The other day I went down a Norm MacDonald rabbit hole (full disclosure I don’t know if he has been canceled or not, but I would imagine he has because he says some outrageous shit, but I am old and his stuff was funny before he got canceled if he got canceled so I still watch it and it still makes me laugh) and was watching some of his old standup routines while working on other stuff, and this gem popped up:
I immediately thought of the media freakout the last couple weeks over the Afghanistan withdrawal, and it occurred to me- they’re not history buffs. With the exception of a few older reporters and media types like James Fallows and Charlie Pierce, folks who regularly use the brains they were born with, most of our bobble heads are relatively young. Also, there is also nothing more American than not remember fucking anything, so you combine these two and you get a bunch of media who have A.) never seen us lose a war, B.) don’t understand that no military plans survives longer than initial contact, C.) the other guy is trying to win and has their own agenda that is independent of any static intelligence reports. So they literally have no idea what is going on.
For most of them, they’ve never actually seen a war end, particularly because we don’t declare wars anymore, we just call things wars and then they go on forever (see also war on drugs, war on terrorism). It’s very rare that we have actual land wars, we just bomb and arm people and what not, and most of it is out of American sight (a reminder that Operation Menu, Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, was only a secret war in the United States. The Cambodians were fully up to date on it as it happened).
So they are basically in “I don’t know what is going on and I’m freaking the fuck out.” And their reporting shows it. “Why didn’t we evacuate earlier” is a popular question, and the answer is WHY WOULD YOU EVACUATE BEFORE THE WITHDRAWAL and if we evacuated everyone the fucking Taliban would have noticed and we thought the Afghans would hold longer. Again, it’s not a static turn based crpg. It’s a fluid event with lots of moving parts and hundreds of different agendas and tens of thousands of actors. It’s fucking messy.
Wars are messy, losing them doubly so. So, no. There is no fucking reason for Biden to fire his cabinet or execute the Pentagon leadership and the Joint Chiefs. This is what losing looks like. People may have romantic ideas about a bullet, razorblade, and match in the finial of the flag for the last man abandoning post, but that’s just not how it happens.
So ignore them. Listen to the calm people doing briefings at the Pentagon. They know what they are talking about, even if you can’t trust everything they say.
JR
Not everyone loses a war as hilariously as Louis Napoleon getting captured at Sedan.
zhena gogolia
I like Norm MacDonald too. I hope he hasn’t been canceled
ETA: I hate the news media. I just hate them.
raven
I finished “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” by Max Hastings today. Hastings doesn’t spare anyone involved in the war and some folks don’t like that perspective. If you think the exit from Afghanistan is ugly pick this up and check out the second to last chapter. Thousands of ARVN, NVA, VC, and civilians were killed and wounded in the last couple of years and it ended up like it always going to. I know there are fuckers in the MIC that would loved to have the end of our involvement in Afghanistan become another blood bath, and it still may happen, but get the fuck out.
Gin & Tonic
For some reason “canceled” with one L looks wrong to me.
coin operated
The Taliban could have made this significantly more messy by sending our remaining forces back in body bags…this country needs to count it’s blessings in that regard.
Part of me thinks that’s what our Talibangicals would have done…
jl
Big shot media and academic aristocrats who are so removed from reality that they think it’s all just a game of risk are the ones who are most upset. And they are fools, dangerous fools, but fools.
A big chunk of the international security field has been lost in some kind of fantasy video game thinking for years. Your team goes in and shoots fantasy power beam rays, hit enough targets and you win a credibility chip power pack and you can go up to the next level.
Edit: Afghanistan has been an exemplar of entirely mindless mission creep for years. The goal of getting Al-Qaeda was mostly achieved within a few years, and probably could have been completely accomplished but for the incompetence and malfeasance of the Bush people. It was never possible to build a modern nation state. I think we could have improved life there and reduce the chances that the country would not become a haven of international terrorists again. But that idea was dealt a nearly fatal blow by the Bush admin too. I don’t think any subsequent administration could have recovered the mess.
brendancalling
I’m a big Norm fan even though I disagree with his politics quite a bit. The dude is funny, that’s a great bit, and that’s a good description of the media, especially cable news. They’re like teenagers discovering something for the first time, but everyday. Goldfish memory.
