Trump gave up the farm to the Taliban but nothing about it was so bad as to merit reneging and get stuck in Afghanistan long enough for Gen Z's kids to be deployed. That's ultimately all this was. Our war with the Taliban had been over for some time. To stay meant to relaunch it.
— zeddy (@Zeddary) August 29, 2021
Thing about living through trauma: You never forget that things can go wrong, catastrophically wrong, because you’ve been in the chaos when they did. President Biden has lived through trauma; he knows that in the real world there are no reset buttons. When the terrible thing happens, you pick up what pieces you can, and move on, regardless of what you might have preferred in a kinder timeline.
Seth Moulton (and, I presume, Peter Meijer) have never had to live through trauma. Bad things have no doubt happened in their vicinity (they both served in Iraq), but they, personally, have by upbringing and random fortune been allowed to observe those bad things happen to other people. Such privilege has given them the self-confidence to achieve many things, but it’s also made it impossible for them to understand that their privilege is just that, a gift, not a universal endowment:
Jake Tapper asks Seth Moulton to respond to his colleagues who are "furious" with him and Peter Meijer over their secret Kabul trip.
"At the end of the day, I don't care what pundits in Washington are saying." pic.twitter.com/xdSNdd8s3g
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 29, 2021
By their own admission they shanghaied someone's rest cycle to give them a tour, but that was totally fine because that person "works at night" and therefore had nothing else they'd have rather been doing during the day
— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 29, 2021
And, of course, the leading members of Our Failed Media — such as the New York Times‘s Peter Baker — also believe that trauma is a thing that happens to other people, people who probably deserved it, but in any case people less important than the stockholders at Raytheon…
This framing is dumb as shit but very on brand for Peter
Frame the story around a quote from a Dubya alum and fucking King David, a framing that the remaining 80% of the piece contradicts https://t.co/SZWjIj0BRh
— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 28, 2021
Say what you will about media in the '70s, at least they had the good sense to not keep getting takes from someone like Westmoreland or McNamara in '75
— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 28, 2021
Ah, well — at least the rest of us can keep picking up the pieces…
U.S., 97 other countries announce deal with Taliban to keep evacuating allies after Aug. 31 https://t.co/QxZa3bVRqY
— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) August 29, 2021
Baud
Did we think the war mongers would just go away without a fight? Now is when the rubber meets the road on the unpopularity of forever war.
dww44
In the daily newsletter that The New Yorker puts out there is this opinion piece by Robin Wright in today’s edition:
Now maybe I am either misinformed or simply uninformed but I’ve never gotten the impression from Biden or anyone else in his administration that they believed that yesterday’s drone strikes was part of a policy that they believe will reduce terrorism in the region. I thought it, purely and simply, was retribution for the bombing of American soldiers and Afghans.
I cannot read the article itself as it is behind a paywall.
Lapassionara
@Baud: I was just thinking about that today, all the military contractors who have lost their steady source of income, what will they do now. One can only imagine.
Poe Larity
You must show pic of you and horse
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
I’m so sick of this shit. And the really enraging thing is that in six months, none of the people who are screeching about how we can’t leave, it’s a the world’s worst mistake, it’s going to come back to bite us in the end, it’s immoral, et al., won’t have a word to say about it, because they won’t give a thought about it by then, and if they did, they wouldn’t care an longer.
zhena gogolia
@dww44:
Fuck the New Yorker. They published a piece by Dexter Filkins about Biden’s mistakes that never mentioned the name Trump a single time. It said something like, “He [Biden] gave an embarrassing speech that blamed everyone but himself.” I HATE THEM
Lyrebird
@Baud: You’re right, I’m sure.
Feeling sad.
Just watched video of the start of the Dignified Transfer ceremony from CSPAN, h/t mama4obama1 on twitter.
And Ed Asner has passed on.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
In all seriousness, I wish somebody more organized than I am would keep a record of when these assholes stop talking about this. ’Cause it’s going to happen, and it won’t be all that long before it does. I’d love to see somebody throw that right back in their fucking faces.
