this morning. good morning, john. yes, yesterday, once the sun came out, you could really see the level of devastation. i mean, my heart really goes out, all of us do, to the folks that were north of us. because the wind just did unbelievable damage, as you ve been reporting. here, what we got was unbelievable amounts of storm surge. we were on that southeast quadrant corner where the meteorologists always warn is the dirty side. and although we did get hurricane force winds, nothing like what they experienced north of us, but most people here have never seen 12 feet of storm surge. a lot of times the takeaway is that s always an overestimation, it s always a lot less. this time it wasn t. we saw every inch of it. going around my district yesterday, what i saw were a lot of people dragging out all of their positions to the curb for pickup. people who had 4, 5, 6, 7 feet
and understanding military. we saw that with hitler during world war ii. but we also saw that with president johnson during the bombing campaign of north vietnam in the late 60s. i can t think in modern history where we had a situation where a leader of a country directing the individual soldiers on the ground has ended up better than worse. yeah. and notably, there was some intelligence intercepts that revealed that some of the soldiers on the ground were lamenting the directions from mo moscow. they were complaining. what did you make of that? well, two things, i also don t know a soldier in war who hasn t bitched about his leaders. but the fact remains if it gets to the point now where the leader is, as we say, using the thousand-mile screwdriver to try to adjust the war inside ukraine, it shows two things. number one, vladimir putin has an overestimation of his own
overestimation is how long it would take the taliban to take over afghanistan. we are joined by a former director, retired lieutenant james clapper. i wonder what your reaction is to this internal intelligence, should there be a reassessment and how the u.s. goes about assessing the strengths of foreign military and perhaps the world t will to fight. ukrainians have the will to fight and afghan forces did not. you are exactly right. this what this war is down to is will to fight. and, we have never, to my knowledge done it very well. i say, we, as the government. going back to my war, 60s, we
the consequences will last generations but didn t slow the flow of patience. according to john s hopkins university, lockdowns reduced covid-19 mortality by only 0.2%. offense like other covid studies, it s a gross overestimation. the researchers did a meta-analysis of several studies analyzing lockdowns like school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and concluded we find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns had a noticeable effect on covid 19 mortality rates. 0.2%, that s not even half a percent. it s basically 0.0. in unscientific terms, lockdowns didn t do [bleep]. except let your older loved ones die alone, let your spouse misses a cancer screening and what your kids develop speech problems and let your friends overdosed on drugs. that happened. maybe lockdowns were worth it if you re a total [bleep].