Eric Boehlert: The media's Afghan blame game

Treating the Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan’s capitol over the weekend as a shocking event in the wake of U.S. troops withdrawing from the war-torn country, the press eagerly jumped into the blame game. In the process, they diligently did the GOP’s bidding by omitting key context in its rush to pin the blame for a 20-year, extraordinarily complex and heartbreaking military and foreign policy failure on a single man who took office just seven months ago.

Turning over their platforms to partisan Republicans and pro-war military experts, the media seemed eager to portray President Joe Biden as one being swallowed up in “crisis,” even as his call to withdraw troops has drawn overwhelming, bipartisan support at home.

Axios laid it on thick. Doubling as a GOP springboard, the news outlet made sweeping factual declarations in its news coverage: “Rarely has an American president's predictions been so wrong, so fast, so convincingly as Biden on Afghanistan.”

Raise your hand if you remember the predictions President George W. made about invading Iraq, long before the U.S. spent $2 trillion and more than 500,000 people died.

A reporter for ABC News typed up GOP talking points on Twitter when he posted a photo of Taliban leaders seizing control of Kabul: “The Biden White House will have to contend with images like this every single day for the foreseeable future.”

CNN sounded identical to Fox News when it announced the troop withdrawal threatened to “stain” Biden’s entire “legacy,” while Time was sure the Afghanistan event “could alter his presidency.”

“Biden’s Betrayal of Afghans Will Live in Infamy,” The Atlantic’s George Packer declared, without detailing what steps could have been taken to stop the Taliban from retaking control of the country.

The Washington Post editorial board, which in 2002 and 2003 published nearly 30 endorsements advocating for the invasion of Iraq, howled that the troop withdrawal had been “precipitous.” https://pressrun.media/p/the-medias-afghan-blame-game

Fareed Zakaria: We lost the war in Afghanistan long ago

The United States had been watching the Taliban gain ground in Afghanistan for years now. It is rich and powerful enough to have been able to mask that reality through a steady stream of counter-attacks and air, missile and drone strikes. But none of that changed the fact that, despite all its efforts, it had not been able to achieve victory — it could not defeat the Taliban. Could it have withdrawn better, more slowly, in a different season, after more negotiations? Certainly. This withdrawal has been poorly planned and executed. But the naked truth is this: There is no elegant way to lose a war. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/16/we-lost-war-afghanistan-long-ago/

Paul Waldman: The right unleashes a new wave of fear-mongering over refugees

“They hate us for our freedoms,” the idea conservatives repeated so often as a way of explaining terrorism. But while that cry was meant quite intentionally to obscure the foreign policy and military decisions that contributed to anti-Americanism — our support for corrupt and dictatorial governments, our military adventurism — in this formulation it turns into a condemnation of American society, or at least liberal influence over it.

In that story, the foreign enemy still doesn’t hate America because of what our government has done. But rather than hating something so fundamental about us we could not possibly change it (the vague and all-encompassing “our freedoms”) the enemy supposedly hates only the social changes conservatives don’t like.

For Tucker Carlson, this makes a kind of sense: If the Taliban is understood as merely a group of extremely traditionalist conservatives, then of course he’d imply that American conservatives should see them as allies in the real battle, the one against liberalism.

Does this idea sit uncomfortably alongside Carlson’s crusade to keep America White? Only a little. You can find momentary common cause with a foreigner while still believing that anyone who looks like him is a threat who should be kept out of your country.

Carlson may give a thumbs-up to the Taliban, but its fighters are not the ones trying to flee Afghanistan. It’s the Afghans who embrace American values that Carlson sees as the real threat, because they might come here. And just imagine if the Afghan refugees we accepted were not only non-White and not only Muslims, but turned out to be liberals!

