Question: With whom is the United States currently at war?

Joe Biden bugged out of Afghanistan almost exactly a year ago while leaving 14,000 Americans and many more of our allies behind Taliban lines. At that time, Biden himself celebrated that he had given us peace for the first time in twenty years, apparently forgetting that we’re still conducting hostilities in the Syria-Iraq desert.

So if this is a “wartime address,” as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson described it to Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who’s the enemy? This may be an awkward question for Robinson now that Biden’s walking this back, but Robinson still should answer it:

“The speech last night, to me, sounded like a president delivering a wartime address. Indeed, Joe Biden sees this as, as he said, a battle for the soul of the country. It is a battle for the preservation of our democracy. To me, the significant thing was that he — yes, he called out Donald Trump, but he also called out the MAGA Republicans, the MAGA Republican officials and followers who, for whatever motive, every whatever delusion, are going down this authoritarian path, this undemocratic path, and trying to take the nation with them.” Robison said.

“He framed this as an emergency, as something that we as a nation need to bond together to stop and to reverse. To return to our democratic principles and our democratic practices. To me, it was — it was an urgent wartime address,” Robinson added.

To return to our “democratic principles and democratic practices,” Robinson recommends treating Americans like “wartime” enemies? To frame political debate by painting wide swaths of the electorate with a broad brush on the fringes and other-ize the opposition? Promising unity while demonizing dissenters?

None of that sounds like “democratic principles and democratic practices” to me. YMMV, but wartime addresses usually precede wartime responses, which are anything *but* democratic. Will Robinson cheer those too?

Had Donald Trump gotten up and delivered a “wartime address” as a political-campaign speech, Eugene Robinson and Joe Scarborough would have pointed all of this out, too. That’s a big part of the problem with the current political moment, as I pointed out this morning. Rather than offer any introspection, the media takes sides, and most of that cuts in a single direction. This makes hypocrisy a constant in politics, and is yet another institutional failure that makes the situation worse.

Politico’s take is more honest. Despite selling this as an address to defend democracy, Jonathan Lemire and Meridith McGraw correctly recognize it as an address to sell Democrats, although you’ve got to slog your way into it to find that out:

Aides stressed that the speech, given just days before the unofficial Labor Day kickoff to the stretch run of the midterm campaign season, would not be overtly political. But it was difficult to read it as anything other than Biden’s attempt to frame the stakes of an election once again dominated by Trump after an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home turned up classified information and intensified talk of possible criminal charges for the former president.

Biden wanted to declare war on his potential 2024 opponent, and anyone who might support him. In doing so, he demagogued the moment into a “wartime address,” which for anyone who really worries about “democratic principles and democratic practices” should be a gigantic red flag.