Царь наш, your Volgi didn’t watch it, being consumed with analyzing the numerological-astrological-cosmological significance of a six-pointed Oriental fortress.

However, what leaps out is the President’s implying that we’re going to try and be out of there in eighteen months or so, circumstances permitting. That seems like an invitation to the Taliban to lie low, stockpile weapons, and wait us out, then come crashing back in like they did when the Soviets withdrew.

He may be prepared to see it out; it’s dangerous for him to imply he isn’t. One assumes it’s a bone he’s throwing to his disappointed lefty-pacifist base—and fears it may accord with his own lefty desire to withdraw from the world in order to get on with immanentizing the American eschaton in which our sinful nation will be consumed in the righteous flame of his incandescent intellect and be reborn as the perfect society that he, the one we’ve been waiting for, can create through the sheer numinousness of his being.

Geez, Confucius has to lay off the rice wine late at night.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.