They're Eating the Dogs! Debate me!

 

What a split screen. I mean. pic.twitter.com/pKW39fDfoh

— Annika Brockschmidt (@ardenthistorian) September 11, 2024

They are not eating the dogs. Putin is eating Trump's lunch. Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, and every state has laws against infanticide. Trump's "concepts of a plan" are not a goddamn plan and he looked weak, delusional, unfocused, changed the subject and rambled like a lunatic, and demonstrated why 81 million people voted against him four years ago. Trumps history of racism was discussed. as was his weakness and lack of patriotism. 

Vice-President Harris had reasons to smile, to express pity for delusional old Trump mingled with the satisfaction of having a new crotchet of his to seize on with any given response. He was baited on his weakness, on people leaving his rallies, on his former staff having bad things to say about him--

And he rose, or should we say, sank, to each allusion. 

He messed up by showing up thinking his act was all he needed. The ABC team did a good job of fact-checking, which Trump fans will no doubt view as putting their thumbs on the scale. I guess my point about that is--why are the facts so stubbornly aligned against what Trump says, though?  That is certainly something you might want to consider!

Maybe Trump is just a pathetic liar. 

TWGB: He'll Dance to Anything

 

Wow. This is a new low, even for Trump.

“It Was a Setup,” “Could have been the parents” Trump tries to blame Gold Star families for the Arlington incident
pic.twitter.com/7eO9CZ3tag

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 31, 2024

Maybe the Gold Star families, who invited him and have signed statements to the effect that they think his being there was cool and totally legal--fucked him over by posting pictures and videos. That's what HE SAID, babies, not me. He tried to suggest the people who were there to back his ass up backed his ass over. So he suggested he didn't know anything about the strategy of his dumb stunt and maybe he was stunted upon. Maybe it was the White House that he was going to claim bailed on a solemn event they totally were clued into.  Kamala Harris called him on it, and now that stunt is supposed to be "he said and she said". 

I'm not here to belittle the Gold Star families because their grief is real and how they feel is real regardless of the facts on the ground. Their loved ones saved people in assisting the evacuation that day and died in a suicide bombing from ISIS-K. Nearly 170 Afghan people also were killed by that blast. The war had been 20 years long. And many servicepeople cycled through that assignment.  They can cast their blame any and everywhere it feels valid. But we all know that serving in the armed services can mean being placed in danger. Their safety was not guaranteed, they guaranteed the safety of others and that was their great sacrifice and why Section 60 is hallowed ground. 

Nothing I can say makes that right. Throughout the war on terror, we have not stopped the tactic of extraordinary violence. The results are appalling and personal. I demur from politicizing it. I have my own ideas about why the withdrawal sucked, but it was a group effort. And yet, for the Abbey Gate tragedy, I still blame ISIS. There was one airport, and there were so many people who were running out of time to be safe.   It was time to leave, and the crowd itself was an exploit. An opportunity for terror. One last kick in the slats before leaving. One demonstration of the ideology that faced the country we tried to rehabilitate into something like a Western image.

TWGB: Winning on Character!

 

A little while ago, Rich Lowry took some heat for writing a column suggesting that Trump could "win on character", which seems stupid as hell, but meant something like using policy as demonstrating that he's steadfast to his principles or some such drivel. I noted in my last post that there was something "weird" about using hallowed ground for a campaign photo-op--but it gets worse. The Trump campaign muscled aside a civilian employee who tried to stop them from filming the event for their use. 

Well--this is consistent with Trump principles to be sure. We can all remember Trump using tear gas on protestors to clear the way for a photo op at a church and using his cabinet members and a bible like props. Maybe we also remember when he exploited a murder victim's funeral, alleging he had spoken with her family when he had not, and claiming things he had read in an obituary were memories they had shared with him. 

Trump uses people as things. That is his character. Maybe he wanted to use a photo op to counter the claim that he considers our war dead as "losers" and "suckers", which was resurrected in part by his gross assertion that the Presidential Medal of Honor, which he has awarded to political allies, is in some ways better than the Congressional Medal of Honor, awarded to military heroes of conspicuous bravery. Maybe it's to counter the book just out by his former national security adviser General McMaster. 

Come to think of it, when we look at who Trump consistently is, it really is hard to see how he could "win on character". This is the man who betrayed our Constitution over his 2020 loss by instigating a riot at the Capitol and setting in motion a plan to avoid the transfer of power despite losing his election.

