by Guy Benson
Throughout the previous administration, hardcore supporters of the president would sometimes twist themselves into knots to defend his words or actions. They would adamantly insist up is down — or that an obvious debacle was, in fact, fine, or actually good. They’d blame the media (often fairly) for relentlessly negative coverage, even when some of it was deserved. They’d claim that an outburst of half-baked foolishness or impulsivity was all part of some ingenious. ‘four-dimensional-chess’ plan. And in turn, their opponents would excoriate them as cultish hacks, willing to say anything and flat-out deny reality. For The Cause. And now the shoe is on the other foot. There is no spinning the disaster that is the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, even if one agrees with the underlying decision to get out. Like clockwork, some of the people who pronounced themselves aghast by Trump sycophants’ slavish, reality-avoiding devotion have now committed themselves to similar hackery in defense of the indefensible. Let’s discuss a few of their talking points:
(1) The Kabul airlift is a “success.” This is actually the White House line, and some are still clinging to it, even after yesterday’s bloodshed. As many have pointed out, it takes breathtaking chutzpah to claim credit for a frantic, scrambled rescue mission based on an emergency you caused. No one is seriously arguing that America’s exit from Afghanistan could have gone seamlessly, or even well, necessarily. But only embarrassing partisans will try to argue that the absolute chaos, including unfathomable betrayals, that we’ve witnessed over the last two weeks is the best the United States could have done. An orderly, well-planned withdrawal would have been substantially better than this failure. Those who’ve worked ’round the clock to get desperate Americans and Afghans out of the country during the airlift should be applauded. Stories of heroism and bravery like this are remarkable. The raw numbers of people evacuated are significant. But this should be, yet is evidently not, totally unacceptable:
Increasingly looking like US will end up leaving behind > 1,000 American citizens and many times as many Afghans who assisted the US.
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) August 26, 2021
Will have to try to evacuate them in different ways after August 31st w/o US troop presence.
America’s allies are halting evacuation flights from Kabul today, forced to leave citizens and cleared Afghans behind because of the U.S. decision to shut down operations in Afghanistan by Aug. 31. My latest w @SuneEngel in @WSJ https://t.co/HmgTeJrjeH
— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) August 26, 2021
Read the rest at townhall.com.