Gin & Tonic
I’m trying (and failing) to remember – did the NYT have anyone on staff in ’75 who was as obviously pro-war as Peter Baker?
sab
@zhena gogolia: I like them mostly, but on your point they also publish George Packer. And isn’t Peter Baker’s wife one of theirs?
Baud
@dww44:
I just read it. The piece is incoherent on what US policy is or what it should be. 90% of it is background information or predictions.
stinger
@Poe Larity: Thanks for that link — hilarious replies!
Mary G
Not sure what this means, but it doesn’t sound good:
Mart
Responding to a Facebook post on the solemn salute to the troops with thirteen beer bottles on a table, texted former friends saying thank God Biden had the guts to carry through with Trump and Pompeo’s surrender to the Taliban. My goodness that set them off.
Mart
@Mary G: assume they have diesel or gas back up engine to run the pumps. Something dumb like not maintaining batteries can cause them not to start like Fukushima.
Yarrow
Ida may disrupt oil and gas facilities. Hit in Port Fouchon. Advised previously, but tonight or tomorrow morning it would be prudent to fill up your gas tanks no matter where you are in the country. Except for those of you who have electric vehicles. Of course if you have one of those you’d be SOL in NOLA atm due to catastrophic damage of the electricity transmission system.
Scout211
@Mary G:
cnn.com/us/live-news/hurricane-ida-updates-08-29-21/
catclub
@zhena gogolia: He [Trump] gave an embarrassing speech that blamed everyone but himself.”
Every single Trump speech. Projection again
Ohio Mom
“U.S., 97 other countries announce deal with Taliban to keep evacuating allies after Aug. 31”
Wow. I assumed our closest allies had troops and other people in Afghanistan — England, France, Germany… — but 97 is about 90 more countries than I would have ever imagined.
And what a hit the Afghan economy is about to take. All those people from those 97 countries were pumping money into the economy, that is a lot of deman that is vanishing, Poof!
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
if stymied house speaker seth moulton doesn’t give a wit about what a dc pundit says, why is he on cnn state of the union?
he should be denying those parasites his essence instead
SFAW
I’ll be interested to see if Traitor Ted Cruz supports a relief bill for NOLA to recover from Ida. Perhaps he will whine about it as he did after Hurricane Sandy, and refuse to support it.
And perhaps I won PowerBall last night.
Mary G
Tweet with attached account of the Kabul suicide bombing from a Marine who was there, very touching (no politics, just duty).
debbie
@Mart:
?
Mary G
@Scout211:
Per the story, the backup generator for the ICU floor failed, so patients were moved by the stairs to another floor with power. They seem to be OK, though one anonymous doctor said conditions were “Katrinaesque.”
Bill Arnold
@Baud:
Very few war mongers actually fight.
(Also, it is possible to destroy e.g. their careers without violence.)
jeepers
Peter Baker should be air dropped into the Hindu Kush with a chocolate bar and 8 oz of water so that he would have something meaningful to write about.
Ken
That saying about idle hands seems horribly appropriate.
Jackie
@Lyrebird: To watch that thirteen times… my heart is heavy. I can’t imagine how President Biden is feeling ?
rikyrah
@Mary G:
????????????
Major Major Major Major
This whole thing is just so tiring. It’s the same shit from the same people we’ve been reading about for decades—not too uncommon in politics, sure, but usually these people’s failures aren’t well known by the vast majority of the country. Why must the media subject us to this. Just go AWAY, neocons.
ETA I’ve seen at least two things now basically blaming our ‘failure’ in Afghanistan on the fact that we have civilian control of the military. The neocons won’t come out and *say* this, but they don’t have to. Their disdain for liberal democracy is clear, which is funny considering how many people they’re willing to kill to spread it.
rikyrah
@MontyTheClipArtMongoose:
He made a fool of himself ?