Seems Weird to Me

 

There's something that strikes me as a little ghastly about Trump using Gold Star families and the graves of heroic dead as a prop for a photo-op with his trademark "thumbs-up" pose. It's out of place in a "Happy Memorial Day" sort of way. He was there ostensibly for the wreath-laying ceremony, but actually to rip the Biden Administration for the Afghanistan withdrawal as part of his campaign.

His criticisms are not surprising, but they do serve to remind us who he is.

In other unsurprising news, Trump was endorsed by former Democratic Rep. and Tucker Carlson fill-in host Tulsi Gabbard. For what her opinion is worth. 

Her opinion. for example, is about the same and certainly no better than RFK Jr.'s on Trump and, well, NATO, and she cites Pro-Putin propaganda. 

They’re country over party. Just don’t ask which country. pic.twitter.com/8SBnAu1NK8

— Frank Lesser (@sadmonsters) August 26, 2024

Although unlike RFK Jr. she has, to my knowledge, never severed a whale's head with a chainsaw and driven around with it strapped to her car. Which is a real thing, apparently. 

Just potential Trump 2.0 cabinet members, is all. But it just seems weird to me. I used to think I knew the GOP. 

But they are something of a happy family, no? Just a little weird, right?

We Felt Our Mortality

 

We are a young country, the US, in some ways, and ride on the idea of our strength and sense of purpose as a leader among nations. The first country among equals (except we're not) as one might say "primus inter pares." The memorial logos, the sigils, the swag, often just show the World Trade Towers themselves, draped in flag-wrap. The buildings were not the tragedy--the loss of lives was.  We lost great people that day. We lost parents and children, leaders and caregivers, sinners and saints. All kinds of people. Office workers, police, firefighters, medics. 

But the pictures of the victims themselves is too haunting: and yet we see them, forever in our minds. And they get reposted on social media. 

We are losing them even today--people who inhaled too much of whatever makes buildings and are dying too young of what they breathed in. We are losing them even now, people who were there or their loved one was there and now it's 22 years out, and we lose people all the time. The narrative memory of what happened will fade. Except in what has been committed to print, video, etc.--but that memory is always a little short. 

Tragedies amortize. Tragedies fade. We said "Never again" but we don't step into the same river twice, or face the same sort of history as Memorex: just an echo. 

Strangely Blogged 2021: Year in Review

 

I haven't been doing year in review posts or top fives or whatever for a few years because it felt weird to gather my personal best and show it off, but I guess I'm over that? So anyway, here's a year in review from me because this was some kind of year, all right. 

January: Little Noted but Long Remembered  : Just post 1/6, angry and patriotic. 

February: Unraveled Bolero: Just who was that man the GOP was bound to sell their country and themselves out for? 

March: While They Were in the Nursery: Where I dress-down Republicans for championing lazy culture war bullshit over effective policies because they are puerile. 

April: Let Them Know, Joe! : I'm encouraged that the Biden Administration understands the stakes and will do good things.

May: The Republican War on History: I take a look at why CRT is being attacked by the GOP and it is not good. 

June: TWGB: The Once and Future President: This is who the GOP are putting all their chips on? Seriously?

July: The Fall of Icarus:  Where I consider that mythology tells us something about our climate change and COVID-19 denialists.

August: Denial and Co-Dependency in Afghanistan:  I sum up recent Afghanistan War history and why the war must be over, and how the Biden Administration can only do the best they can with the cards dealt.

September: It's the Public Health, Stupid: In which I note that GOP COVID-19 policies are stupid ulture-war signifying and deadly

September Bonus:  Dolchstoß-Legende and Trump's Lost Cause : In which I notice that Trump and his followers are a little too interest in the ideas of Civil War and a Lost Cause.

October: Die Fahn Hoch: Obvious fascists are being obvious (basically, whenever I title a blogpost in German, I think my observations are grim, sadly).

November: Autumn of Our Discontent: We are living in an absurd timeline and people believe increasingly desperate and bizarre things.

December: The Big Lie and The Big Liars Telling It: How can anyone democratically support a party that just doesn't believe in democracy anymore? 

Anyway, that's my year. in review. Here's to a better New Year--even if I'm skeptical and even a little paranoid about that (but would my readers expect less?).

TWGB: We Said He Wasn't Right

 

President Biden threw his support behind the top U.S. military officer, Mark Milley, a day after a new book said he went around civilian leaders to place secret calls to his Chinese counterpart over concerns about then-President Donald Trump https://t.co/mgr8I1Rd7T pic.twitter.com/0PNUDrO7rx

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 16, 2021

Pause to consider for an instant what happened in a brief span--a leak from Woodward's latest book reveals that post-1/6, Trump was so out-of-bounds that Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley wanted to see to it that there were additional guardrails in place to prevent an international catastrophe from occurring.  The reality seems to be that Milley's actions weren't quite as "mavericky" as the book depicts. And I'm not privileging the insights from one view of his actions over the other, I wasn't there and am no military expert. 

