, AZ.

Quote of the Day (Margaret Atwood, With a Bad Guess About American Culture in the Past Decade)

“What sorts of novels, poems, films, television series, video games, paintings, music, or graphic novels will adequately reflect America’s next decade? We don’t have any idea yet. We can’t: Nothing is predictable except unpredictability. It’s probably fair to say, however, that Donald Trump’s interest in the arts, gauged on a scale from one to 100, is somewhere between zero and negative 10—lower than any president in the last 50 years. Some of those presidents didn’t give a hoot about the arts, but at least they found it politic to pretend. Trump won’t. In fact, he may not even notice they’re there.”—Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Margaret Atwood, “Creative Reconstruction,” The Nation, Feb. 6/13, 2017

Margaret Atwood developed a reputation as a master dystopian novelist with The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’m afraid that her soothsaying capabilities have failed in at least one respect. Had she substituted “appreciation” for “interest” in the above paragraph, I would have had no quarrel with her prediction.

Yet it turns out that Donald Trump is very much interested in American art and culture. It all goes back to what conservative Republican and former speechwriter Peggy Noonan called in her recent Wall Street Journal column “The Art of the Self-Deal.”

In other words, whatever or whoever trumpets his name, money, and allies, meets with his approval. But whoever interferes with any of these, he will go beyond the already vast powers of his office to crush them.

Count among the latter Army Chief of Staff Randy George, fired without explanation earlier this year by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps not so coincidentally, George had refused to kill a probe into an unauthorized Apache helicopter flyover near the Nashville estate of Kid Rock, according to this Hollywood Reporter account from earlier this week.

In implementing plans by his Orwellian titled Department of Government Efficiency to terminate funding for more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants totaling more than $100 million, Trump hoped to demoralize key portions of academe.

But the algorithms that triggered many of the cuts were so ridiculous that a federal judge ordered the grants’ reinstatement in May—and even Brian T. Allen, writing for the venerable conservative magazine National Review, was forced to concede, “Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething tech nerds was a big mistake.”

Moreover, the Kennedy Center controversy continues. Trump couldn’t stop with replacing former trustees with ones of his choosing, all of whom bent over backwards to rename that much-loved Washington performing arts center in his honor. More recently, he has threatened, if it’s not allowed to proceed with plans for a renovation that might not even be needed, to simply knock the whole building down.

Even before becoming President, Trump wanted his name on all his business ventures, as part of his branding effort. It’s a different matter when he’s talking about buildings that, properly speaking, belong to the people of the United States and not him and that traditionally honor retired or, better yet, dead American figures.

Nevertheless, he has no compunction about plastering his name and/or image not just on the Kennedy Center but, among other initiatives, on the Interior Department’s “America the Beautiful” pass, the State Department’s Institute for Peace, or limited-edition U.S. passports.

When late-night comics predictably mocked the President (as they should, and as they have done with other incumbents of both parties), Paramount yielded to FCC pressure over its planned merger with Skydance Media to cancel Stephen Colbert’s longtime perch on CBS—and Jimmy Kimmel only narrowly avoided a similar fate at ABC.

Anytime something happens, Trump always wants to make it about him. Poor Dolly Parton couldn’t pass away without the President claiming to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, on scant evidence, that the country-music icon “really liked me, I will tell you!” (If she did, she kept it very well hidden—rejecting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Trump and Biden, so as not to alienate either Republican or Democratic fans.)

I guess we should probably qualify Ms. Atwood’s statement above in another sense. When she is referring to “the arts,” it is true that Trump could care less about, say, literature, classical music, or the visual arts. But he may be our most show-business President in the same sense that Lincoln was our quintessential war President.

His second term continues the pattern from his first in commanding the nation’s attention 24/7. That is not a compliment: no society can be counted as well when its citizens cannot carve out for themselves a private realm where the mind is not dominated by images from the state.

Unfortunately, this second term has abundantly proved that Atwood was overly optimistic that Trump wouldn’t notice the presence of arts programs.

But she was absolutely correct in believing that “Nothing is predictable except unpredictability”—at least when it comes to a wildly capricious President intent as much on self-aggrandizement as on retribution towards opponents.

Joke of the Day (Tina Fey, on a New Form of Plastic Surgery)

“There's a new procedure I'm doing a lot where they freeze your fat off you, then make it into a whipped dessert, and you eat it again.” — American actress and screenwriter Tina Fey, quoted by Dan Snierson, “Tina and Amy Boss Us Around (And You Love It!)”, Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 20, 2013

Song Lyric of the Day (Dolly Parton, on Her ‘Coat of Many Colors’)

“My coat of many colors that my mama made for me,
Made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly.
Now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be.
In my coat of many colors my mama made for me.”—Grammy-winning country-music singer-songwriter Dolly Parton (1946-2026), title tune from her Coat of Many Colors LP (1971)
 
There’s a reason why Dolly Parton was remembered not just with respect for her talent, but even with love for her personality: she was so transparently down to earth. She never forgot where she came from: Locust Ridge, TN, in a tiny log cabin with her parents and 11 siblings, but without electricity or running water.
 
There will certainly be those who say that she achieved success through hard work. No argument from me there. But I think it’s also fair to say that, despite what some cynics say, you don’t have to step on other people’s toes to get ahead in life. Her career proved that, too, in abundance.

(The image accompanying this post, of Dolly Parton accepting the Liseberg Applause Award 2010, was created on Nov. 16, 2010, by Curtis Hilbun.)