That, of course, is the dark heart of the conspiracy Carlson warns his viewers about on a near-nightly basis, and that Miller echoes: The fight to keep immigrants out of the United States is both civilizational and political, since Democrats are supposedly scheming to bring them in by the millions so they can become Democratic voters. It’s not xenophobia and racism for their own sake, it’s also about maintaining Republican rule. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/17/right-unleashes-new-wave-fear-mongering-over-refugees/

Michael Hiltzik: Like children playing with matches, GOP again toys with US debt ceiling

As is almost always the case, the Republican stance on the debt ceiling depends on mass amnesia. McConnell and other GOP leaders blame Democrats for enacting big spending bills over the last year but forget that some of them, including pandemic relief bills, passed with bipartisan votes.

Nor do they ever mention one of the biggest budget busters of recent times, the 2017 tax cuts, which passed without Democratic votes and will add more than $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. Every one of the senators who signed Johnson’s pledge and were in the Senate in 2017 voted for the tax cuts. (Only four GOP senators are missing from the pledge: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Richard Shelby of Alabama and John Kennedy of Louisiana.)

Those tax cuts overwhelmingly favored corporations and the wealthy, which points to a strategy that Democrats should consider if the GOP stands firm on insisting they manage the debt ceiling issue all by themselves: Roll the 2017 tax cuts all the way back. That should provide enough money to shut up the GOP deficit hawks, at least for a while. https://www.fltimes.com/news/nation/michael-hiltzik-like-children-playing-with-matches-gop-again-toys-with-us-debt-ceiling/article_9c26ff3a-1f44-5fb3-aa91-4bb20bf143a0.html

The best option, obviously, is for Democrats to take this opportunity to repeal the debt ceiling entirely. It’s useless except as a partisan device.

Congress should take the words of 1 Corinthians to heart: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Put it away, already. https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx

Elizabeth Kolbert: The U.N.’s Terrifying Climate Report

The latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. effort, released last week, has to be read—or, more likely, not read. Even the shortest and snappiest version of the report, the so-called Summary for Policymakers, which, at forty-one pages, is just one per cent of the length of the full document, is, in its mix of the technical and the turgid, pretty much impenetrable. Still, it manages to terrify. Owing to humans, the report states, the world has warmed by more than one degree Celsius—nearly two degrees Fahrenheit. Global temperatures are now higher than at any other time in the past hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Anthropogenic warming, the report observes, is already producing fiercer heat waves, heavier rainstorms, and more violent cyclones.

In the coming decades, still hotter heat waves and worse flooding are to be expected, as events that are now considered extreme become commonplace. On Twitter, the climate activist Greta Thunberg described the I.P.C.C. report as a “solid (but cautious) summary of the current best available science.” The U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, called it a “code red for humanity.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/23/the-uns-terrifying-climate-report

Catherine Rampell: If cops want to defund themselves, let them

Around the country, police officers are threatening to quit if subject to a coronavirus vaccine mandate. And you know what? Good riddance.

This is a useful opportunity to clear law enforcement ranks of their worst, most selfish and least-public-spirit-minded officers. If cops want to defund themselves, let them.

It’s not clear whether threats to resign — expressed by individual officers or union leadership — should be taken at face value. After all, many cops would lose seniority and retirement benefits if they quit early. But let’s assume they’re not bluffing.

So what? Let them quit.

If some police officers want to defund themselves, by all means let them. Let the bad cops go, and replace them with officers actually committed to the noble mission to protect and serve. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/12/if-cops-want-defund-themselves-let-them/

Paul Waldman: The new GOP midterm election strategy is to make everyone mad

As they look toward next year’s midterm elections, Republicans are hard at work crafting detailed policy proposals they will present to the public to explain why life would improve if they were given control of Congress.

Just kidding; what they’re actually doing is trying out different ways of getting their base, and anyone else, as angry as possible. Which isn’t anything new, but when it means promoting not just social division but also greater risks to public health in the midst of a pandemic, it presents a threat that goes beyond an election.

As if political divisions around the country’s response to covid-19 weren’t bad enough already, Republicans seem to believe that a new backlash to public health measures is just their ticket to victory in 2022.

They’re right about one thing: Americans are tired of how long we’ve been living like this, and in despair that the delta variant surge means the extension (or revival) of inconveniences like wearing masks in schools and stores. At the beginning of the year, when vaccines began to roll out, we thought covid might have been nearly behind us by now; knowing that it isn’t is enough to make anyone sour.

