Ezra Klein: Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem

In 2005, two of my colleagues at The American Prospect, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, wrote an essay I think about often. It was called “The Incompetence Dodge,” and it argued that American policymakers and pundits routinely try to rescue the reputation of bad ideas by attributing their failure to poor execution. At the time, they were writing about the liberal hawks who were blaming the catastrophe of the Iraq war on the Bush administration’s maladministration rather than rethinking the enterprise in its totality. But the same dynamic suffuses the recriminations over the Afghanistan withdrawal.

To state the obvious: There was no good way to lose Afghanistan to the Taliban. A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one. Either way, there was no hope of an end to the war that didn’t reveal our decades of folly, no matter how deeply America’s belief in its own enduring innocence demanded one. That is the reckoning that lies beneath events that are still unfolding, and much of the cable news conversation is a frenzied, bipartisan effort to avoid it.

Focusing on the execution of the withdrawal is giving virtually everyone who insisted we could remake Afghanistan the opportunity to obscure their failures by pretending to believe in the possibility of a graceful departure. It’s also obscuring the true alternative to withdrawal: endless occupation. But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/opinion/afghanistan-us-withdrawal.html

Philip Bump: Ron DeSantis criticizes Biden for not ending the pandemic he’s exacerbating

The coronavirus pandemic in Florida is currently worse than it has been at any prior point. More than 21,000 people are contracting the virus each day on average and nearly 230 are dying, well over the state’s previous high. Florida’s population-adjusted rate of new infections is more than twice the country’s overall, and its adjusted rate of deaths is more than three times as high. About 15 percent of all new cases in the United States and one-fifth of national deaths are occurring in the Sunshine State.

DeSantis made a bad bet earlier this year, that the plunge in new cases that followed the broad rollout of coronavirus vaccines and preceded the emergence of the delta variant of the virus meant he could run hard against containment measures such as mask-wearing recommendations. Then delta arrived in a state with a middling vaccine uptake, and cases exploded. Instead of backtracking on his political choice, DeSantis pushed vaccinations and, later, treatments for those already infected. Meanwhile, people keep dying.

Looking past his reelection in 2022 and toward the 2024 Republican primary, DeSantis now finds himself having to sell some questionable soda.

He offered a new pitch in an appearance Wednesday night on Fox News. Appearing on “Fox News Primetime,” over the breathtakingly generous chyron “Media hacks are determined to smear Gov. DeSantis & everything he’s achieved,” DeSantis was asked how he would handle future attacks from President Biden who, host Jesse Watters suggested, was desperate to deflect attention elsewhere.

“We are absolutely going to stand in Biden’s way if he’s trying to bring his destructive policies to Florida,” DeSantis replied. “If he’s trying to have the federal government take away parents’ rights in terms of their schoolchildren. If he’s trying to continue with his inflationary policies, if he’s going to continue to try to dump —. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/26/ron-desantis-criticizes-biden-not-ending-pandemic-hes-exacerbating/

Eugene Robinson: What’s happening in Afghanistan is horrible. But how else was U.S. involvement going to end?

How, exactly, did the Biden administration’s critics think U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan was ever going to end?

“Certainly not like this” is not a valid answer, however tragic Thursday’s attacks near the Kabul airport prove to be. Please be specific. Did you envision a formal ceremony at the U.S. Embassy with the American flag being lowered and the Taliban flag raised? Did you see the Taliban waiting patiently while the U.S.-trained Afghan army escorted U.S. citizens, other NATO nationals and our Afghan collaborators to the airport for evacuation? Did you imagine that the country’s branch of the Islamic State would watch peacefully from the sidelines, or that regional warlords would renounce any hope of regaining their power, or that a nation with a centuries-old tradition of rejecting central authority would suddenly embrace it?

This is not an apologia for the tragic and chaotic scenes that have been unfolding in Kabul. Rather, it is a reality check. If there is a graceful, orderly way to abandon involvement in a brutal, unresolved civil war on the other side of the world, please cite historical precedents. I can’t find them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/26/whats-happening-afghanistan-is-horrible-how-else-was-us-involvement-going-end/

Sam Youngman: California, Just Say No…to Becoming Florida

I have lived in Tennessee, and I have lived in Florida. And I am begging y’all not to send me back.

