When it’s a GOP Administration
When Democrats are the majority
Bring on the Cult of the Savvy, Democrats in disarray (or panic — Politico — of course).
Forget if it was the Lawrence O’Donnell or Brian Wilson (update: it was Wilson, update: Williams, damnit, what was I thinking? Thanks for noticing and pointing that out, Adrastos — at least I got it right further down) segment on MSNBC that mentioned “Democrat, sorry, Democratic, investigations of the ‘botched Biden’ response.”
Oh, and the endless grim litany of “yeah, but…” to ensure the message was, is, and will forever be Democrats stumble, while GOP daddies might err, but only on the side of maybe, possibly, being, a bit, I don’t know, aggressive, but only because, you know, sometime you gotta kick ass and name names, and What-The-Fuck-all?
Since Cassandra and Adrastos (won’t call him Boss, promise) said it better than I can, my .0002 cents is only that war actually is hell, and that’s why it shouldn’t be the first resort, regardless of how eager armchair generals are to open a great big can of whupass, provided there’s sufficient distance between their lard-asses and anything that might disturb their comfort.
The Afghanistan war was never going to end well.
The only other option was for it to never end.
As for the chaos, well…
It looks like the best-case scenario was Afghans allied with us were supposed to be flak-catchers for a few weeks or months which assumes a certain, I don’t know, underestimation (misunderestimation, to paraphrase George W.) of their basic intelligence if not common sense.
But, and to go back MSNBC, pretty much the official Democratic Party channel these days: a few semi-libruls, a former GOP congresscritter anchoring the morning feed, and a number of ex-GOP anti-Trumpers chatting it up with Rush Limbaugh fan Brian Williams (wow, the left really has a hell of a presence on cable TV!), anyway…
While the Afghanistan war end game is not at all something to crow about, the fact that they’ve “finally” (in the words of Richard Engel) managed to get some measure of order to the evacuation after — gasp, 5-6 days — reminded me, of how, in the pre-Twitter Stone (Blog?) Age, it took at least that long for a GOP administration to deal with the drowning of New Orleans.
And that was without the overt xenophobia, though, ahem, more than a few victims of the flood are likely as foreign to the MAGAs as Afghans.
Also, too, the then-Karl Rove variant of the Repugs simultaneously played the “let’s not point fingers” game while pointing fingers at — of course — Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco, with a pliant media more than willing to play along.
Meanwhile, corporate media’s latched on to “Biden’s bungled response” of, holy shit, almost a week, while forgetting that this administration took office after a lack of any effort at a smooth transition and an attempt to overturn the election via a riot
Oh, and deliberate undermining of basic public health measures to mitigate a once-in-a-century pandemic, not to mention a nihilistic GOP that’s abandoned small d democracy in favor of overt racist herrenvolk governance.
“On brand.”
Must be media speak for why do journalism when you can do teevee?
Maddow cried on air last night over the escape of a family from Afghanistan. I don’t mean to down her for crying – it was a human moment we see too little of in pre-packaged news programing.
But I had a couple thoughts watching her long opening segment about this family’s harrowing escape. One: the MSM that now sees the bankruptcy of the entire US project there studiously avoided saying the emperor had no clothes for two decades. Two: The horrors that likely await the people under the Taliban must be viewed through the prism of “compared to what?”, not the prism of comparison to a functioning, liberal society. The society that most of Afghanistan lived in for the last 20 years was far from that.
A couple of points:
1) Lawrence O’Donnell is one of the few on cable news who hasn’t lost their mind. He’s strongly supporting Biden for reasons similar to mine. Also, it’s Brian Williams, not Wilson.
2) With all due respect to Walt, the Maddow segment was manipulative and creepy to me. I’d heard about that interpreter and knew he’d gotten out. She milked it for drama. As to the on-air crying, it was real but she’s been melting down all year. Last night was probably it for me.
Maddow lost all credibility with me long ago, when she cut to a ninety second infomercial for the joys of General Dynamics living. I think may be rethinking her passes, not unlike it is suggested the rest of the mainstream multi-millionaire media are.
At some point the media is going to have to recognize their culpability …
I think she may be rethinking ~ stupid smart phone