The fringe right can’t chance Biden being redeemed for his handling of Afghanistan. If people start looking at this rationally, the whole game is up. Many folks closer to the centre-right may start to view Biden’s management of the crisis as having made the best of it under the circumstances. If that happens, the dam starts forming cracks.
Milley’s testimony in a couple of weeks could do serious harm to perceptions of Republicans being supportive of the troops. I predict the Republican loon brigade (Jordan, Rubio, et al.) will do serious harm to their party in how they react to Milley’s testimony.
These people are coming apart at the seams because they don’t have any other expertise other than defending their Orange Idol. We are a post policy nation because this Newsmax bobble head was discussing why Trump set up the negotiations only with the Taliban, that it was his idea to draw down military personnel down to a handful, and that 2500 was never going to be enough boots on the ground to get the contractors, their families, and other Americans working in Afghanistan out in a timely and orderly manner. Trump doesn’t do timely, orderly, because that would mean he cared, and that he had thought or two about how this was going to wind down.
They’re imperiled because these are policy and procedure questions. Questions that they should have been asking the Trump WH spokesperson. Did he even have a WH spokesperson at the end? Oh right it was the incredibly lying smug blonde lady that had more snark then what her job called for. She was an excellent liar and diverter of not answering questions. But since she was worthless I forgot her name until now-Kaylie, or something like that.
Right now those Republicans on the center right are making a spectacle over the 12 military members that were killed in suicide bombing at the airport.
Please don’t think that I don’t care about them, but the fuss and outrage being shown about their deaths is just too much when then don’t even fucking care that 666,550 Americans here at home died from 01/20-09/21. More people have died here on US soil than all the service members in Afghanistan over 20 years.
This is me venting about my Republican Representative. She has all but set up shrines on her FB page for the US members of the military that died and that are anywhere near her district, and she may have expanded that to the whole state.
My personal feeling is that the RWNJ aren’t so much afraid of POTUS Biden being redeemed but of the whole situation being forgotten. That the whole situation ends up slithering down the memory hole.
Biden’s management of the crisis as having made the best of it under the circumstances.
People who have or had skin in the game tend to be disproportionately right of centre. Some of those can be deeply rooted to the Republican side and are quite susceptible to Republican outrage. Yet there are others who look T both Iraq and Afghanistan as disasters that should’ve been abandoned long ago, they will come to see Biden’s withdrawal as their veterans’ view it: long overdue and well executed under the circumstances.
In my experience with veterans, those who saw combat are more likely to have large numbers among their cohort who have drifted away from Republican orthodoxy and have greater respect for peacemakers. The veteran being interviewed here may be just such a fellow.
My father was RCMC - MD for 17 years and spent three of those years in Vietnam (1 year under the ICC and then two years under US command under a medical exchange secondment).
I remember watching an episode of 60 Minutes with him when I was in my teens. There was a story about Vietnam Vets leading a group lobbying Congress to work towards freeing (imagined) US POWs. At one point, one of the vets starts saying that the US would’ve won the war had it taken the matter seriously and my dad, as if actually in the room with the man, says “let me guess, you were a mechanic in the motor pool” and sure enough, the photos of him tinkering with a Jeep pops up on the screen, then another of him in front of a bay of ambulances, and so on.
I was astonished and had to ask, “how did you know?”
My dad responded “It was an educated guess. But combat veterans don’t say that kind of shit. Support personnel, navy types or airforce…sure. But never would you hear that shit from anyone who has seen the sharp end.”
What gets me is my Rep has a son who is an Army Ranger, and is currently serving, but apparently not in Iraq or Afghanistan, In fact during her first and second term it seemed like she always made reference to him serving, while also pointing out her Dad served in-had to be Korea- or her parents had her when they were old.
What gets me is she didn’t mention these service men when they died, just now. I realize that she irks me to no end, but for all her claimed reverence for the military she sure turns it on and off.
The only place I disagree is, Donnie does malignant very well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave some deeply self-satisfied thought to how messy the ending was gonna be.
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, Trump won a second term, pulled us out Afghanistan in May, killed many, many more people in the process and this Stenchfield guy is yelling at his guests for not praising the outcome of the Afghanistan withdrawal and blaming the libs for wanting to stay in a state of perpetual war forever.
I am blessedly ignorant of the ways of Newsmax, but I’m guessing this was a failure of vetting.
Perhaps they naively thought, “He’s a vet, so we don’t need to vet him.” It didn’t occur to anybody that someone could be a veteran and also be critical of Trump. So they put this guy on the air and got caught with their pants down.
My hunch is that if you make a habit of watching Newsmax in hopes of seeing lots more of this particular brand of ass-hattery, you’ll end up with a poor return on investment.
OTOH, if any ol’ ass-hat behavior will do, then you’ll probably make out fine.
