Following Up On The 🐘

Biden: "Let me be clear -- the evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard & painful no matter when it started, when we began. It would have been true if we had started a month ago, or a month from now. There is no way to evacuate this many people w/o pain." pic.twitter.com/3t8wTZvwRv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 22, 2021

"This is all just talk now. So far, the Taliban has not taken action against US forces. So far, they have, by & large, followed through on what they said... we'll see. But the bottom line is this... I'm not about to send your son or your daughter to fight in Afghanistan" -- Biden pic.twitter.com/EbrsNyWs8W

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 22, 2021

REPORTER: Do you trust the Taliban now?

BIDEN: I don't trust anybody, including you pic.twitter.com/E3CPFBnvbJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 22, 2021

"We have a long way to go [in Afghanistan], and a lot could still go wrong" -- President Biden https://t.co/Rj7KtLDqx2

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 22, 2021

Adm. Mike Mullen on @ThisWeekABC reflects with regret on advice to boost US troops under Obama and attempt to build an Afghan army.

“What I thought we could do, and I advised President Obama accordingly, is I thought we could turn it around,” he said. “Obviously I was wrong.”

— Matt Viser (@mviser) August 22, 2021

Helene Cooper and Andrea Mitchell are tut-tutting and clutching their pearls in a very significant manner! And aver that Adm. Mullen was no true Scotsman. That, or Cooper and Mitchell are both more Catholic than the Pope (for those who don't remember, as I had to be reminded, Adm. Mullen is the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.) Meanwhile, among the hoi-polloi:

In the NBC poll, Biden’s approval among registered voters has gone from 51% in April to 50% now even amid the chaos in Afghanistan. Yes CBS is bigger drop but it was an outlier high to start. Larger point: elections now a brutal game of inches between two entrenched coalitions.

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) August 22, 2021

And yes, yes it is:

It is a huge relief to find out our country is filled with people who know, with 100% certainty, how to properly extract the US from Afghanistan.

— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) August 22, 2021

Expertise abounds!

It is a huge relief to find out our country is filled with people who know, with 100% certainty, how to properly extract the US from Afghanistan.

— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) August 22, 2021

Maybe it's not just the expertise of arm-chair generals that's the entire problem:

CNN scolded on live TV for 'over-the-top' Afghanistan coverage: '5,000 people died of Covid in this country' https://t.co/xozLswQR7G

— Raw Story (@RawStory) August 22, 2021

"[The coverage was] way over the top and unconnected to a perspective on the issue from the beginning," Dowd told CNN's Brian Stelter on Sunday. "They've added more perspective in the final days but from the beginning, they didn't have a perspective on it."

"We should judge it by the data," he continued. "And sometimes the press has a tendency to judge things by anecdotes and not the data. And the data for the last week shows that Joe Biden has basically gotten 30,000 people out of Afghanistan without a single loss of American life."

Marcotte agreed.

"It's been over the top," she said. "I think that we were reminded of the factors that got us into some of the wars to begin with, which is there tends to be a bias in the press towards military intervention. And I think that we also see why it was so hard for presidents in the past to pull out of Afghanistan. They were afraid of exactly this kind of press overreaction."

 

"There's no way to surrender, leave, withdraw -- whatever you want to call it -- in a war without things getting ugly," she added. "And I feel there was something pollyannaish about expecting anything different and it disappoints me the press is behaving in this way."

Dowd, who served in President George W. Bush's administration, argued that the former president "is the one who should be lambasted the most in this coverage."

He also complained that some reporters have failed to acknowledge how their personal feelings and experiences have influenced the coverage.

"While this was going on, 5,000 people died of Covid in this country," Dowd pointed out. "500 people died of gun violence in the last week in this country. And not a single American has died in the midst of this chaotic situation in a political hurricane."

"I don't think the press fully understands what the context is for the American public," he remarked. "And so when you understand the context, not only of Afghanistan, but the context of what's going on in our country, there's far worse crisis situations, including the assault on our democracy, that get forgotten about in the midst of this."

Context is all.