Ignore Biden’s "uh, I meant to do that" apologists on Afghanistan

You can tell that Rubin, Rothkopf, and so many other “uh, I meant to do that” apologists are disingenuous because they keep invoking the same straw man counterargument that Biden invokes in speech after self-justifying speech. “We had to leave Afghanistan,” they all say — a statement irrelevant to the discussion. They are trying to confuse people by conflating the popular decision to leave Afghanistan with Biden’s incompetent and unpopular execution of that policy.

The vast, vast majority of voters and even Biden’s Republican predecessor and 2020 opponent all agreed that the U.S. should leave Afghanistan. So did we . But Biden’s precipitous withdrawal, which has caused more service members’ deaths than the last several years of combat with the Taliban, has been such a disaster that new polling suggests it has nearly soured voters on a sensible decision they had strongly supported .

There are stubborn facts that the Biden apologists cannot get around. These include Biden’s reassurances about how the withdrawal would go and the stranding of hundreds of Americans.