I’ve spent my adult life around politics as a reporter for newspapers and wire services back in Washington, D.C. and in a few different states before then. I covered three presidential campaigns and more House and Senate races than I can remember. I spent four years at the White House covering two presidents. In other words, I have seen levels of self-inflicted stupidity you simply would not believe.

And right now, California is flirting with an all-timer on that list.

Because not only is this recall a really, really stupid way to get rid of one governor and choose another—seriously?! One candidate has to get 50 percent of the vote and the other one can limp across the finish line with next to nothing?! I’m from the state of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul and even we don’t do things this dumb!—but it would also open the door to a rush of more genuinely dangerous stupidity.

If you ever want a shot at normal again—or as close to normal as we do out here—then you’re gonna need Gavin Newsom to finish leading us through this hell.

Because the other folks running are eager to keep us there.

Only they don’t call it hell. They call it Florida. https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/opinion-california-recall-florida/

Jonathan Chait: Why the Media Is Worse for Biden Than Trump

Over the last week, the media has hammered Joe Biden with relentlessly critical coverage of his pullout from Afghanistan, resulting in noticeable drops in his approval ratings. Put aside for a moment whether this reflects failures by Biden or biases by the media. One conclusion we can draw is that this sort of dynamic is a regular feature of Democratic presidencies, and — as the Trump administration showed — a near impossibility during Republican ones.

But wait, you’re thinking. Didn’t the media hound Donald Trump for four straight years at least as hard as it’s hounded Biden over the last week?

Well, sort of. The mainstream media certainly gave Trump harsh and even overtly hostile coverage. But the mainstream media only describes roughly half the media landscape. The other half of the media is a right-wing messaging apparatus that makes no effort to follow traditional journalistic norms. Republicans communicate to their base through a media that functionally operates as part of their party, while Democrats communicate to their base through a media that still exerts substantial independence. If you want to understand the strange difficulty that Joe Biden’s sane, competent administration has in yielding measurably higher approval than Trump’s insane, incompetent presidency, the asymmetrical relationship between the two parties and their respective media environments is the most important place to start. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/why-the-media-is-worse-for-biden-than-trump.html

Sara Goddard: Where is The Climate Leadership in Our Government?

The unbridled impunity with which fossil fuel companies and plastics producers greenwash their activities is deeply entrenched. It’s accepted with ignorance or cynical resignation by a nation that lacks robust, centralized climate leadership in tackling a planetary crisis of epic proportions.

Oil producers act with abandon, fueled with cash and no guardrails. To counteract (then-presidential candidate) Biden’s climate plan, for instance, it was only too easy for companies to dip into their vast wallets and release a torrent of misleading ads on social media, touting the benefits of “clean oil” and a fossil fuel-driven America. (For an exhaustive analysis of how Big Oil has permeated every facet of the American political system, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a must-read.)

But it’s not just the power of money that ensures industry dominance. Energy companies exert an enormous amount of influence in policy-making at every level of government. One example is the recent push by corporate interests for lawmakers to support carbon capture policies that will enable continued production while doing little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. https://greenthatlife.com/climate-leadership/

Will Wilkinson: The Density Divide and the Southernification of Rural America

The fundamental geographic division in American politics has traditionally been a sectional conflict setting the North against the South. The idioms of "red states" and "blue states" caught on widely after the 2000 presidential election because they could be applied to a regional divide—blue North, red South—that was already presumed to reflect the main axis of political debate and competition. But the partisan difference between large-metro and rural residents has now become much larger than the gap between northerners and southerners.

I call this widening gap between the partisan loyalties of urban and rural America “the density divide.” Hopkins is clearly correct that urban vs. rural has eclipsed North vs. South as the geographic embodiment of our partisan divisions. As the old adage goes, a chart speaks a thousand white papers. The divergence is crazy.

However, I suspect that battle between North and South lives on both culturally and geographically. The North has drifted out of the countryside and concentrated itself into our cities. At the same time, America’s rural and exurban counties have slowly become more and more homogenously Southern. The South has risen again … in rural Maine?