Splitting Image
My favourite in the genre has to be Judith “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Miller crawling out from under a rock to blame Biden for not taking responsibility for his mistakes. I normally don’t pay much attention to ratios, but at the moment she has 900 responses and 19 likes.
twitter.com/JMfreespeech/status/1428182545892511751
“Biden’s Afghan debacle is devastating. It’s been made worse because he won’t own his mistakes“
Adam L Silverman
@dww44: Wright’s problem is a conceptual one that a lot of the think tank and pundits on this topic make. Specifically, that non-domestic terrorism is an existential threat to the US, rather than a complication to be managed and mitigated as necessary.
This is why you see all these folks – from the political reporters in DC and NY to the foreign correspondents to the pundits to the think tank folks to former elected and appointed officials – all freaking out. They’ve spent the better part of the past 20 years arguing that al Qaeda and its offshoots in the Middle East, SE Asia, and Africa, and now ISIS and its offshoots in the same places, are existential threats to the US. At one point in 2002 Newsweek ran a cover article on al Qaeda Inc where they spent dozens and dozens of pages explaining how al Qaeda was organized as a fortune 500 company and that made it so dangerous. Al Qaeda was never actually organized as a fortune 500 company. At the time the issue was published, most of al Qaeda was living in caves hiding from US special operations personnel and hoping they’d live to see the next day. They were lucky to have camp toilets, let alone executive washrooms. Al Qaeda was also never actually that dangerous. Bin Laden himself was astounded at how 9-11 went. He got lucky beyond his wildest dreams. Especially because the US societally freaked out by how uncannily lucky bin Laden got on 9-11. If we’d stayed home and send Special Operations, CIA paramilitary in to capture and kill al Qaeda, and used over the horizon strikes to degrade their capability and capacity, bin Laden would have been a gigantic loser. But we gave him what he wanted. We put a sizable footprint into Afghanistan and just kept pouring money and personnel into the country. And then, we did the same thing in Iraq even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. Go read bin Laden’s letter to America, which is his manifesto. Everything in it he says he wanted to achieve with his attack on the US he did. Not because of the actual attacks, but because he scared Americans into providing him the ways and means to achieve his strategic ends in our anger and panic.
The result is that Wright and a lot of other people cannot and will not admit that they misunderstood the problem set for the past 20 years. That they misunderstood the strategic environment. They’re dug in. And they can’t be dug out.
jl
If only the US had played two resolve cards and borrowed more from ‘we’re serious this time’ bank, then we’d have gotten two credibility power packs and an double invulnerability patch that would have lasted through to the lightning round.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
@Splitting Image:, huh. Of all the people I never want to hear from about anything ever again, she’s right up there on that list. Why won’t she just go the duck away?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Some young black guy on my block is sitting in his cars trunk and screaming insults at passerbys, not that there is that much of that suburbia. I think someone’s internet is out.
Uncle Cosmo
@jeepers: Do that for every member of the 101st Chairborne and we might make some progress.
HumboldtBlue
@Splitting Image:
I saw that thread as well, and I did appreciate the immediate blowback to her insipidness.
Same with that fucking warmongering chickenhawk Condi Rice who the temerity to tweet about Afghanistan last week,
Mike E
@Adam L Silverman: their salaries literally depend on them misunderstanding the situations in Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran etc etc
Gretchen
I’m a former night shift worker whose employer would schedule mandatory training in the middle of the day “because you’re not busy then.” Yes I was, busy sleeping. They were shocked to be asked if they’d be willing to do the trainings at 3am because they didn’t have anything else going on then. Argh.
HumboldtBlue
A historic building in New Orleans where Louis Armstrong once worked has been destroyed by Ida.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I heard the interview of the NPR reporter who happened to have found Al Quida’s branch off, if that’s the term, in Kabul after it fell in 2001 and he got to read Al Quida’s own stuff before the military did. He said it came across like a small collage campus newspaper and fund raising was always on their minds. I guess that NPR report story was inconvenient to the rest of the press.
