Even if he does have a little ear-bud feeding him words to say from a nearby room, Joe Biden doesn’t seem to know or remember quite a few things these days. Like the names of people standing right next to him or what you call that immense, five-sided building over in Virginia, you know, where all those military people are.
But one thing Joe Biden is absolutely certain and absolutely adamant about, when he can express a coherent thought, is that he must get all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan this week — because his mouthy predecessor signed an agreement with the Taliban.
Biden is equally certain that the Aug. 31 pullout deadline, which he himself set, and all the shocking deadly chaos in Kabul involving thousands of terrified people the last few weeks is due to that same agreement Trump’s minions signed early last year with the Taliban or, as Biden calls those terrorists, the Tollybahn.
According to Biden, he is bound on this matter by these most likely ill-advised obligations made by Donald Trump. So, this immense, messy mass of humanity visible from space around the airport in Kabul belongs to Trump, too.
We try to be clear, accurate, and to the point here at RedState. So, I will say as politely as possible that Biden’s assertions are an eight-letter, barnyard epithet describing what male cattle do to relieve themselves.
To put it another way, Biden’s claim is pure crap designed for him to dodge the blame for arguably the worst American government foul-up at least since the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
Joe Biden is infamous for making stuff up. He was atop his law school class, as you know. He got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela. He had one summer career as a lifeguard — bravely ending with a local bully — and a later career driving 18-wheelers cross-country.
A few weeks ago Biden said a no helicopter rescues off the Kabul embassy and a Taliban takeover was highly unlikely, which he reportedly had been warned was untrue. Now, he says draw-down chaos was inevitable, not his fault.
Biden wants to twist the narrative tale away from the deadly mess he presides over, after saying it would not happen to an admirable evacuation effort that need not have happened if Biden had not hastily withdrawn the troops before civilians.
Biden is experienced in narrative twists. He famously stole a British politician’s speeches years ago and spoke them as his own. He says he never talked with son Hunter about his murky foreign business deals, despite smiley photos of him with those people in the vice president’s office.
My RedState colleagues have documented scores of other “stretchers,” as Mark Twain called them, for example here. And then there’zzzz this.
With rare exceptions, presidents are not obligated to keep the obligations of their predecessors. That’s kinda the point of changing presidents.
Remember Barack Obama’s big to-do about finally closing the Guantanamo prison he said shamed the U.S. globally? First thing in office, Obama signed an executive order to shutter the place. Then he didn’t feel obligated to follow through on his own policy.
Trying to suck up to Russian leaders, Obama canceled the defensive missile systems that George W. Bush negotiated in Eastern Europe. Trump abandoned Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement and negotiated a new one.
Trump didn’t feel obligated to stay in the Paris climate accord. Then, Biden didn’t feel obligated to stay out of the Paris climate accord. Trump didn’t feel obligated to stay in the flimsy Obama-Biden nuclear pact with Iran. Biden says he wants another one.
As you may have noticed, foreign policy talk is cheap among U.S. pols, who know Americans only care about foreign news if there’s a lot of explosions on TV.
Trump had the southern border crisis with Mexico calmed down. Biden’s ineptness turned all that into new chaos, with hundreds of thousands of illegals streaming into the country — free of tracking or legal repercussions.
With deregulation and new drilling leases, Trump constructed a successful, energy independence drive, which had the U.S. for the first time exporting surplus energy. Biden canceled much of that because, green.
The Democrat endorsed Vladimir Putin’s huge undersea gas pipeline, which Trump opposed because it threatened U.S. LNG sales to Western Europe. Biden also killed the Keystone pipeline from Canada, which Trump had approved.
Then Biden appealed to OPEC nations to boost oil production so he could buy more. They said No.
Biden also wants to negate the Trump tax cuts that drove the economy up and unemployment down, historically down among blacks and Hispanics. The Democrat president has trillions of new spending in mind, and who cares about his promise not to take more income from middle-class families?
Trump, the sole modern president not to get the U.S. into new foreign military adventures, had planned to get all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by May 1 — before the annual fighting season got going in a fractious tribal land where civil wars are a national pastime.
Biden claims he was bound by Trump’s draw-down agreement with the Taliban. But on his own, Biden inexplicably changed the pullout date into the peak fighting season. That’s when Taliban forces would be on offense and Kabul government troops would be leaderless, sitting ducks without American and contract mentors, and U.S. air cover.
Trump’s May 1 date was set in an understanding with the Taliban signed in early 2020, without any participation by the central government. The document “required” the Taliban to stop attacking U.S. and allied forces and to immediately enter talks with government officials on jointly governing.
Those talks never got started.
There’s a revealing element to these events that Biden doesn’t bother to mention and here’s why: The failure of those Kabul-Taliban talks could have allowed the U.S. to walk away from the agreement, keep troops in-country, or even increase them.
The fact that neither Trump nor Biden walked away shows the document for what it really was: Mere cover for getting out of dangerous Dodge City. Like most Americans, Presidents No. 45 and 46 simply wanted free of the 20-year-long conflict. The Taliban, which is never accountable to anyone like voters and appears to have an unlimited supply of willing martyr warriors, figured that out long ago.
U.S. intelligence says it warned the administration. But apparently neither Biden nor his crack foreign policy team foresaw the quick collapse of Afghan morale and fighting will that handed province after province to Taliban forces.
The key to this collapse was the unannounced abandonment of Bagram Air Base on Biden’s orders weeks before the official pullout date. When Afghans arrived the next morning, the sprawling former military headquarters was empty, a pretty clear signal from Mr. Empathy that “Guys, you’re on your own now.”
Back home now, the Biden mission is to focus Americans on the welcome end of the endless war and all the people saved. Forget about the needless, catastrophic way it ended, damaged United States’ world standing, and invited troublemakers to take advantage of a weak Biden.
Which brings us back to what that bull deposited in the barnyard.
