Perhaps Joe Biden’s speech turned out to be more inspirational than first thought. His incessant finger-pointing over the incompetent and catastrophic bug-out in Afghanistan certainly got everyone’s attention, even for a period of time on CNN’s home page (via Twitchy):

CNN later changed the headline to a more anodyne “Biden stands behind his decision,” but the theme has clearly resonated — even within Biden’s own administration. CNN reports this morning that White House “factions” are doing some finger-pointing of their own in an attempt to scrub the stain of this shameful episode off of them:

Factions within the Biden administration are embroiled in a blame game over why the US government didn’t act sooner to withdraw American citizens and Afghans who helped the US over two decades of war, leading to a rushed and dangerous evacuation.

Military officials have said that for weeks they urged the State Department to move faster in evacuating its diplomatic personnel. State Department officials have said they were operating based on intelligence assessments that suggested they had more time, but intelligence officials insist that they had long reported the possibility of a rapid Taliban takeover.

Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley gets singled out for particular derision from White House staffers:

Some officials insist that Biden got bad advice from some of his top military and intelligence advisers. One White House official pointed to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley’s comments from three weeks ago, when he suggested the Afghan forces had the capacity to fight for and defend their country, and that a Taliban takeover was not a foregone conclusion.

“Utter bunk,” the official said.

If Milley and Lloyd Austin had the honor necessary for their positions, they would tender their resignations after that shameful and dishonest public assessment, not to mention the execution of the withdrawal. But wait! The military “faction” has a few things to say about the Biden administration, too:

Military officials, in turn, have said they were actually prepared for the worst and had been urging the State Department for weeks to begin withdrawing embassy employees in Kabul. Pentagon officials used the words “frustration” and “sh*tshow” to describe their feelings about Washington and Kabul.

The officials said they had warned the State Department that a last-minute emergency evacuation — if needed — would be more difficult the more staffers remained.

You know what would have made it a little easier? Keeping control of Bagram Air Base until the withdrawal was complete. We handed it over to the Afghan government on July 1 even while planning for our exit, leaving the Karzai Airport in Kabul our only option for egress. While Biden bragged yesterday about having planned for “all possibilities,” the absence of an easily defensible Bagram in our possession belies that claim:

When this happened, we couldn't figure it out. It was so weird. Moving to exclusively leveraging Kabul International seemed so bizarre. This is beyond the intel failure that they would waltz out of there and the Taliban would remain far over the horizon. Absolutely nuts.

— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) August 16, 2021

As the intel community pointed the finger at the military, and the military pointed the finger at State, the State Department is blaming the intel community:

A State Department official acknowledged there had been real friction with the Pentagon in recent weeks as the department resisted the military’s advice to close the US Embassy in Kabul sooner. A senior administration official, however, said they were operating off the intelligence community assessments that the fall of Kabul was not imminent. The State Department, therefore, felt it was making appropriate decisions, the official said.

It’s not just a “sh*tshow,” but also a circle jerk.

All of this finger-pointing — along with Biden’s — demonstrates even more just how nonsensical Biden’s speech was yesterday. If this withdrawal had been planned and executed properly, the competition right now would be to take credit for the operation. Success has a thousand fathers, after all, while failure is an orphan. In this case, however, the paternity test for incompetent and catastrophic collapse is easily applied. Joe Biden’s bumbling checkers-in-a-chess-game intellect is the true father of this disaster.