Jay
@dww44:
and today’s strike was to take out a bunch of ISIL-K suicide bombers and gunmen, before the could attack the airport.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jl: God don’t the pundits sound like they’ve been playing way too many computer games. I am waiting for someone to go on about how he knows the prefect way to win in Afghanistan from playing Rome Total War.
Dan B
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for getting to the essence of our “War on Terror”.
Your posts are amazing!
Lyrebird
So true. Wish we had more people with at least a fraction of your compassion there as WH correspondents.
The son of the orange menace tweeted out an image of POTUS putting his head down briefly to respond to some (I assume) Fox News professional misinformer. Said he looked weak or something. I watched the press briefing real time, wanted to shout at the camera, “don’t you realize you are taking so much time for your fake talking points, and here is the man who has to go call twelve bereaved families??? you scum!!”
And now it’s 13. Respect to POTUS and FLOTUS for paying proper respects to the fallen and their families.
Jeffro
How about Fox featuring that (now ex-) Marine officer who got himself cashed out for taking to social media to berate his superior officers? He went on again today to say, pension (and possibly his marriage?) be damned, he wanted people to join him to “burn it all down”.
it was Fox’s headline story all day on both tv and web.
just kind of unbelievable that they’d give that kind of thing a platform…unless of course they are looking to kneecap the country any way they can when a Democrat is in charge.
Jeffro
Also: one of my high school alum FB friends is posting pics of his 2 dogs wearing camo scarves “in support of our troops” and I am *THIS * close to asking if they also have yellow ribbon magnets on their collars. Just unbelievable.
Mary G
Hurricane Ida is bad:
Distinguished weatherman:
Louisiana reporter:
Our own lamh:
Jeffro
I bet there’s a graph somewhere that shows bin Laden got something like $1M return on every dollar ‘invested’…or maybe more like $10M…but you know, ‘Murica!…
Dan B
@HumboldtBlue: The videos from that Twitter thread are frightening. Louisiana is getting pummeled.
Mart
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I listened to NPR’s The Diane Rhem Show at work. They would often cut to Iraq weapons inspector Baradei who would say they got nothing. Then the Bushies would say they are in the palaces, cut to Baradei they got nothing in the palaces. And on and on. Bushies even lying about the inspector’s getting kicked out. I thought I was the only person in America listening.
Mary G
The comments do make the point that “land” is swampy mud, with a high water content.
Dan B
@Mary G: There is satellite imagery of four meso vortices in the eye wall while it is over land. It appears that their wind speeds are at tornado levels. It is a wild storm.
Biden’s team has a lot on their plate
Mary G has the link, I see.
Mary G
Dan B
@Mary G: My brother’s house had a huge branch come through the kitchen ceiling, with an 80′ tree attached. Not a hurricane.
Kent
@Mary G: That’s a seriously shallow root system for a tree that large.
Martin
@Mary G: There was speculation that might happen with earlier hurricanes. It’s not a new idea. First time it seems to have actually happened, though.
News from South Lake Tahoe is grim. Red flag conditions next two days is going to make it a hell of a job to save structures.
dww44
@sab: Yep, Susan Glasser.
@Baud: Thanks for reading that for me. You seem to have summed it up nicely and in your usual succinct manner.
@zhena gogolia: Well, while I don’t hate them, over time I’ve kenned to the fact that do not give a free pass to Democrats, ever. They hated Trump, though… mostly.
Sister Golden Bear
@Lapassionara:
I’m sure Erik Prince will find work for them at home. After all, coups don’t happen just because the rubes bellow “freedum!” doncha know.
Mary G
@Martin: But California rocks, SoCal leaping in to support:
It is a dire situation and it looks like So. Tahoe is going to be devastated. I’ve been avoiding looking at the three fires down here.
JoyceH
@dww44:
Like the story of the little girl throwing starfish back into the ocean.
Armchair pundit: {sniff} Do you think that air strike is going to stop terrorist attacks in the region?
Realist: It stopped THAT one.
dww44
@Adam L Silverman: Thank you. Your recounting made me remember that I kept hoping, in the aftermath of 9/11, that we wouldn’t react in the very way that we did. One of the things that’s always bothered me about the GOP of the era and the conservative mindset of almost any era in my lifetime, is the hubris that they always bring to a problem.