So the GOP is trying to take the sentiment of “Man, this is a bummer” and turn it into “I am exploding with rage.”

In particular, Republicans want people to direct their anger at public health officials who are urging new mask requirements, and Democrats who say those requirements might be a good idea, especially since so many people are refusing to be vaccinated. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/11/new-gop-midterm-election-strategy-is-make-everyone-mad/

Mary Trump: Donald’s Plot Against America

Democrats must stop squandering their advantage as they waste time waiting for Republicans to feel shame. They have none. Over the four years Donald was in the Oval Office, there were any number of opportunities for Republicans to break with a man who, at every turn, undermined everything they claimed to have stood for—law and order, the military, moral conservatism, fiscal responsibility, and small government. And yet they never did.

January 6 should have been a wake-up call for all of us, Republicans in particular. Initially at least, some of them had been scared enough by a mob intent on committing violence against any member of Congress they came across to recognize that the monster they’d deluded themselves into thinking they controlled could not, after all, be tamed. Instead, they have followed Donald’s lead. Less than six months after the fact, Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde claimed the insurrection was a “bold-faced lie” and nothing more than “a normal tourist visit,” despite the fact that there is a photo of him rushing to help barricade the door against the mob. Donald continues to double down on his claim that these were peaceful people and actually said “there was such love at that rally.” There has been no pushback from Republican leadership. There can’t be. They know that any investigation into what happened that day is a losing proposition for them—either because they’ve been covering it over or because they’re guilty of sedition. They also know that the 2022 election will turn in part on how many Americans they can convince of the Second Big Lie: that the insurrection never happened. https://newrepublic.com/article/163115/donald-trump-plot-against-america

Aaron Blake: The GOP pushed Benghazi probes for years. It’s already done with Jan. 6.

Republicans spent years pushing for investigation after investigation of the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. But when it comes to the Jan. 6 insurrection, they’re already very much over it.

A new poll from Quinnipiac University is the latest to show Republicans don’t really want any type of investigation of the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The poll gave people a choice between the idea that it was an attack on democracy that should “never be forgotten,” and the idea that it’s overblown and it’s time to “move on.” Three-quarters of Republicans — 75 percent — chose “move on.”

That binary choice is a little overly simplistic, admittedly. It asks people to choose between two polar opposites, when they might be more in the middle. But when asked whether they support Congress’s investigation of Jan. 6, GOP support for the probe isn’t much higher. Just 29 percent of Republicans support the probe.

It might be tempting to view this as a symptom of how the probe is being conducted, rather than the necessity of some kind of investigation. Republicans cried foul over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA.) rejecting GOP picks for the select committee, and Republicans voted overwhelmingly against both an independent commission and Pelosi’s fallback plan for a select committee.

But polling suggests that’s not really the case — that this really is about just not wanting to investigate at all.

Back in May, as Senate Republicans were killing the independent commission, pollster YouGov asked questions about this. Republicans opposed the commission 61 percent to 23 percent, but they also opposed really any kind of investigation. The pollster asked which of these options people agreed with more:

1. “We still need to find out the truth of what happened.”
2. “There have been enough investigations already.”

By a 62-to-27 percent margin, Republicans said the matter had been investigated sufficiently already.

That verdict was particularly striking given Congress, well, hadn’t actually produced any big investigative products. It had held hearings, yes, but the first big report on intelligence and security failures, a bipartisan product of the Senate, wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks. Despite this, less than five months after the insurrection, Republicans didn’t see the need to look into how this happened.

Perhaps most tellingly, it’s a huge contrast to how the party viewed the Benghazi investigations.

For months and years after the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans, Fox News’s pollsters asked similar questions about people’s appetite for investigating it. And Republicans’ appetite was voracious and long-lasting.

In June 2013 — nine months after the attack — 88 percent of Republicans said they supported continuing to investigate. In November 2013 and February 2014, it was 83 percent. By April 2014, it was still only slightly diminished, at 77 percent.

