Say Their Names

Before their appearance at the RNC, a short documentary played with interviews from the Gold Star families, all of them angry that the Biden administration had mostly ignored them while Trump hadn’t. He’d given them his time. He knew their children, they said. That matters if you’re the Commander in Chief, a job neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris are suited for.

When the families finally appeared on stage, tears were already streaming down the faces of almost everyone in the hall, as they often are when we come together to talk about military deaths. We know they died serving their country. Some grown men could be seen openly weeping at the unimaginable loss of an avoidable tragedy.

But because the legacy press has been in the Biden administration's pocket for eight years now, Afghanistan has never become the full-scale political scandal that it should have been. What happened to all that gear? What happened to Afghanistan? Did it spark the two wars in Ukraine and Gaza?

I don’t know anything about military operations, but I know that when you rush out of a country, you’d better be sure you protect your soldiers from terrorists, and you’d better be sure you aren’t leaving with bodies falling off airplanes. We’re better than that.