You know what they say…. pride goeth before a fall. Perfect description of them and the bought and paid for DC media which has never been able to admit to being wrong.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jeffro:
Copied from the thread below: He is still serving. He just got relieved of his command. There will be other consequences for him down the road.
Bishop Bag
@Martin:
I was in Carson City this afternoon and there was so much smoke …Could not even see the Mountains around Lake Tahoe and ashes were raining from the smoke clouds. Just terrible.
Splitting Image
@Mary G:
Christ. I hope everyone in that neck of the woods is okay.
Mary G
HumboldtBlue
The four horseman are coming and they’re extra pissed cause their horses all have worms now.
HumboldtBlue
USS Kidd suffered heavy damage from Ida.
Zelma
The invaluable Bret Devereaux at his “Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” has a wonderful discussion about the inaccuracy of calling Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires.” He notes that Alexander conquered as much of it as he wanted and that the result was a Hellenistic successor state (Bactia) that lasted for a couple of centuries. He then goes on to list all of the other empires which conquered Afghanistan without fatal results. His conclusion:
“Afghanistan isn’t the graveyard of empires. It is the midlife-crisis-car of empires: an overly expensive, not terribly useful thing empires buy when they are bored and not sure what to do with their excess income that is a swiftly regretted embarrassment. It may not always be so, of course; at times after the shifting of the silk road Afghanistan has been the seat of major empires and it may yet be again (if my country was next to Afghanistan, I might be more than a bit worried at where the battle-hardened and victorious Taliban might think to go next, if they decide to take their brand of Islamic rule on the road – though it is by no means certain they want to take it on the road). And on top of this it must be conceded it is rough country and the multiple linguistic and ethnic groups make it difficult to control (though this might be said of many other parts of the world too), a point which might not be fatal to imperial ventures there except that there is nothing worth the difficult in Afghanistan…unless of course that thing is ‘home.’
“But some unique ‘graveyard of empires’ it is not.”
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@rikyrah: i would imagine as much
i only get over the air teevee, so i missed seth molting & watched meet the press instead & got to see hr mc master display signs of either roid rage or dementia
Mary G
Chaparral Fire, 15 miles away from my house as the crow flies over the mountains, created a fire tornado earlier today and was 10% contained as of this morning. Luckily winds are calm and humidity is high.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: Much as the Fall colors move south, so does the fire season.
MisterForkbeard
Speaking on ongoing national catastrophes, my 4 year old is in Pre-K and has been there for 8 days in total – have a real blast.
Today we got a call that she’s been exposed and we need to quarantine her for 5 days and then get a test before they’ll let her back in. Son of a bitch.
This is minor in the face of <gesture at everything else> but this hits pretty personally.
Mary G
@?BillinGlendaleCA: “These are the days of our lives…”
Kay
This is all of cable TV and the NYTimes for the last 3 weeks:
Fake Irishman
@MisterForkbeard:
I’ve got a three year old in day care. I feel your anxiety and frustration. School has been totally on the ball from the beginning: masks and face shields for teachers, masks encouraged then Mandated for kids 2 and up. Prodded classrooms, lunch outside, my kid knows all about social distancing. (And somehow they still manage to make the place magical for the kids)
AND we STILL have outbreaks. I’ve had her home isolating for probably six to eight weeks since March 2020. Every time she sneezes she asks “do I have to get tested now?”
good luck.
HumboldtBlue
@Mary G:
As the world turns
MisterForkbeard
@Fake Irishman: Yeah. I’m not surprised by this at all.
We took her home from Daycare in March of last year and have kept her home except for a couple of trips to grandma’s and a trip to the coast awhile back.
She’s actually pretty happy about it. She gets to stay home from school. Her older sister is trying to help and it’s both hilarious and horrifying: “Don’t worry Ari! You don’t need a shot, and shots can’t go all the way through your arm and poke out the other side!”