Benw
Man, the anti-mask brigade is just nuts.
I’m at our school district BOE meeting and we can’t talk about anything except masks. Not even vaccines can make a dent. They start off sounding vaguely sane and then descend into the rabbit hole of Bill Gates mind control.
dexwood
@Gin & Tonic: That’s how I feel about the word. Although I know both spellings are considered correct, I lean towards the double L.
zhena gogolia
@dexwood:
Me too, but editors won’t let you use it.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Sort of on topic, I met up with 2 of my cousins last month. I had not seen either in 20 years. My wife kept whispering to me about the older one, “He sounds like someone. He sounds like someone.” After a few hours it finally hit me, Norm Macdonald! We had a good laugh about that one.
Baud
@jl:
It wasn’t mission creep. It was planned that way from the beginning. See my comment # 10 and 15 in this post.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Same. Also, traveled.
dexwood
@zhena gogolia: Wasn’t aware of that, but I haven’t been around editors for a long time. I worked with a guy who always mocked our editor, telling him, “you know, if you could write, you wouldn’t be an editor”.
Doug R
As the philosopher Mike Tyson once said: “Everyone’s got a plan ’til you get punched in the face”.
CaseyL
@Gin & Tonic:
Hey, I’ve never quite recovered from learning that “judgment” isn’t spelled “judgement,” and that was years ago! Talk about a word that doesn’t look right…
Oh, and judgment appears to be the American spelling. Everyone else does include that “e.”
p.a.
I assume someone has posted this previously, but just in case:
Forbes:
“Several people hired to lead a controversial audit of Arizona’s 2020 election results have contracted Covid-19, Republican lawmakers said Monday, delaying a widely panned ballot review process that’s earned scrutiny from Congress and criticism from local officials.”
Shad-en-freude to the nth.
Another Scott
@jl: One of the things that really bothered me about Obama wrt to Afghanistan was when he talked about “defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban”. We shouldn’t have accepted the framing that they were the same or so intricately entwined to be effectively the same. They weren’t.
The Taliban gave space for al Qaeda, but they aren’t the ones who attacked us or blew up our embassies.
The last year or two in office he toned that down, I noticed. I’m not sure if anyone else did. But every student of warfare knows that one has to negotiate to have a lasting peace after a war. If we weren’t going to negotiate with the Taliban after crushing al Qaeda there, who were we going to negotiate with? And if we weren’t planning on negotiating, what made us think that any changes we put in place would last after we left?
Cheers,
Scott.
jl
@Baud: Thanks for reminding me. It was both a vile dishonest, and disastrously stupid, plan.
As for ‘plans’, I sure don’t want to blame all bad things happening now on Trump, but…..
IIRC, Trump’s treaty was with the Taliban, not the official Afghan government. Those latter losers were bounced out of the meeting room early on. Trump had a habit of getting his great negotiation deals by ignoring any stakeholder that would produce any difficulty in getting a Fantastic Deal, the Best Deal!
And IIRC, negotiations between the Taliban and the official Afghan government was a provision of the treaty, without any conditions on what kind of deal was struck.
Now, I am no credentialed expert in international security studies, and I’m not a overly paid news pundit or anchor on TV. But I think any not too dim grade school kid would be able to see that the official Afghan government started to fall with Trump’s deal, not Biden’s withdrawal announcement.
Trump’s deal said that the Afghan government was a bunch of losers, dummies. Not worth making a deal with the President of he United States.
But that is just facts and history, no competition for pundit and international security academic nincompoop fantasies.
CaseyL
@p.a.: Do they really have it, though? I mean, I’ll do a little dance of glee if they do, but a lot of people are speculating Cyber Nutbags just don’t want to release the report.
geg6
As the daughter of an old school local newspaper reporter, I have no doubts that she’d be ashamed of her beloved profession. As for me, I have never despised anyone so much as I do our modern media elites. Disgusting creatures, every one but a very small and shrinking minority. I refuse to pay any attention to them. No clicks or eyeballs from me for those dirty scumbags. I hate them.
HeleninEire
I’m remarkable glad that Biden has decided to end this war with a loss. America has got to get a handle on that. You know; that we can be losers. Whenever anyone spouts at me about how powerful the U.S. military is I spit back: The US military? The fucking US military hasn’t won a war since 1945. And they won that one because Stalin was pissed at Hitler for lying to him so he was willing to lose 27 million of his citizens to do so.
