What has the Republican Party done this year to earn the resounding approval it has gotten in the most recent national poll by the Gallup organization?

Nothing. The Republicans have just sat around like everyone else watching as the incompetence of President Biden and his administration makes the country miss Donald Trump.

According to Gallup, more people now consider the Republicans superior to the Democrats on both economic issues and international affairs. Some polls even show Trump leading Biden in a hypothetical presidential rematch in 2024, though it is hard to imagine Biden maintaining the necessary stamina for even another year.

Of course 2024 is a long way off. But campaigns are already starting for next year’s elections for Congress, and the Democratic majorities there are paper thin. A switch to Republican majorities seems likely.

More than dissatisfaction with the Biden administration would be required to make next year’s Republican nominations for governor and Congress desirable in overwhelmingly Democratic Connecticut. But in addition to crime, Connecticut is full of serious issues that state government long has overlooked. Maybe the national polls will encourage Connecticut Republicans to try getting more relevant.

Don't feed the Afghans

Now that the supply of dollars has been cut off with the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Afghanistan, Reuters reports that officials of Western governments and the United Nations are working to turn the spigot back on to prevent the country’s economic collapse. The new theocratic fascist Taliban government is no more capable of running the country than the puppet regime was. Indeed, Afghanistan is hardly a country at all, more like a grouping of medieval tribes.

The plan, Reuters says, is to get money to the Afghan people without also underwriting the Taliban. This is a silly delusion.

For a gangster regime like the Taliban easily can confiscate whatever it wants from the people, and any money sent to and kept by the Afghans will make them more content to be ruled by the gangsters. But hunger and general privation may encourage Afghans to overthrow the regime.

The Biden administration’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan forfeited to the Taliban military equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Taliban can sell that equipment to Iran or China and already may have begun to do so. In any case under U.S. occupation the Afghans had their chance to build and sustain a decent government. Being so primitive, most Afghans couldn’t have cared less, and the United States was stupid for thinking they ever might have cared.

If the Afghans are hungry or need medicine, their country has great mineral wealth and can sell the mining rights to China, which, having a gangster regime itself, will have no problem underwriting gangsters elsewhere.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.