RaflW
@jl: This is more credible than a good half the paid commenters on foreign policy who ‘grace’ our airwaves and cable cords.
RaflW
@Mart: I didn’t listen to her show. But Bush pulling out the inspectors when it was so obvious that they were this close to officially reporting they got nothing.
And virtually zero press could put even 1 + 1 together to = 2 on that. WTaF. They just wanted a revenge war and happily accepted Dubya’s garbage. I was livid for months. Years. Maybe still.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Tomorrow’s APOD is a fire rainbow shot in West (By God) Virginia.
Origuy
Some scary thermal webcams of the Caldor and Dixie fires. Click on the Heavenly camera to see South Lake Tahoe.
mrmoshpotato
Seth and Pete can resign from Congress, join the press corpse, then throw themselves into the Sun along with Jake.
mrmoshpotato
@RaflW: How’s your blood pressure tonight?
CBS – Plans for Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
James E Powell
@RaflW:
@mrmoshpotato:
I thought that was common knowledge by now. And at the time, no one really cared, did they? Didn’t most Americans just want some dead Ay-Rabs?
I was called many things because I was against the war. Later on when most realized it was a mistake, just like we anti-war types had predicted, we learned that we opposed it for the wrong reasons, so it didn’t count.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Isn’t “Leaving Afghanistan” the new Sheryl Crow tune?
piratedan
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: I believe it’s a synthesis of “Everyday is a Winding Road” and “A Change Will Do You Good”.
opiejeanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA: WOW! I’ve never seen anything like that before.
There was someone on Twitter asking if anyone else in Maine was seeing what she thought was the Aurora Borealis this evening. There were no answers at the time I saw her ask, and now I can’t find her post to see if she got a response.
opiejeanne
@Origuy: I can’t interpret what I’m seeing in those thermal photos. I assume it’s recording heat levels, but maybe I’m missing the explanation on the page.
JWR
@Jeffro:
I watched a few minutes of Chuck Todd’s Clowns on Parade show Sunday morning, and one of PBS’s anchors, Amna something, brought up that loony’s gloomy story, asking, “I mean, what is this guy gonna do now?”, with the pained expression of the True Journalist. Yeah, lady who obvs doesn’t get the role of the military in American democracy. What’s Joe Biden gonna do about that poor, long suffering fool?
sab
@JWR: Amna Nawaz
sab
@JWR: Amna Nawaz, who used to be at ABC. Sara Just, the PBS Newshour executive producer and Senior VP, seems to be bringing in people from ABC when PBS Newshour already has competent people on board. This won’t end well.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@piratedan:
it also has a touch of “you’re my favorite mistake”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mart: I was listing to the same thing. The Press responded by mocking the inspectors as naive fools being played by the cunning Saddam.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@mrmoshpotato: Yep, Rummy just latched on to Iraq and refused to let go on 911. I am sure in time it will come out that there was something broke in Rummy’s head with substance abuse along the same lines as Trump.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
hehe, this, in a nutshell, is The Blob. The thing they are really upset about with the War of Terror is they were wrong.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Rummy was part of PNAC. He was calling for regime change as early as Jan 1998. (link) [nearly 4 full years before 911]
My intuition says they wanted to remove Saddam not for security but to enable the lifting of UN sanctions which would then allow oil services companies like Halliburton to starting selling equipment to extractors like Exxon, but they could reveal such crassness so they made common cause with loony Likudniks and useful idiot warmongers in the media.
Ken
@opiejeanne: TheRealHoarse has pictures of sky lights, but isn’t sure if it’s an aurora.
evodevo
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: yes…this…it WAS a war for oil. And, in addition to resource extraction, they envisioned establishing a true libertarian/conservative “democracy” where they could extract other profit streams via a loony-tunes “stock market” and a mfg zone uninhibited by those pesky labor and environmental regs and favored by a compliant hand-picked puppet govt… OOPS!
opiejeanne
@Ken: Thanks. I saw some photos from the original post. I’ll take a look at his Twitter.