In May 2014, the House GOP added a select committee to its previous investigations, bringing the total number to a half-dozen. The committee issued its final big report in June 2016.

But a full year later — in June 2017 — Fox News asked a similar question again. And lo and behold: 65 percent of Republicans still said it was either “extremely” or “very” important that the investigations into Benghazi continue.

This was just shy of five years after the attack, after six congressional investigations, including a select committee run by Republicans that had concluded its work. And nearly two-thirds of Republicans wanted to keep probing. That’s similar to the number of Republicans who basically said it was time to move on from investigating Jan. 6 even before the first big report landed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/05/gop-pushed-benghazi-probes-years-its-already-done-with-jan-6/

Eugene Robinson: Maybe it’s time for doubting Democrats to press pause on the angst

It’s time to entertain the possibility that President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually know what they’re doing and are really good at their jobs.

Their fellow Democrats seem to have doubts, because, well, Democrats always have doubts. Dwelling on worst-case scenarios is somehow wired into the party’s DNA. Every victory must have some downside; every step forward must lead toward some potential pitfall. If worrying had been an Olympic sport in Tokyo, Democrats would have swept gold, silver and bronze.

This angst is richly nourished by voluminous news media analysis and commentary adhering to the convention of anticipating what might go wrong. What if progressives in the House won’t swallow hard and vote for the “hard infrastructure” bill passed by the Senate? What if House moderates insist on a quick vote on the Senate measure and threaten to withhold their votes on the budget with its huge “human infrastructure” spending? What if an asteroid strikes before Biden can sign these transformational pieces of legislation into law?

Let me suggest that Democrats squelch their inner Eeyore for just a moment to appreciate, and celebrate, what their party has accomplished.

There was no way the bipartisan gang of senators trying to craft a compromise measure would succeed. There was no way Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would allow anything on infrastructure to pass, thus giving Biden a win. There was no way more than a handful of Republican senators would defy all the threats streaming from Mar-a-Lago and collaborate with Democrats on anything.

Yet here we are. Nineteen Republicans — including McConnell — joined every Senate Democrat in approving $1 trillion worth of desperately needed infrastructure spending. Included are not just funds to fix roads and bridges, but also big money to provide broadband Internet to Americans who can’t afford it; upgrade the power grid in ways that facilitate the switch to renewable energy; and create a coast-to-coast network of electric-vehicle charging stations.

Okay, but there was no way (according to the conventionally wise) that the whole Senate Democratic caucus, from Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) on the right, would agree on a budget framework. Yet they did, and the massive $3.5 trillion resolution — which Democrats can pass through the reconciliation process, without GOP votes — addresses all the party’s major spending priorities, including the urgent need to address climate change.

Well, said worrywarts, there was absolutely, positively no way that the creaking, dysfunctional Senate could possibly do both those things — infrastructure and the budget — at the same time, as Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats were demanding. Yet, again, that is precisely what Schumer accomplished. Done and done.

So now we’re hearing that the hard part actually lies ahead, because Pelosi will inevitably face an uprising by her progressives, her moderates or both. Indeed, this could happen. But I would submit that Pelosi’s record demonstrates she knows a lot more about how to get the House to do what she needs than any of the Cassandras predicting her certain failure. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/12/democrats-achievements-biden-pelosi-schumer-infrastructure/

Jonathan Chait: 9 Moderate Democrats Threaten to Tank Entire Biden Presidency

Joe Biden’s success to date has owed itself to many factors, the largest of which is the willingness of congressional Democrats to compromise with each other. The narrow margins of the party’s majority means almost any member in either chamber can blow up any bill, and just as the dynamic of mutually assured destruction prevented the Soviets and the United States from obliterating each other, it has muted the traditionally fractious Democratic caucus.

That dynamic is beginning to change, and the instigators are easy to identity: a handful of moderate House Democrats who have been issuing increasingly aggressive demands, culminating in a new letter threatening to withhold their votes from a budget resolution that will contain Biden’s signature domestic legislation and the basis of the party’s campaign.