One of the puzzles of the 2016 election, and the catastrophe of the Trump presidency, is how populist white nationalism finally prevailed at a time when Americans, taken altogether, were less racist than ever. This is one of the questions I take up in the “Density Divide.” But I left out one of my favorite answers to this question largely because it’s too speculative and I didn’t have the data to prove it. My hunch is that rural white culture, which was once regionally varied and distinctive, became more uniform by becoming increasingly Southern. I call this the Southernification thesis. https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/the-density-divide-and-the-southernification

Jennifer Rubin: Biden tells some hard truths few want to hear

President Biden on Thursday mournfully delivered information to the country that was disagreeable to many Americans: There is no way to withdraw from a futile war without messiness. The expectation that there would be no misery or casualties was a fantasy.

A case in point is the issue of Afghan refugees. “I know of no conflict, as a student of history — no conflict where, when a war was ending, one side was able to guarantee that everyone that wanted to be extracted from that country would get out,” Biden said solemnly. His historical memory is accurate.

We need some sober reflection on the folly of overeager interventionism. We need to come to terms with the delusional feedback loop between civilian and military leaders. Instead we have a media and political culture that are not serious or attentive enough to grasp that dilemmas 20 years in the making have no good answer, just less terrible ones. Everything is reduced to a partisan question. (Is Biden in crisis? Is this a boost for Republicans?) The media, it seems, does not know how to cover a tragedy without viewing it through the lens of horse-race politics. It is so much easier to pronounce the exit a “disaster” than to consider if one’s advocacy over 20 years contributed to the groupthink that sent young men and women to die. Confronted with 13 dead Americans, the press is eager to demonstrate Biden missed the obvious, safe course. What that is, they do not explain.

This week’s loss of life — both American and Afghan — is heartbreaking. With a mainstream media obsessed with stoking partisan squabbling, and Americans refusing to process the consequences of their own choices, it does make one pessimistic about self-government. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/29/biden-tells-some-hard-truths-few-want-hear/

Laurence Tribe: If Garland doesn't prosecute Trump, the rule of law is "out the window"

We need to begin with the fundamental precept that not all crimes are created equal. Those crimes — regardless of who allegedly commits them — whose very aim is to overturn a fair election whereby our tradition of peaceful, lawful succession from one administration to the next takes place — a tradition begun by George Washington, continued by John Adams, and preserved by every president since except Donald Trump — are impossible to tolerate if we are to survive as a constitutional republic. …

Trump's relentlessness has laid bare the defects in many of those accountability mechanisms. Now Garland stands as the final line of defense for our constitutional democracy. No prior attorney general has confronted so daunting a challenge. For what might be the first time in his life and what will surely be the last, Garland could hold the future of the last best hope on earth in his hands. https://www.salon.com/2021/08/30/laurence-tribe-if-garland-doesnt-prosecute-trump-the-rule-of-law-is-out-the-window/

Kori Schake: What Trump’s Disgraceful Deal With the Taliban Has Wrought

The problem with Mr. Trump’s Taliban deal wasn’t that the administration turned to diplomacy. That was a sensible avenue out of the policy constraints. The problem was that the strongest state in the international order let itself be swindled by a terrorist organization. Because we so clearly wanted out of Afghanistan, we agreed to disreputable terms, and then proceeded to pretend that the Taliban were meeting even those.

Mr. Trump agreed to withdraw all coalition forces from Afghanistan in 14 months, end all military and contractor support to Afghan security forces and cease “intervening in its domestic affairs.” He forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters and relax economic sanctions. He agreed that the Taliban could continue to commit violence against the government we were there to support, against innocent people and against those who’d assisted our efforts to keep Americans safe. All the Taliban had to do was say they would stop targeting U.S. or coalition forces, not permit Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to use Afghan territory to threaten U.S. security and subsequently hold negotiations with the Afghan government.