What's fascinating to me is people who seized on whether Milley trying to mitigate the apparent volatility of the CinC was wrong (if not treasonous!) instead of noting that the outgoing president was, in fact, acting as if out of his goddamn mind. After all, it's not a secret that Trump made decisions after his loss that weren't really "America First" but seem like a tantrum made manifest in abrupt foreign policy dictates.  And, as I've regularly indicated here in the blog--the man is not well. Trump has boasted that he is a "stable genius" at regular intervals, and believe me, no one does that unless their intellect and stability were both seriously under question.

But Senator Marco Rubio roared out of the gate to demand that Milley be fired for his temerity.  Which is something that would just mean Biden appoints a new one (although for crying out loud--I guess GOP senators would make a "thing" out of the "advise and consent" deal. After all, blocking State Department picks, or State Department and DOD picks for insincere counterproductive reasons (for a value of counterproductive that includes national security but does not include self-promotion) is apparently the new trifling stunt from the clown shoes brigade that triflingly stunted over the Biden election confirmation. 

I could point out, as I have before, so what good does it do us that someone is telling us this--NOW? But to be clear, any corroboration that TrumpWorld has operated and still does operate around the damaged psyche of a spoiled brat with neither empathy nor loyalty is necessary to keep in view in a world where this guy is still considered a GOP 2024 presidential frontrunner, and not an epically disgraced has-been. It is also good to remind people that the current administration is coping with fall-out of irresponsible choices made by the previous administration.

And it serves to tell us who is still a deluded dupe paddling in The Former Guy's wake, incapable of committing the sin of ever holding Trump accountable for anything.  You can tell who they are, because they blame Trump's failures on the people who tried to curb his foolishness, because in a world where expertise is demonized, mere competence itself is considered suspect. 

Although, IMHO, not too many current GOP officeholders need to be overwhelmingly concerned about being considered "suspect".

9/11: Over the Horizon

 

The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family: https://t.co/eUX5WSImrD

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

There just isn't anything more apt to round out our 20 year misadventure in the War on Terror, than by this--a misguided drone strike that showed how far we had come, that we could be wrong from farther away instead of having to be wrong face to face and street by street. 

The memorial of 9/11 has been fraught for some time with me because of the cant and formulaic expressions of remembrance and the truisms that just strike me as false. "We came together that day." Tell it to visibly brown Muslim or Central Asian people who experienced discrimination, and find a kernel of what people came together to be. We needed to be unified to move forward, but we didn't need to do all we moved forward to do. 

The 9/11 fallen, those who died that day, and also their survivors, and the ones who have died of assorted toxins breathed in from working near or on the pile since and their survivors--they deserve every respect and support. But they were also used to sell an open-ended global war that was misguided in many ways. These ill-conceived decisions, occurring in part because short-sighted people didn't want to know any better and acted on what felt "right" politically, did more harm than good.  

Dolchstoß-Legende and Trump's Lost Cause

 

So, about 156 years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, the statue of the general came down in Richmond because sometimes, you just have to take the "L". Even if over 150 years later. It's not that the statue didn't still have some current support, like the folks who supported Confederate monuments back in 2017. It's that the support they have doesn't recognize the reality that treason in support of chattel slavery is actually very bad. Dress it up however they want to--the Civil War was fought and the union won. We acknowledge the citizenship of those born here of whatever their origin. Our Constitution guarantees to all citizens their equal protection under the law. 

(With varying degrees of enforcement, but I am not addressing that today. Although I want the Supreme Court to consider this clause with all their attention regardless of their partisan affiliations and realize the trouble that this country went to to finally find the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence--to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a matter for government not to fail to interfere with, but to positively protect.)

This blog has been keeping track of The Former Guy's habit of myth-making, and his attention to the Civil War. He has shamelessly compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, never understanding just quite why The Railsplitter dwarfs him. 

But his recent missive into the world from his Mar-a-Lago exile (where he still declares he never lost the 2020 election--a lost cause if I ever heard one) is uniquely absurd:

The radical left is very responsible for ending the racism of the Confederacy--okay, I guess we can take the credit for trying although I don't think we're fully there, yet. And maybe Lee was great (or at least, competent) for all his wins if you don't count his losses. But saying Lee would've been great if we had him in Afghanistan seems like a bit much. 

That Authentic Grief Dollar

 

Wow, what a-holes.