Please don’t @ me about Dunkirk or lend lease. I get it.
dilbert dogbert
Real military talk Logistics. Play military talk tactics. Old story.
Catherine D.
@CaseyL:
I don’t know how true this is, but many, many years ago, a newspaper reporter told me double l’s, e’s and others were dropped by the papers to save space in print.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: You can do it here, you’re among friends.
dmsilev
@p.a.: We we’re laughing about it in a previous thread, but I feel that any and all additional laughter is thoroughly justified, so by all means repost.
justawriter
“Secret bombing? Everyone around here knew about it. I said, ‘Look Martha, here come the bombs.'”
Martha: “It’s true, he did.”
– Doonesbury, sometime in the 70s
dilbert dogbert
@HeleninEire: Hitler said what he was gonna do to the Russians. If he had won a lot more than 25 million would have died.
Baud
LGM has been on a roll with positive posts today about Afghanistan.
Another Scott
@Catherine D.: “ax” is the same thing, I think.
Gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frank McCormick
The bottom line: just as with Viet Nam (“Peace with honor!”), we lost and our exceptional national ego cannot admit to the fact.
Sure Lurkalot
A propos that most of these asshats never wrote or spoke a word about Afghanistan for two decades, there’s another Norm who did dedicate a portion of his radio show each Friday to commemorate those killed in our PNAC wars. Norman Goldman may not have been a well known media figure, but he was a righteous railer against the MIC. And all its costs.
Mary G
The minute I heard that the Taliban wasn’t holding any Americans hostage, I decided Biden’s got it; it’s under control as much as it can be. Of course it’ll be messy, how could it be otherwise, and I’ve wasted a lot of my precious time yelling at the media on Twitter.
I know lots of folks here don’t like David Weigel, but this is funny to me:
A few of the commenters have good ones too:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
my comedy spot for the day: A preview of the audio version of Meghan McCain’s upcoming book ( made it about half way through it)
Gin & Tonic
@HeleninEire: Operation Desert Storm was arguably one for the “W” column, to the extent that it got Iraq out of Kuwait.
Mike in NC
@raven: I have read every single book by Max Hastings.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Does no one remember Grenada?
Nicole
My stepmom left Cambodia in 1979 and she’s still got PTSD from what she went through. Yeah, the Cambodian people were definitely aware of the “secret” bombing campaign. And the US destabilizing the country made it possible for Pol Pot to seize it, and it’s being run by a (former Khmer Rouge) strongman today. Ugh. I’m so angry at the media this week, too. We destroy lives when we go marching in to nation build but by god, they don’t want the US to be the “loser.”
raven
@Mike in NC: He got some pretty iffy reviews for this book but I thought it was good.
sdhays
I just don’t understand how anyone can say the world “credibility” with a straight face after the Republican Party, the American electorate, and our slavery-era electoral system produced President Donald Trump. When that happened, the American people and our Electoral College flushed any credibility we had down the toilet.
After that, everyone in the world knows that we’re always one election away from walking away from any commitment, and any ally can become an enemy (or simply left for dead) overnight.
“But American credibility!11!!!”
“It’s dead, Jim. It’s been dead for a very long time.”
NotMax
@Mary G
At least last week, the poll being cited had approval at 49.9%.
Oh no! The sky is falling!
Another Scott
… gradually, and then suddenly.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sure Lurkalot
@Benw: That’s it! Sounding Vaguely Sane is the name of my…of my…debate team?
chrome agnomen
i have to dispute A in cole’s post. i think most of these members of the 101st chairborne have in reality never seen us win a war.
Dan B
@p.a.: Sounds like, “Mrs. Fann, we can’t turn our group project cause some of us are sick! Honest!”
Next? “Gee we never thought the dog would eat THAT!”
JCNZ
@Another Scott: Superb.
Bonnie
Not only what you said above, I would like to add that once we went into Afghanistan, who thought the ending would be pretty?! We never belonged there in the first place. If most people are too young to remember other wars, e.g., Viet Nam, Korea, etc., Then, may I suggest you read a few history books. Joe Biden is a good President is doing the best for the country despite all the negativity that seems to be the going fashion. I, myself, am ever so grateful that that swine, trump, is not in office.