The demand of the letter is that the House votes on the bipartisan infrastructure bill before it votes on the budget. Why are the nine Democrats so insistent on this order when the party’s leadership wants to pass both bills? The reason is that they aren’t promising to support the budget resolution, either. The House leadership can wait on the infrastructure bill, which they are desperate to pass, to pressure them to support the bigger, Democrats-only budget bill. If the infrastructure bill were to pass the House first, on the other hand, they could threaten to take their ball and go home if the House doesn’t give them absolutely everything they want.

The suicidal illogic of the demand may explain why only nine Democrats signed the letter. The most famous Democratic members representing purple districts — Ellisa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, and many others — are absent from the list, which is heavy with Democrats focused monomaniacally on protecting the bank accounts of their funders. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/9-moderate-democrats-threaten-to-tank-biden-presidency.html

 

Mark Z. Barabak: Debunking Trump’s ‘Big Lie,’ scholars and statistics show the facts don’t add up

In a recent survey of presidential scholars, President Trump finished a dismal third from the bottom, just ahead of perennial duds James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.

He tied Franklin Pierce, whose political timidity helped lead to the Civil War, and placed just behind two other presidential laggards, the pro-slavery John Tyler and William Henry Harrison, who served only 31 days before dropping dead.

But in just seven months since leaving office, the petulant Trump — who always aims for the top — has already bested his 44 predecessors in one way, building a strong case for conducting the most maligned post-presidency in history. (Tyler was buried with a Confederate flag but at least kept his mouth shut, being dead and all.)

Trump has made it his singular mission to undermine the 2020 election he irrefutably lost, promoting a series of conspiracy theories and fact-free allegations used by Republicans nationwide to justify laws making it harder to vote and easier to overturn elections they don’t like, starting in 2022.

“There’s this real risk of delegitimization that goes along with people saying this election was conducted incorrectly,” said Grimmer, who suggested the allegations shouldn’t simply be dismissed out of hand. “We investigate ... and say, ‘Look, the evidence just isn’t there.’ ”

Hopefully, the fair-minded will pay attention. All it takes to undermine democracy is for good people to be faced with a crock of lies and do nothing. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-08-17/trump-big-lie-experts-debunk-voting-fraud-claims

Charles A. Kupchan: Afghanistan’s rapid fall shows Biden was right to pull out

It has been excruciating to watch the Taliban roll across Afghanistan, undoing in a matter of months two decades of efforts by the Afghan people and the international community to build a decent, secure and functioning state.

The Taliban’s virtually uncontested takeover raises obvious questions about the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces from the country. However, the rapidity and ease of the Taliban’s advance provide a clear answer: that Biden made the right decision — and that he should not reverse course.

Biden doubted that U.S.-led efforts to prop up the government in Kabul would ever enable it to stand on its own. The international community took down Al Qaeda; beat back the Taliban; supported, advised, trained and equipped the Afghan military; bolstered governing institutions; and invested in the country’s civil society. None of that created Afghan institutions capable of holding their own.

That is because the mission was fatally flawed from the outset. It was a fool’s errand to try to turn Afghanistan into a centralized, unitary state. The country’s difficult topography, ethnic complexity, and tribal and local loyalties produce enduring political fragmentation. Its troubled neighborhoods and hostility to outside interference make foreign intervention perilous.

Biden made the tough and correct call to withdraw and end a losing effort toward an unattainable goal.

Finally, Biden is right to stand by his decision to end the military mission in Afghanistan, because doing so is consistent with the will of the electorate. Most Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, have lost patience with the “forever wars” in the Middle East. The illiberal populism that led to Donald Trump’s election (and near reelection) emerged in part as a response to perceived American overreach in the broader Middle East. Against a backdrop of decades of economic discontent among U.S. workers, recently exacerbated by the devastation of the pandemic, voters want their tax dollars to go to Kansas, not Kandahar. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-16/op-ed-afghanistans-rapid-fall-shows-biden-was-right-to-pull-out