The original: @nytimes: "Biden, Still Grieving His Son Beau, Finds That Not Everyone Wants to Hear About It"

Now: "In Invoking Beau, Biden Broaches a Loss That’s Guided His Presidency" pic.twitter.com/6IHuzr52q6

— Tommy moderna-vaX-Topher (@tommyxtopher) September 4, 2021

I didn't want to broach this part of The Discourse and all, but when supposedly serious journalists started in on whether President Biden's references to his son were appropriate because they might rub some people the wrong way, I heard Bill Hicks in my head. Something along the lines of: 

The Authentic Grief dollar. That's a good dollar. Lot of authentic grief to go around. Covid-19, endless wars, the opioid epidemic (we really helped that last one along, sir, let me tell you...). But we're not getting positive reactions across the market, so we think you're gonna have to workshop your grief a bit, Mr. President. Just to give it a more broad, universal, generic appeal. You with us? 

And my gut-level response to what that makes me feel about it is very like that of the late Mr. Hicks. Just kill yourselves you fucking fucks. 

The media hovered like vultures over Al Gore's honesty, Hillary Clinton's laugh, Barack Obama's tears and said "Look, they're human. That means they die and we eat." And then both-sidesed people who promoted unregulated fossil fuels in the face of climate change, policies of torture and endless war, and featured columns from people who, with a straight face, suggested little kids could fling their bodies at a mass shooter to stop him. Eventually. 

If it bleeds it leads. The bloodthirsty dollar. Always a great promotion. You know how it goes.

That's right. We have little kids going to school with bulletproof backpacks or with active shooter drills where they pile into a coatroom, but thanks to scum-life mouthpieces, we are supposed to be respectful when ever-growing numbers of kids are getting COVID because god forbid someone's little precious had their freedoms impaired by covering their wee Hummel figurine features with a mask. Because empathy and common sense have been beaten to death in a parking lot for not having the right Q rating.

Leave people's bloody personalities alone (unless they are unrepentant racist rapist narcissistic sociopaths, in which case, report that shit early and often). Report facts. We're fucking dying over here!

Ah the Fear of Death dollar. A very reliable mover. Pretty much our oldest trope....say, can we interest you in a flight to Mars in like, 2037 to escape all this? Some vitamins? A weapon to protect yourself in our future Mad Max Hellscape? 

Fuck. This. For. All. Time. 

See the Sky Ripped Open

 

The claim that the Taliban executed a man via helicopter hanging - promoted by Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and numerous others on the right - has been thoroughly debunked. Here's the most thorough fact check so far, from @zoo_bear: https://t.co/fVQrGrDGrq

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) August 31, 2021

I don't really have anything especially insightful to add to the whole

OMG the Taliban are using helicopters to kill folks

thing except that bad faith permeates a lot of the daggone discourse, and that debunking things like how much useful materiel was handed to the Taliban (it isn't actually a lot and most of it was rendered useless beforehand) probably isn't going to help with people who think that letting people know 19 times that they have to get out of Afghanistan while the getting is good doesn't really seem like a lot when really?

Biden says they reached out to Americans in Afghanistan 19 times since March to try to get them out... that seems like not a lot given the circumstances.

— Lara Seligman (@laraseligman) August 31, 2021

Seriously. I don't know how you address that. Or how you address the whole "people are being left behind thing" when we don't have transporter beams like Star Trek, so it takes time and we are still going to get people out (the ones who actually want to go!). 

Or the whole "How can you trust the Taliban?" question when, per the deal from February 2020, they actually didn't attack our military contingent upon our leaving. They are sticking to the deal, if in a Taliban  kind of way. President Biden ran down many of the facts during his speech, and some bad faith MF's just said, whatevs and stayed nattering on about optics. No, we don't love them like soul siblings. Also too, sometimes you can deal with people because you do have leverage and they are just happy to get rid of you. 

 But the helicopter thing just makes me laugh in an ugly way because what? Were they momentarily jealous?

UPDATE: Jesus Flipping Christmas:

Donald Trump Jr. has changed his Twitter banner to a Biden-mocking image featuring a man appearing to be hanged from a helicopter, though, again, the helicopter execution story was imaginary. pic.twitter.com/zcEzg5VI1b

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 1, 2021

Don Jr. also has pushed the lie that service dogs were left behind, and of course the hell not.

The Worst Instincts

 

"I'd start killing bad guys" -- Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) on how he'd respond to the attack in Kabul pic.twitter.com/38AFNd6Nim

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2021

"Pew! Pew! Pew! Muddafakas!" he did not add. I don't know what he thought we had the military doing there for the last 20 years, and I'm not sure he even gets that "putting in more US troops" isn't the way to get all Americans out. This isn't a thought process--it's the equivalent of when a house cat jumps because you set a cucumber down next to it. 