Mary G
Same as it was for me with Hydroxychloroquine, so it is now for Ivermectin:
Also Crouton and his fellow rescue animals are a great follow, and they are raising money for winter hay if you can spare any money.
The Moar You Know
@Another Scott: Shit fuck fuck fuck fuck. Wanna know why I’m upset? Because none of them, and I mean none, keep those records longer than six months. Think T-Mobile is only 90 days. Did nobody think to ask a digital forensics expert (my former field) about this shit earlier? My God. Fucking malpractice. That boat sailed in June.
ETA: Not even an expert. Any reasonably competent attorney SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THIS.
Ken
@Mary G: Surely those feed store owners must know that the people they’ve never seen before, the ones who are coughing and wheezing as they ask where the COVID medicine is, are not planning to follow label directions with their tube of horse dewormer. But they sell it to them anyway. You have to admire capitalism.
Kent
Which is still better than Trump’s highest ever approval rating in 4-years of his presidency.
Another Scott
@The Moar You Know: Made me look. USN&WR from 2015:
Have the rules, or company policies, changed?
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
leeleeFL
@dilbert dogbert: deleted aftervre-reading your comment. Got it bass-ackwards!
NotMax
@Ken
Have feed stores require proof of vaccination.
Problem solved.
//
Kent
Maddow is reporting that one of them is actually in the ICU. No word on whether or not the MAGAt was vaccinated though.
Philbert
@The Moar You Know: This. Maybe-hopey-prolly not: that the various prosecutors put a hold on the phone recs. Or we have to somehow get them out of the NSA in some manner that they can be evidence. Sigh.
The Moar You Know
@Another Scott: I just looked it up. They have. Thank God.
What they don’t keep is text messages, but that should not be an issue for a good prosecutor.
Kent
The feed store owners are nowhere near the cash register. Especially for chains like Tractor Supply. It is the same retail clerks working for minimum wage that you might find at Wal-Mart. You want THEM to get in the face of some hacking infectious MAGAt and question what they are going to do with their tube of horse dewormer?
phdesmond
@Gin & Tonic:
you’re a person of discriminating taste.
Villago Delenda Est
Just take off and nuke the Village from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
VeniceRiley
Norm was cancelled by me the second he said anything not written by an SNL writer, approx. A lot of these guys think they’re funny on their own. Maybe, for a fame minute.
craigie
This little aside is funnier than it ought to be. Or maybe I just laugh at the wrong stuff.
CaseyL
@Mary G: Yeah, I remember the pontification before he got them all out: the MSM was practically salivating at the thought of another round of “America Held Hostage: Day XX.”
As I think I’ve mentioned before, it’s funny that the Right and the Left both hate the MSM, though for completely opposite reasons.
ETA: I’m not making fun of our noting how lazy and plain ol’ dumb they are, or minimizing their failings. Just noting that everyone hates them.
Nicole
@craigie:
No, I grew up with three survivors of the genocide and I still chortled. Sometimes dark humor is the only way we can deal. And John adroitly points out the truth- that it was never actually “secret.” Nixon just used our American desire to remain ignorant of anything that doesn’t directly affect us to his advantage.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, this. There was one young lad of the press stating that Afghanistan will make the next president think twice about one of these war. The reply was the time between the Fall of Saigon and the 1st Gulf was five years less than the Afghan War has lasted.
Lyrebird
@Another Scott: I guess I saw it differently. One of the main reasons I htought the AUMF was a bad idea was that there had already so many name changes in what we called the “freedom fighters” or terrorists or what have you, depending on whether they were doing our Cold War bidding,
I was not old enough to vote for Mondale but I would have, and Bush Sr’s lies were enough to make me sour on any proposal of Jr’s.
What I am currently surprised about is how early US intelligence folks knew about Pakistan’s role as a possible sponsor of terror.
Why wasn’t that discussed more at the end of Obama’s presidency? I don’t know, and I still think the main people who need ot answer for the awful impact of war in Afgh are the people who sent us there and who sold the idea of staying there.
