How many times has Joe Biden ranted at us about why he is right on Afghanistan? I’ve lost track, but I think this at least the fifth “official” rant.

But this one was the worst yet and you could feel it. He was just so angry. He’s not angry at the Taliban. He’s not angry at his own failures or those of his people. He’s angry at the people left behind. And, he’s angry at you. He’s angry at you for not simply accepting what an “extraordinary success” this all was.

He keeps screaming about ending the war, a point that no one is even contesting or really talking about – only about his incompetent handling of it – which he doesn’t want to deal with, so he keeps trying to switch the focus. He’s done this four times and still doesn’t realize that no one is buying this tact. What’s that they say about insanity is doing the same thing but expecting a different result?

But he also just kept saying things that made no sense or that were demonstrably untrue.

Biden says he was warning people to get out since March or April. But then he was also saying that he himself couldn’t see the country falling, that “no one” could, so he can’t be blamed for not seeing it. So which is it? In July, of course, he claimed that he hadn’t been told the country might fall. That was a lie, as we found out later, as he was told in June that it was a possibility. We’ve been talking about the possibility since at least May.

He spoke about the Trump May 1 deadline – yelling that the choice was between that and surging far more troops in for more war which no one was talking about. But he himself broke that deadline in April, postponing leaving for four months. So he himself proved that was nonsense. Plus, Trump had a lot of conditions in the deal that the Taliban broke, but Biden didn’t hold them to the deal, which would have kept them in check.

Biden disputes suggestion Americans should have been evacuated before he abandoned U.S. bases in Afghanistan: “I respectfully disagree” pic.twitter.com/17gNs5tjPv

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 31, 2021

He says he disagrees with people who say he should have started sooner. Now, leave aside for the moment that his people were telling us in July they were working on getting interpreters out. So they were claiming in July that they were doing what he says now they couldn’t. But he says now – imagine if they brought in thousands of troops to get out people then, in the middle of a civil war? I don’t know Joe, was it better to bring in the thousands after you pulled out all the troops after they took complete control and we were at their mercy because of you?

But the whole point of doing it earlier was so that you didn’t have to do it all at once, so that you could have done it over months, slowly and carefully, fully vetting everyone. So you wouldn’t need “thousands of troops.” Plus, Biden pulled the remaining 2500 troops out, only to have to put 6000 back in. So he himself was “surging” in far more troops than he took out. Everything he claimed he was doing to reduce our involvement, only increased the risk and danger to our people and our Afghan allies.

Biden kept trying to preach at us, convinced if he just kept yelling at we ignorant peasants even louder than the four times he’d already said it – we would be convinced of his argument that it was just cool to pull out the military without first pulling out the citizens or the allies with no apparent plan. Biden even made some bizarre comment about Yemen, that I have no idea what it means.

Biden said:

“Remember why we went to Afghanistan in the first place? Because we were attacked by Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in 2001 and they were based in Afghanistan.

“I respectfully suggest you ask yourself this question: if we had been attacked on September 11th 2001 from Yemen instead of Afghanistan – would we have ever gone to war in Afghanistan?”

Huh? What does that even mean? No, if he had been attacked from Yemen and they were harboring terrorists, we would have gone to Yemen. Why would we go to Afghanistan? What a bizarre question.

But the thing that was striking about this all was it wasn’t about the dead. It wasn’t about the people left. In some measure, it even wasn’t about ending the war. It was, to Joe Biden, about proving Joe Biden right about this issue.

There were a lot of sick things in it, but the thing that was sociopathic about it all was using his own dead son’s name/death for emotional blackmail. Some people may not like that I say that, but that’s what it is. He’s done that repeatedly in his rants on Afghanistan. He did it again in Tuesday’s speech, and he did it during his Dover meetings with the families who lost their sons and daughters in Kabul. So, for the record, Joe Biden’s son Beau didn’t die in Afghanistan. He died of cancer. He had previously served in Iraq. The families felt he talked more about his own son than theirs. We see him throw Beau Biden again into this speech. He acts like he was a Gold Star father, and it’s not the same thing. The families know that and they were offended that he made it about himself and not about their loved ones.

But more than that, it’s a cynical use of his son as a defense to being criticized, to make it not about facts, but about his pain, not even about the son. To me, that’s sick and even disrespectful to his own son, to use Beau’s death in that way.