On Saturday, the Pentagon announced that US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is still hospitalized following a prostatectomy.
To recap: On January 1, President Biden and top national security aides convened on a secure call to discuss ways to intensify pressure on Houthi militants in Yemen. Nobody present, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top aides, noticed anything wrong with Austin.
Hours later, however, he was being raced across the DC suburbs in an ambulance, and told nobody about his health crisis for days.
Not even Austin’s most senior aides at the Pentagon, top officials at the White House, or Biden himself had any idea of his whereabouts and the threats to his health. Kathleen Hicks, the Pentagon No. 2 who could step in for Austin if needed, was vacationing in the Caribbean.
Four days passed before Austin’s medical crisis was disclosed publicly. The uproar unleashed by the news that the Pentagon chief had undergone two hospitalizations and a surgery following a prostate cancer diagnosis without notifying the White House or Pentagon staff has threatened to overshadow his tenure leading America’s sprawling military enterprise, and created a potentially damaging distraction for Biden as he intensifies his reelection campaign. -WaPo
And as Roger L. Simon writes in the Epoch Times, Austin should be fired...
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I consider myself something of an expert on prostatectomies because I had one not long ago—November 2022.
Of course, I was asleep through most of it, so factor that in. I’ve also written about it in my new book in a chapter entitled “Farewell, My Prostate”—a nod to the great detective novel by Raymond Chandler, “Farewell, My Lovely.”
If you read it, I predict you'll agree that I’ve been more transparent about the event than the Pentagon or the White House, although that’s, as the cliché goes, a low bar.
In fact, the obfuscation, denial, and misinformation on all ends of this, given the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and, potentially, the Pacific, is almost the most dangerous incompetence imaginable on a global scale.
It makes you wonder who’s minding the store here in the land that’s supposedly the guardian of the free world. Since the disastrous departure from Afghanistan, we have more than an inkling of that. The craziness and extraordinary lack of transparency in the matter of the secretary of defense’s prostate operation only hammers it home.
In my case, the operation was a big deal to my family and me, but not, needless to say, to the country.
All it did was delay my columns here at The Epoch Times for a few days, something I’m reasonably sure almost no one noticed.
Unlike Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, I had notified the company sometime before, in the person of Editor-in-Chief Jasper Fakkert, that I would be having the operation. He was gracious about it.
Such things are almost always scheduled far in advance. Mine was. (Was Mr. Austin’s?)
Most people who have prostatectomies have known about their cancers for a considerable amount of time. They’re slow growing. In my case, it was diagnosed when I still lived in Los Angeles seven or eight years before the actual operation. I was under what’s called “active surveillance” until a biopsy told me action was needed.
Even then, I waited several months and consulted several physicians.
It would be interesting, actually imperative, to know Mr. Austin’s history in this regard. Just how long did he know he had prostate cancer, and who else knew it?
The recovery, too, is tricky. I went home from the hospital, as did the secretary of defense, the day after the operation. This is conventional. But I went home with the also conventional pain medications (hydrocodone) and antibiotics—to avoid the urinary infection that Mr. Austin apparently got.
Further, and also conventionally, I was catheterized. If you’ve been there and done that, you know that that doesn’t exactly put you “on your game.” (You probably know it, even if you haven’t been.)
You remain that way for a week, sometimes more if the doctor advises. For me, it was by far the most unpleasant part of the entire procedure.
I wouldn’t have been qualified to, say, monitor the activities of the Houthis in the Red Sea and make decisions about a response—not that I am normally.
But there are reasons to believe Mr. Austin isn’t all that qualified either, normally—and not just because of the prevarications surrounding his operation.
Mr. Austin has overseen, and been a prominent spokesman for, our new woke military that has turned our once-revered fighting forces into free, taxpayer-sponsored mills for transgender surgery—thus leaving our enemies in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea scratching their heads in bewilderment, but nevertheless, we can assume, smiling and laughing at the same time at our idiocy.
And there’s the matter of the aforementioned flight from Afghanistan that left the Taliban one of the most heavily armed fighting forces in the world and a net exporter of weapons on a grand scale with the huge Bagram airbase in its hands, while, after a very short time, women are back to being as oppressed as they always were under their rule.
Good job, Secretary of Defense Austin.
Scratch that, terrible job, one of the worst ever.
Whether it was shame over an operation that’s exclusively male or whatever excuse he has, his behavior in his crucial position was unconscionable in the extreme, and that of the White House scarcely better.