In order to keep from writing an increasingly expletive-laden 2500 word excessively linked screed about what the whole hell is wrong with Republicans, I'm just going to boil it down to this: people who have more smoke for President Biden than ISIS and make saying he has to resign or be 25th Amendment-ed the first thing to fall out of their mouths, are just partisan ghouls. Any tragedy to seize on and make political hay of would do. 

I didn't respect that nonsense when they tried it with Benghazi and I'm a whole lot less charitable to it after January 6.

UPDATE:  Yeah, this tracks: 

Amid the chaos in Kabul, Business Insider is highlighting a November 2020 article written by James Golby for The Atlantic. 

"Perhaps by design, perhaps by incompetence, perhaps out of sheer spite or arrogance, Trump has created the circumstances for another Bay of Pigs, Black Hawk Down, or Benghazi," Golby wrote in his piece published by back in November. 

Golby, also a U.S. Army veteran, emphasized how those were all incidents "where the United States inserted itself into overseas conflicts enough to draw lethal opposition but without sufficient strength to protect its people."

 

Denial and Co-Dependency in Afghanistan

 

(Graphic via Financial Times.) 

I don't really want to get too deep into this idea, but I think one of the biggest problems with the coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is one of denial: I just don't think that the media was prepared to deal with the war ending, and can't seem to shift off the idea that somehow, President Biden must be responsible for the whole of what is going on right now, even if the facts are staring them in the face. The reporting on the war is that it has been rife with mistakes that have prolonged the war, enabled corruption, and created an Afghan military that was dependent on US air power and materiel support backstopping them before Biden was elected.  And yet?

It feels like there is an unwillingness to see the evacuation efforts as a success because it means the war wasn't. As if this final, visual, physical evidence of the failure is the worst damage to the illusions some people wanted to manifest. As long as we were there still, maybe, somehow--? The effort would pay off. But take a look at the graphic I posted above--by the time the US got going, it was time to go. 

Critics of the Biden administration can talk about whether dealing with the Taliban now strikes them as abhorrent (it's actually necessary because who else is there?), but where have they been? It's true we only have one president at a time, but it's bizarre to forget the previous ones ever existed. The previous administration cut out the Afghan government we were supporting in order to deal with the Taliban because they knew what was coming. They very likely enabled the lightning speed of the fall. And were heedless of internal criticism. 

But who was it we were cutting out? And weren't the deals that resulted in the Afghan military folding set in motion way back in 2020 when the Trump deal with the Taliban was made, before Biden started the pullout? Because, while Trump can now say he would have gone back on his word (and his withdrawal from the JCPOA confirms that he cares little for the value of the US's word) we know what he said about what Biden should do, until he had the opportunity to be a backbiter. (I think the "ruse" notion is not actually so unlikely, as that even as early as just post-impeachment, Trump, contra his claims that he won the election, knew he wouldn't win and and legitimately wanted to set up Biden for a shitty transition. But in the off chance Trump won or one of his ugly little challenges kept him in office, yeah, he'd feel empowered to renege on any damn thing.) 

So there's a lot of denial. People who don't want to acknowledge their dirty hands or the questions they left unasked, or officials who want to fix their poor records on this subject. And of course, people got rich on the contract opportunities in nation-building, whether it went well or not. (Erik Prince is still making bank on human tragedy because of course.) 

So when breath is given to even Hank Kissinger's vegetable opinion--I only have one question: How is he still alive? Why are we still giving voice to horrorshow people who can only give us cynical ways to be wronger and more morally tainted to accomplish dubious goals? 

Our foreign policy house is rife with abuse and dysfunction. Our media still herald our bad old father figures because they gave us monstrous examples to learn from. We can do better. We can learn from failure and the gift of bad optics. We can do better by nations without our freedoms and resources by being the example we mean to set. 

Biden is breaking a terrible cycle, and his administration is, in the evacuation, demonstrating the great logistical strength and discipline that can be accomplished when people understand their clear mission. The uncertainty evidenced by things like not knowing just how many US citizens there were to be evacuated, who needs to be evacuated, etc. also are a part of denial.  A delayed preparation for an inevitable outcome, one so seemingly far off in some minds that even high school students (even in the time of COVID-19) thought to visit the war-torn country regardless of the international news. 

I don't know the fix for any of this. I can only recommend people surface from their ideals and drink of the realities, whether they taste great or are less filling or whatever. And then re-evaluate accordingly. 