Not only did the agreement have no inspection or enforcement mechanisms, but despite Mr. Trump’s claim that “If bad things happen, we’ll go back with a force like no one’s ever seen,” the administration made no attempt to enforce its terms. Trump’s own former national security adviser called it “a surrender agreement.”
Mr. Trump and his supporters clearly considered the deal a great success — until just days ago, the Republican National Committee had a web page heralding the success of Mr. Trump’s “historic peace agreement.” Really, the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban deserves opprobrium even greater than what it heaped on the Iran nuclear deal struck by the Obama administration. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/28/opinion/trump-taliban-deal-diplomacy.html

Eugene Robinson: How to be a crisis president when crises don’t unite the country anymore

“Biden came into a crisis presidency, and nothing has changed,” a senior administration official told me, citing the parlous state of the economy when Biden took office, the need to quickly develop a nationwide covid-19 vaccination system and the massive cyberattacks threatening critical U.S. infrastructure.

The Afghanistan withdrawal “hasn’t been pretty.” The fact that the United States and its allies have been able to evacuate more than 120,000 people from the country in an around-the-clock airlift is an impressive logistical achievement. But the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a terrorist bombing at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate were tragic.

But note the difference between the response to that attack and to the terrorist truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which claimed the lives of 241 U.S. service members, including 220 Marines, nearly four decades ago.

Back then, the nation joined President Ronald Reagan in mourning the loss. Last week, by contrast, some Republicans in Congress took the occasion of the Kabul bombing to call for Biden to be impeached. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) threatened that there will be “a day of reckoning” — not for the terrorists who killed our troops, but for Biden as commander in chief.

I can’t help but imagine what today’s Twitter trolls would have said about President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the day after Pearl Harbor. And I shudder to think what contemporary conspiracy theorists might have said about the announcement of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine 10 years after the death of Roosevelt, who suffered from the disease. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/30/how-be-crisis-president-when-crises-dont-unite-country-anymore/

Charlotte Klein: Republicans Bravely Defend Americans’ Rights to Treat COVID With Horse Dewormer

Republicans have apparently taken it upon themselves to ensure that Americans continue to receive terrible medical advice now that Donald Trump is no longer offering it up from the White House podium. In the spirit of the former president—whose own penchant for unproven and often dangerous COVID-19 treatments has included suggesting Americans inject bleach or expose themselves to “very powerful light”—Senator Ron Johnson has for months supplemented his vaccine conspiracy theories with enthusiasm for unsound COVID-19 treatments. Most recently, he’s latched onto ivermectin, a deworming drug intended for horses and other livestock, and with the assistance of conservative media, helped prompt a warning from the FDA after people were hospitalized for taking it. The anti-parasitic is approved for certain uses in humans, such as head lice, but it “has repeatedly failed in clinical trials to help people infected with the coronavirus,” according to the New York Times.

Now, the Wisconsin senator is among the GOP lawmakers claiming that the agency’s opposition to ivermectin is not because it hasn’t been shown to be effective for treating or preventing COVID-19, or the uptick in poison control calls from people who have taken it, but the result of political bias. In issuing a warning against the use of ivermectin, the FDA is “doing far more than dismissing me, they’re attacking me,” Johnson told Cheryl Chumley, the opinion editor of the conservative Washington Times, on her podcast last week, according to the Wisconsin Examiner. “I don’t care what drug will work. Try a bunch of them,” said the senator, who has no medical expertise or background.

Johnson has regularly undermined proven medical treatments such as ventilators and the highly effective and safe vaccine that the FDA has already fully approved for the prevention of COVID-19 in those 16 and older. He went on a different podcast last week to claim that the FDA authorizing Pfizer’s product while warning against horse medicine is “all about...the political goal of having mandates,” he said, a perceived threat to personal freedom that the senator has said he opposes “unless there’s some incredibly deadly disease.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/08/republicans-bravely-defend-americans-rights-to-treat-covid-with-horse-dewormer

Paul Krugman: The Snake Oil Theory of the Modern Right

Vaccine refusers aren’t just rejecting lifesaving vaccines, they’re also turning to life-threatening alternatives. We’re seeing a surge in sales of — and poisoning by — ivermectin, which is usually used to deworm livestock but has recently been touted on social media and Fox News as a Covid cure.

OK, I didn’t see that coming. But I should have. As the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, there’s a long association between peddlers of quack medicine and right-wing extremists. They cater to more or less the same audience.

