IF NOTHING ELSE is clear from the last several days, it's clear that President Joe Biden has done what I don't think any other President has done in my memory, he told the truth about a war the United States has waged.
Joe Biden will deserve to go to a place among the highest handful of American presidents for that reason alone and I will bet you that it was just that inconvenient honesty, inconvenient for the elites that will probably keep it from being seen for the heroic honesty it is.
Nicole Wallace said 95% of the American people will agree with Biden, and 95% of the punditocracy won't.
ReplyDeleteShe's right. Listened to Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC and all she could do was complain about how badly Biden had bungled this, even as she reported the US now has control of the airfield and the Taliban has not engaged any US forces in combat (i.e., tried to interrupt their efforts at evacuation).
Short of forced evacuation of 50% or more of the cities (the countryside is another matter, as it is anywhere), I don't know what Biden was supposed to do. And I emphasize "Forced." A great deal of what's on Tee Vee is blind panic as the Afghan "government" (I use the word loosely) dissolved more rapidly than that Afghan "army" did. I suppose that's Biden's fault, too, though I fail to see why.
Charlie Pierce said Biden gave the people a strong dose of truth. It appears that's one thing the punditocracy, on any end of hte political spectrum, cannot tolerate.
I thought his point that a lot of those who they would have evacuated didn't want to leave when they could have. I remember reading one after another account of how Jews in places like Hungary and even in Germany and Austria couldn't believe things would get as bad as they did and so they wouldn't leave when they could have. George Soros' father's mother in law (if my memory of his father's book serves me) had to be convinced of the necessity of living incognito in a place other than her home even as they were starting to send Jews in Hungary to their deaths.
ReplyDeleteStephanie Ruhle, She'd have been about 25 when the US went into Afghanistan, oddly, I don't see any mention of military service in her record. Her degree is in "international business" I don't see anything about diplomacy in there. I think we've got to start grilling the war hawk media on their notable failure to serve in wars they support, if that was a rule for being a talking head in the media, decimation would be too weak a word for what it would do to them.