Things Could Have Been Very Different

The Taliban were weak and ready to surrender in 2001 when the U.S. passed on a deal to end the war in Afghanistan. Nearly 20 years later, the U.S. did negotiate a deal — but the balance of power was very different. It favored the Taliban. https://t.co/gI1u5mzMZM

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 23, 2021

Here's part of the problem:

Messengers shuttled back and forth between Mr. Karzai and the headquarters of the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Kandahar. Mr. Karzai envisioned a Taliban surrender that would keep the militants from playing any significant role in the country’s future.  

But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.  

“We don’t negotiate surrenders,” Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time, adding that the Americans had no interest in leaving Mullah Omar to live out his days anywhere in Afghanistan. The United States wanted him captured or dead.

As incredibly stupid and awful as I think the Trump Administration had been, it really is hard to compete with the steely-eyed ignorance and thick-skulled hubris of the Bush Administration. And of course, the Iraq War was dumb as hell and went on forever as well. What the hell does "We don't negotiate surrenders" even mean--we refuse to accept a win? They could have said--Mullah Omar turns up, you turn him over. It wouldn't have been super-satisfying, but it would have not been--this.

So many pundits, military "experts" and so on, people whose credentials have been made in participating in prolonging this tragedy, get to take up cable news real estate when they shouldn't be given the ground.

I do believe I will stay mad about this for a very long time.

 

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

 

Ingraham: Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of refugees from Afghanistan? pic.twitter.com/Sopvx4RJ0H

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2021

Well, Laura Ingraham's Fatherland figure, Donald Trump, certainly didn't think so, but there is a certain idea of reciprocity many civilized people would observe in regards to people who have risked their lives alongside of your people for a purpose--especially when the purpose (whatever kind of nation-building we were lying to ourselves and others about) never did come to fruition and these quite decent and extensively vetted people are in some deep shit.

I don't know what she thinks it would cost us. The dilution of our cultural purity, perhaps, for whatever value that's supposed to have. I have looked at the cultural value of Laura Ingraham, and found it disturbingly lacking. I would go so far as to say that Ingraham is lacking in the Judeo-Christian values she alleges to believe in, when the traditions that would have humanity's first murderer ask "Am I my brother's keeper?" are answered again and again with, "Love one another", "Treat the stranger among you like a citizen", "Love your enemies and bless them that curse you." 

All I know is, these people tangibly have done more to try and fix a deadly situation with their whole asses on the line, that Ingraham has done within her safe and well-paid sinecure--in fact, she's advocated for things that would worsen a slow-rolling pandemic negligent genocide. 

So what I'm saying is, for what it's worth, I would be less concerned about refugees from Afghanistan living in my neighborhood than a bigot who probably would consider my mixed urban neighborhood a slum in comparison to her experience. I know I place my faith in humankind as a humanist. I think her flavor of bigotry makes things worse, denies the common thread among people, hardens our hearts, makes it more difficult to connect and communicate. 

Of course you are your brother's keeper. And you are blessed to have him. Just as we're all cursed with one another on this heating rock, this triumph of the bacterial, this monument to entropy. You don't have to like doing someone else a fucking solid. But you'd want one yourself if things were on the other foot, right? So you do. You mask up, or greet a stranger with kindness, or just try for a whole minute not to be a hatemonger, which Ingraham has made her stock in trade. 

Is there a reason I should be this sister's keeper? All I have is my words, but she'd deny them. She could dine at my table, but never feel nourished. I could offer her water, but it would be salty to her. But it's only human to offer.  I can't be her keeper. I can only say she is wrong. And maybe some day she'd fix herself were she so inclined. 

But I doubt it. 

Failure Has Many Fathers

 

Taliban Commander Who Led Attack on Afghan City Was Released From Prison Last Year, Officials Say - WSJ https://t.co/4qDJdyTyYc

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) August 16, 2021

The co-founder of the Taliban was captured under Obama and was released under Trump, and is now going to be the new leader of Afghanistan. Somehow, this is Biden's fault, because he inherited a withdrawal plan from Trump that was supported by the former guy until it looked bad, because that's how Trump rolls. 

But the problem was not just settling Al-Qaeda business and departing in Bush's first term, which always seemed like it should have been possible, but I think strategically, they fucked up Afghanistan in Bushworld because they really wanted to take a poke at Iraq. And if Afghanistan was wrapped up, the Iraq WMD crisis wouldn't have seemed as immediate.

