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I mentioned earlier this week that some members of Congress – like Republican leader Kevin McCarthy – didn’t sound especially enthusiastic about welcoming Afghan refugees, so I want to make sure I highlight a high-profile Republican who clearly IS happy to take them in, and that’s Robert O’Brien.

In case you’ve forgotten, he served as National Security Advisor to Donald Trump. During a Republican foreign policy event at the Nixon Library, he not only welcomed the refugees but predicted they would become some of our best citizens.

“Our interpreters, those that helped save Americans, and fought side by side with us, we need to welcome them here,” O’Brien said. “And by the way, they’re going to be great Americans because they know what they’re fleeing.”

He contrasted the refugees with what he calls the “blame America crowd” – those on the left who hammer away at systemic racism in America. Of course, there’s also a “blame America crowd” on the right who hammer away at how weak we looked leaving Afghanistan.

But he seemed to disagree with them, too.

“We’re going through a tough time,” O’Brien said. “And our adversaries should understand this — we’re going through a tough time right now and our credibility has been shaken, but we’ve been through tough times before. We saw it after Vietnam. We saw it after the Iran hostage crisis. But don’t ever bet against the United States of America because we’re going to get back and we’re still, as Ronald Reagan used to say, the last best hope of mankind on Earth.”

Sounds like he thinks we’ll recover from this.

And along those lines – as chaotic as our exit was, those crowds scrambling to get to the airport, I keep thinking, yeah, not good, but at the same time – how embarrassing was that for the Taliban? They claim to have God’s blessing, but saw tens of thousands of their most educated citizens willing to leave everything behind and throw themselves into the chaos rather than to have anything to do with the Taliban version of Islam.

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