ETA: not disagreeing with the specific distinction you made, but still disagreeing with the run up to the start of our decades over there.
debbie
@Gin & Tonic:
Blame the AP.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Gin & Tonic:
I remember an old copy editor’s dictum, perhaps apocryphal, that holds that words with the accent on the first syllable get one l and words with the accent on the second syllable get two l‘s. Thus canceled, traveled quarreled, libeled, but repelled, rebelled, dispelled, impelled. Seems to make an obscure sort of sense, because the double l sort of emphasizes the second syllable.
Similar: debited, credited, benefited, but refitted, combatted.
English is strange.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Cancellation still has two.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Catherine D.:
Not true.
oatler
Speaking of Norm MacDonald moth-goes-to-a-podiatrist jokes:
youtube.com/watch?v=jJN9mBRX3uo
Steeplejack (phone)
topclimber
Cole, you never listen to me (LOL) but you need to stop describing Afghanistan as a loss.
We got our asses kicked, yes. But we also found out that we are not so exceptional after all–just another empire that couldn’t get it done in Afghanistan. That’s probably been the case ever since the Persians.
My point–and I have a point–is that empire fail is good for America. We still have a chance to make the vaunted American Exceptionalism be about keeping our Republic and not pursuing some glorious purpose and totally pissing away our wealth and prestige in the process.
Warts and all, I think we still have the market on soft power. Let’s use it. It might be of some use as we try to stop climate catastrophe.
Brachiator
Great essay John Cole.
We live in strange times. We forget history and our overall economic success has turned some of us into perpetual children.
Everything is supposed to go right for America. People are enraged that we have not returned to normal fast enough.
People are confused and enraged that the withdrawal from Afghanistan did not involve the people there blowing kisses to us and throwing flowers.
But hell, I remember watching some of the fall of South Vietnam on TV and seeing photos in news magazines.
I can understand that some of this younger generation of reporters have not seen much. But damn, did all of them and their editors and publishers skip every history class offered to them?
Villago Delenda Est
@topclimber: TFG did a lot of damage to our soft power by his failure to understand anything but brute force. There are many more ways of forging deals than his reptile brain can fathom.
Ksmiami
@Kent: Pity…(not)
dr. bloor
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Of course, the reporter was unfamiliar with either of these events.
HumboldtBlue
A little boy and his dog Ellie want to be spies for the CIA.
That led me to this video about South Australia police and their new canine unit of drone-deployable tactical canines.
mvr
@Gin & Tonic: Actually Desert Storm was unnecessary and likely led to worse.
CaseyL
@Steeplejack (phone): Huh. I never heard of that dictum, but it does make sense. I’ll try to remember it.
HumboldtBlue
Jordan Klepper talks to some anti-vaxxers in NYC.
Han
@justawriter: Here you go: gocomics.com/doonesbury/1973/11/10
topclimber
@HeleninEire: We’ll always have Grenada.
Dan B
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Me too. I believe the first five seconds give a more than adequate preview.
Oy!
Dan B
@Kent: But, but, but… is there a note from his/her doctor?
It’s not good to laugh but the weird intersection of paranoia, conspiracy theorizing, and missing the real problems in the world is enough to make semi logical people feel the only sane course of action is to laugh like a lunatic. How is the country thus out of touch?
I have hypotheses as to why.
LeftCoastYankee
Was this around the “Axis of Evil” times?
We grew up with Reagan and Bush Sr. bullshitting about how we could win a nuclear war with the USSR and/or PRC, and then when Baby Bush’s gang wanted us to wet the bed over Iran, N. Korea… and… Iraq?
I can’t even remember the 3 countries, probably because I banged my head rolling around the floor laughing my ass off.
The Republicans have always been very silly people shrieking about the least important things.
John Cole
@VeniceRiley: He was an SNL writer. And he is amazing.
phdesmond
@Another Scott:
that resolved an anxiety. thanks.
featheredsprite
@Benw: You have my sympathy [for being at a BOE meeting].
BigJimSlade
@justawriter: I remember that one well, even if I only read it in the 90s, not the 70s. I love how the Cambodian woman’s name is Martha.
206inKY
I recommend Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire (2019) in the strongest possible terms, to illuminate everything john writes in this post.
Feckless
All the generals should be put on trial. They defrauded the country of blood and treasure, if there is no price paid they will do it again.
Especially the generals what left to work for the war profiteers.
Try that google a list and of the us commanders in a Afghanistan, you can’t.