 Leaving Obama to try and wind down Iraq according to the Bush-signed SOFA. Which wasn't leaving him with a great bunch of choices. Obama, to his credit, never tried to leave a mess in Syria--except of course, ISIS happened. 

And you know what Trump did with regards to our attempts to unfuck that. I'm not trying to place a partisan frame on what had happened, of course, just trying to smash the stupid lies Republicans want to tell about what they've been doing the last two decades. 

 (Just like the economy, re: unemployment and the debt, GOP does the damage, Democrats clean up.)

Mike (Klepto) Pompeo doesn't walk away from it. (Even if he'd rather be obnoxious about CRT and other stuff right now.)  The Bush Administration certainly shouldn't. They initiated the lie that kept us there--that we could fix it. That women and children depended on us. 

We were guilted into forever war. Biden is doing the honest thing. The buck is stopping with him. So for many lazy pundits, that means he gets the onus of failure? Pshh. I am not a goldfish. and can remember years of effort. Media pundits can and should do the same. 

The L Should Stand for Learning

 

The Biden Administration is trying to do a thing that needed to be done some time ago, and it won't be without blood. The US is extricating itself from a war that began with no good definition, that moved from invasion to occupation and nation-building with no sense of what the exit needed to be, and no great sense of the local lay of the land, having made brutal mistakes largely of neglect and failure to understand that only so much can ever be done; to just take the "L" on whatever great plan existed and realize we could not backstop the Afghan government forever. 

We had 20 years. In that time, there were some human rights gains, but the problems that needed rooting out to our satisfaction were cultural and endemic. We were managing a crisis that wasn't ours--we didn't create Afghanistan. We waded in to do something about Al-Qaeda, and then...stayed. imagining we'd fix whatever was broken to pay these people back for the invasion. The US military hasn't any spiritual or crisis counseling options for what is going on. 

Mourning lost opportunities makes sense if opportunities existed, but I think we were sold on something that we created for ourselves--the idea that our ways and ideals were naturally exportable, and that our military was a great way to export them. But what the Taliban represent is something unique to the area and we gave them credibility by making them the face of anti-US imperialism. We helped to make them a stable and lasting presence and to treat with them like a stable opposition. And as President Biden just reminded us, The Former Guy even meant to negotiate with the Taliban at Camp David before the idea was scrapped. 

That he claims he would do things differently than Biden is doing now is inconsequential--Trump simply isn't president and pretending you would do something better and actually doing the thing better are quite different, and Trump has really only ever shown himself better at the former. For that matter, I don't know what pundits in media think should be happening now--were we to stay forever? Make Afghanistan a colony or a territory? Always and inadequately stand in the breach between the health of this country and other people who didn't give a shit, fought like motherfuckers, and incidentally, lived there? 

If Afghanistan cannot do it, with the support given for so long, themselves, this should tell us the value of that support. If what we could have passed on was fighting for the rights of women and children, if we could have passed on democracy, if we could have injected western values...

You can say we failed Afghanistan, but I say we're also failing here--we have our anti-democratic, theocratic, anti-woman, anti-LGBT, racist thugs here. The lesson is once you have a Taliban, it is maybe too late to stop a Taliban without extraordinary violence, which we did not do there and wouldn't have done because of what that would have made us. 

Afghanistan sees to Afghanistan. We see to ourselves. I don't like the outcomes. But if it can be a lesson, it isn't a failure. And all the "What if" in the world won't change it. I don't think were were really helping, maybe just putting on a bandage. But we never could have made Afghanistan different. We might have just made it more the same, adding to the eras of occupation, war, and opportunism. We can only learn not to do this again.

Walking Away from Forever War

 

President Biden: "I will not send another generation of Americans to war in Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation to achieve a different outcome. The United States cannot afford to remain tethered to policies created in response to a world as it was 20 years ago." pic.twitter.com/JB0bYSFf1B

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2021

There's a pretty obvious saying about doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. The initial crisis of 9/11 that sent the US into Afghanistan was about defeating the terrorists that caused that tragedy--yet, we are only leaving ten years after Bin Laden, the mastermind of that event, was killed. A lot has happened in the meanwhile, but what hasn't and won't happen is an end to terror: tactics used by people in conflict, not an entity with a given identity. We haven't reached the end of extremism or militancy. We haven't come to the end of war, just this twenty-years-old war.

The Taliban remain, but Biden has pledged to help relocate and protect the Afghan interpreters who assisted the US military.  That much is entirely correct. The answer to the question "What was achieved?" has to be balanced against the stark realities of what was achievable. If violence occurs in the wake of the US military's pullout, the tension between Taliban and non-Taliban political forces existed before the war. That tension has to be resolved by them; we are in no position to cause a diplomatic resolution, there. 

