Live at 3:45 ET: Biden (finally) speaks on the Afghanistan sh*tshow

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

There are crises, there are major crises, and then there are crises where members of your own party start demanding cabinet resignations.

Seriously: Who’s going to resign? Lloyd Austin? Mark Milley? Jake Sullivan, who may be the most brazen liar of the three? Hundreds or even thousands of people, possibly including Americans, who should have been evacuated already will be put to the sword in Kabul soon because our military and intel experts couldn’t coordinate an orderly withdrawal despite having had months to plan.

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Biden was sworn in vowing that the “adults” had returned to Washington. As it is, even Trump’s administration couldn’t have done worse in coordinating this process. Someone has to go.

The first person who should go is whoever wrote these talking points for Biden’s speech, which Pelosi’s office is circulating this afternoon. Read them for a sneak preview of what’s coming as the president finally emerges from his basement.

There are some doozies there, but this one’s the dooziest:

I repeat the question I posed this morning: If there was a possibility that the country would be quickly overrun, why wasn’t our evacuation policy constructed around that worst-case scenario? Jake Tapper put a similar question to Tony Blinken yesterday on CNN. Instead of withdrawing all troops, only to have to hastily reinsert 7,000 at the airport to facilitate evacuations, we could have left troops in place while evacuations proceeded and then withdrew them last. Why didn’t we?

Why pull all American forces out and gamble that the Afghan army would hold long enough to let our diplomats ensure that everyone who rightly should have gotten out would be given the opportunity?

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That’s another doozy from the talking points, by the way. Apparently the Afghans left behind are suckers for having relied on our assurances that everything would be fine:

Here’s a question Biden, Austin, and Milley — and Trump and Pompeo — should have to answer, if not today then soon: Why wasn’t withdrawal scheduled for the winter, after “fighting season” ended for the year? The Taliban hunkers down in the colder months, so if we had negotiated with them to draw down over the winter of 2021, they wouldn’t have been in a position to push towards the capital before American allies had departed safely. Trump’s administration negotiated the May 1 deadline and Biden’s administration stuck to it (more or less). Why not a January 1, 2022 deadline instead?

One other talking point from Pelosi’s office, by the way, is that Austin and Milley are working hard to ensure that the airport in Kabul is secure and that evacuations continue. That’s super, but…

American troops and the Taliban cheek by jowl seems like a bad dynamic to me. What did we offer them in exchange for not attacking our guys or obstructing the evacuation?

Maybe we can squeeze a little extra money into the reconciliation bill for them. New slogan: Bribing jihadi cavemen not to massacre our allies before they can be frantically evacuated due to Biden’s incompetence is infrastructure.

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Here’s your thread if you’re watching live at 3:45. I’ll post the clip once it’s available. The plan right now for any Afghan refugees who make it out before being slaughtered is to house them on U.S. military bases until we can get them resettled. Once that’s done, we can pivot to the next political fight, where nationalists insist that the gross negligence we’re seeing from the White House over the past few days is actually part of some deliberate, nefarious “Great Replacement” plot.

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John Stossel 8:30 AM | October 12, 2024
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