That is, Americans willing to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that Italian satellites were used to switch votes to Joe Biden are also the kind of people willing to believe that medical elites are lying to them and that they can solve their health problems by ignoring professional advice and buying patent medicines instead.

Once you’re sensitized to the link between snake oil and right-wing politics, you realize that it’s pervasive.

This is clearly true in the right’s fever swamps. Alex Jones of Infowars has built a following by pushing conspiracy theories, but he makes money by selling nutritional supplements. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/opinion/covid-misinformation-supplements.html

Jonathan Chait: Republican Vaccine Denial Is Not a Political Strategy

The Republican posture toward the coronavirus has not fundamentally changed since Biden’s election. Since the virus appeared, the party has consistently denied or downplayed its seriousness and opposed any measures to contain it: masking, vaccines, shutdowns of both public and private spaces.

Ron DeSantis used to enjoy a promising brand as a Republican governor who had flouted restrictions while still registering average-ish public-health outcomes.

But his state has turned into such a basket case that conservative pundits have (at least briefly) paused their incessant demands that the media apologize to him. DeSantis has been left picking unpopular fights with local school boards and cruise lines that are trying to serve the public without getting people killed.

Meanwhile, Republican vaccine skepticism is killing a nontrivial number of Republican voters, including a tragic procession of mid-level party officials. Three unvaccinated conservative talk-show hosts have died of COVID this month alone. For a movement so obsessed with demographic replacement that it sees Afghan refugees as a plot to entrench Democratic majorities, it’s odd that it would deliberately kill off its own voters.

Noting this MAGA-cide, Christopher Ingraham accuses Republicans of following “the most breathtakingly cynical political strategy I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, revealing a stunning level of contempt for the true believers in the party who end up laying down their lives for the cause.”

But why should we consider it a “political strategy,” or even a strategy at all? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/republican-vaccine-denial-is-not-a-political-strategy.html

Dana Milbank: Texas shows us what post-democracy America would look like

Texas this week showed us what a post-democracy America would look like.

Thanks to a series of actions by the Texas legislature and governor, we now see exactly what the Trumpified Republican Party wants: to take us to an America where women cannot get abortions, even in cases of rape and incest; an America where almost everybody can openly carry a gun in public, without license, without permit, without safety training and without fingerprinting; and an America where law-abiding Black and Latino citizens are disproportionately denied the right to vote.

This is where Texas and other red states are going, or have already gone. It is where the rest of America will go, unless those targeted by these new laws — women, people of color and all small “d” democrats — rise up.

On Wednesday, a Texas law that bans abortions later than six weeks went into effect, after the Supreme Court let a deadline pass that would have blocked the statute. Because 85 to 90 percent of women get abortions after six weeks, it amounts to a near-total ban. Already on the books in Texas is a “trigger” law that automatically bans all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. At least 10 other states have done likewise.

Also Wednesday, a new law went into effect in Texas, over the objections of law enforcement, allowing all Texans otherwise allowed to own guns to carry them in public, without a license and without training. Now, 20 states have blessed such “permitless carry.”

And on Tuesday, the Texas legislature passed the final version of the Republican voting bill that bans drive-through and 24-hour voting, both used disproportionately by voters of color; imposes new limits on voting by mail, blocks election officials from distributing mail-ballot applications unless specifically requested; gives partisan poll watchers more leeway to influence vote counting; and places new rules and paperwork requirements that deter people from helping others to vote or to register. At least 17 states have adopted similar restrictions.

In Texas, the legislature this term also banned the fictional menace of “critical race theory,” put in new restrictions on demonstrations and banned homeless encampments. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) also banned mask and vaccine mandates while the pandemic rages. Meanwhile the legislature failed to expand Medicaid eligibility to low-wage workers, refusing billions of federal health-care dollars for the state with the most uninsured residents in the nation. Instead, Texas cleared the way for people to buy beer and wine before noon on Sundays.

Less voting and less health care, but more guns and more booze: This is the present in Texas, and the future for all of us — unless we mobilize to arrest the Republicans’ destruction of democracy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/01/texas-shows-us-what-post-democracy-america-would-look-like/