It's anti-climatic, I guess. Climaxes happen in dramas and this is real life. 

Things Related and Not

 

It happens that a man can live a long time and do any number of appalling stupid things, like help facilitate a long, brutal, murderous war of choice and authorizing torture, and if he is capable of mustering a grin and fashioning statements that in hindsight seem ghoulish or hysterical depending on how you look at things (among the greatest hits, "I don't do quagmires", "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want to have", "Freedom is messy" and the convoluted mush that is the full "unknown unknowns" quote) and he will somehow receive surprising praise even in death,

He's still dead though, and the history he leaves behind him is still brutal. Some people will say that the Iraq invasion, and the way the justification was tied to 9/11, and the excuse made for appalling judgements of error and misrepresentations of fact were judgment calls by people who felt, after the enormity of 9/11, that they were doing the right thing. Others will say those choices were deliberate and, had there been no 9/11 to tie them to, would have still been made, if more slowly.

Unknown unknowns, right? 

Even after investigations and time, accountability is hard to come by. 

That's the frustrating thing, after the lives lost and damage done and still ongoing. And there was a lot of blame to go around. 

TWGB: What a Day Trump is Having

Trump tells Hannity that he "very recently" "aced" a cognitive test: "I took it at Walter Reed, a medical center, in front of doctors, and they were very surprised" pic.twitter.com/CavfF4BdKB

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) July 10, 2020

Because Trump speaks in superlatives without any view as to how they might resonate, I just want to ponder for a minute over someone "acing" a cognitive test. He performed baseline mental activities well enough to be considered not impaired (it isn't an IQ test, or the SAT's). And the doctors (plural) were very surprised!

Doctor 1: Say, would you get a load of that: Trump is not actually mentally deficient.

Doctor 2: Well slap my ass and call me a timpani drum.

Doctor 3: I shouldn't have bet the under. Fuck.

Doctor 2: So we're....gonna let him still have the nuclear codes and just scoot on out of here?

Doctor 1: Sadly, yes. It isn't....(puts on sunglasses) brain surgery.

Forgive me, it's been a long day, but maybe not so long for me as for the president, who got a little bit of awkward news in that he doesn't have, contrary to his previous and probably current opinion, absolute immunity regarding subpoenas, in this case for his tax returns, as requested by NY DA Vance. (As for US Congress, they need to clean up their act and figure out why they really want it, but you know. They could probably get them.) Trump took this with his usual grace and equanimity, which is to say: no, he didn't have those things. But Kayleigh McEnany says he actually got a win today. And like, why not? She could have just done a five minute drum solo with a couple of pens and walked away doing finger guns. No one cares.

So, what else happened today--Esper kind of admitted he never got told about "bounties" but like, Russian payments to the Taliban? Yeah, he probably knew about those. (He's pretty concerned this got leaked though, although if it's as much as that it happened, I am super unsure. I know what I'd rather he be concerned about.) Also, he doesn't seem to have protected Lt. Col. Vindman from retaliatory treatment regarding his impeachment testimony at all. (He also says he doesn't know who gave the order to clear Lafayette Park, and you know what? Whatever. Esper knows just about what he should know and makes a job of not knowing what he shouldn't.) Lou Dobbs called Esper "incompetent" today over something quite else, so who knows where Trump will stand regarding that guy's future.

Judge Emmet Sullivan isn't done with Gen Flynn, last seen this holiday weekend pledging to Q, whatever that means. Somehow, the DOJ's determination to not, like, make a federal case out of the actual federal case that Flynn plead guilty to just seems kind of suspect, you know? As if the person running the DOJ was trying to make things comfortable for Trump's associates. So weird!

And while we're so obviously on the topic of Bill Barr (who should be impeached) we also got treated to former US Attorney Geoffrey Berman's take on Barr's really way-out approach to getting his ass fired. It really feels like Barr was using the bait of other job offers as a bribe to get Berman to step down because of possibly some investigation he was involved in (and as I've said, those investigations were considerable and revolved around TrumpWorld).

It's really like Trump doesn't have the best people, but the ones that are around him are covering him like a badly-fitting suit. It's a little like some threads are unraveling. It's a lot like he should be regularly getting a check-up from the neck up if he thinks people don't understand that his White House is corrupted by grift, incompetence and deception. Many of us certainly do.

The revolution against Trump might not be televised on Fox News as being from anyone but "The Left" (and it isn't only us lefties, not anymore), but it will be televised.

TrumpWorld must fall. Orbis Trumpi delenda est.