By Mikael Damkier @Shutterstock
Abandoning his hiding place, in a televised jaw-dropping speech last Friday, President Biden looked anything but presidential as he explained the four-word subtext: “You’re On Your Own “ About the speech that is bound to live in American infamy, Judson Berger asks in NRO, how bad was the mess of a press conference on Friday?
So bad, so obvious, even the mainstream media was asking Biden tough questions.
Biden’s Press Conference Full of Fibs
- Biden: There is no al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Wrong.
- Biden: al-Qaeda and the Taliban are enemies. Wrong.
- Biden: Almost no one thought the Afghan army would fall apart this quickly. Wrong.
- Biden: Our NATO allies agreed that his decision to withdraw was wise and that they agreed with it. Wrong. (In fact, our most important allies have taken the rare step of publicly blaming Biden.)
- Biden: We won’t have trouble knowing about any terrorist formation in Afghanistan because we have ‘over the horizon’ capabilities. Mostly wrong. (To know that, we need resources on the ground, and we don’t have those resources anymore. We pulled our people out and abandoned those who worked with us.)
- Biden: The only reason American soldiers had been safe is because the Taliban abided by their agreement with Trump about safe withdrawal. Possible but unlikely. (The better reason is that they were not engaged in door-to-door combat. They were giving local forces intelligence support and air cover. Missing that backbone, the Afghan forces fell apart.)
Chaotic, Deadly, Gruesome, Humiliating
Mr. Lipson asks again, how bad is the mess?
The question now is whether the media will follow up and report on the deceptions, as well as the incompetence and bad judgment.
Has Joe Biden Become America’s King Lear?
As Americans watch people in Afghanistan being crushed to death, toddlers passed over barbed wire and tear gas used by our troops, more reports are coming out of the Taliban’s randomly beating and shooting people trying to escape at Kabul’s airport (NYT reported 7 civilians killed on Saturday alone).
It’s becoming ever more evident, writes Dominic Green in Spectator World, that Joe Biden is not capable of keeping up with events, as evidenced by Biden’s promising that anyone who waved an American passport at the gates of Kabul airport would be admitted.
A Crisis in Leadership
Why Donald Trump would never have let this happen? Because, as Mr. Green notes in Why Biden Must Go, Trump is too vain.
If Trump had gifted Blackhawk helicopters and a lifetime supply of Humvees to our enemies, condemned thousands of our allies to the nastiest of fates and made the United States military and diplomats a laughing stock before the entire world, the media and the Democrats would be calling for impeachment and dusting off the articles of treason.
If Trump had confused his Vice President with a ‘general’ or fumbled with his cue cards because he couldn’t match a scripted question to a scripted answer, as Biden did at his press conference on Thursday; or shown the bizarre callousness and failure of short-term memory in his ‘That was four days ago, five days ago!’ outburst; or spontaneously abandoned the policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan in an interview with ABC, as Biden did with George Stephanopoulos on Thursday, the psychiatrists would be lining up outside the cable stations to explain why the 25th Amendment needed to be deployed now.
The Media Now Turning on Biden
Joe Biden’s belligerent denial of the facts and his lack of responsibility for them are so evident that even the media have turned on him.
CNN and the BBC are now fact-checking their savior. On Saturday night, ABC’s Jonathan Karl bluntly said that what Biden is saying “simply don’t (doesn’t) comport with reality.”
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