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Biden Was Right on Afghanistan [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-30  

We may never know for sure why WaPo continues to provide a platform for right wing propagandists such as Marc Thiessen, but it’s certainly not in pursuit of any form of journalistic excellence. In his latest screed, Thiessen argues that Biden’s “disastrous” Afghanistan withdrawal could cost him the election. It’s time to finally put this nonsense to rest.

First, if by cost the election, Thiessen means Biden won’t be winning any deep red states any time soon, then he might have a point. But who cares? Conservative voters finally decided they cared about American soldiers the moment 13 of them tragically lost their lives during the withdrawal, but apparently they were fine with the other 2,389 servicemen and women who gave their lives under previous administrations.

Shortly after the withdrawal, a friend from Texas sent me a picture of an empty table at a restaurant with 13 place settings in honor of the fallen soldiers. I asked him to find out if the owner did the same thing the year before for the 11 soldiers who died when Trump was still president, or the 23 lives the year before that. I’m still waiting for a response.

Thanks to Joe Biden, for the first time in 20 years, there will be no more Goldstar families sacrificing their sons and daughters to the endless cycle of destruction that was the War in Afghanistan. Yet despite the media’s determined efforts to cast Biden as just as guilty of something? as his predecessor, sane Americans have come to understand that not only did Biden do the right thing by ending this unholy war, but in fact the withdrawal itself was not nearly as calamitous as initially portrayed.

In his blog, Kevin Drum explains what went wrong in the media and why Biden deserves far more credit for executing the withdrawal and bringing an end to this tragic chapter in U.S. history:

Biden can sleep easy: it was indeed the press that had lost its mind. In fact, it was one of the most egregious examples of bandwagon journalism in recent memory, a farrago of frenzied reporting that insisted on pasting the word chaotic into every story regardless of whether there was any real chaos to report. But reporters on the ground never seemed to acknowledge the obvious: somehow, amidst all this "chaos," the State Department and the military managed to steadily evacuate 6,000 American citizens and more than 100,000 Afghans with minimal loss of life. Under the circumstances, it was about as courageous and well executed an airlift as anybody could have reasonably expected.

Unfortunately, the media’s obsession with creating Joe Biden’s first “scandal” did in fact lead to a significant drop in his favorable ratings following the withdrawal, but an honest assessment of the entire tragic episode now paints a completely different picture. Biden knew that a failure to follow through on Trump’s previous deal with the Taliban to withdraw American troops would lead to an immediate resumption of hostilities and continued loss of life for our troops. Responsible Americans understand this and will cast their votes accordingly.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/30/2190529/-Biden-Was-Right-on-Afghanistan

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