Meet The Press host Chuck Todd used the most odious right-wing meme to attack President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Traitor Trump negotiated a deal with Taliban in 2020 that put the United States in the position that we're in, so President Biden chose to rip off the Afghanistan bandage, while owning the consequences.
It was never going to be pretty, unfortunately. But the Beltway media has an obsession for US dominance and when the pictures ("optics") don't look good - they pounce.
“You’ve got to ask: the orderly part of this, what went wrong?” Todd mused.
Then he switched on his inner Giuliani and went right to Biden's mental capabilities.
"Joe Biden’s greatest strength against Donald Trump in the campaign was the idea that he has been around the block, he knows what he’s doing, we’re facing this crisis with COVID, we need some basic competency back in government, no more chaos. He’s lost the competency high-marks he was getting at one time, and that’s tough to get back." Todd said with a straight face.
The idea that Trump was not competent is not an idea but an actual fact.
Politicians can make the wrong decision or the right decision or a decision somewhere in between, but when a former president refuses to read any sort of briefing, on intelligence or otherwise, and and makes domestic and foreign policy decisions based on fifty year-old ideas from Roger Stone? That is not competency. No president has soiled the image of a competent president like Trump, who was less competent than any president ever to hold office.
The press was desperately waiting for the chance to prove that their criticism of Trump didn’t come from being in the tank for the Democrats. Any Democrat would face that at some point. This issue is perfect because it tickles the national security lizard brain in ways that go way, way back in our history.
Biden decided to rip the band-aid off this long festering wound and it’s very bad. I’m sure they could have done it more efficiently than this, which is chaotic and horrible. But I am very skeptical that this would go well in any case. It’s clear that the Taliban was going to take over very quickly — in fact, we knew that when the Trump administration negotiated directly with the Taliban on the timeline for withdrawal. I can’t imagine that anyone believed otherwise. But the media is pretending that the Americans could have somehow made all this neat and tidy with an orderly withdrawal — without triggering violence between US troops and an escalation — wash, rinse, repeat.
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By the way, where was the press on this story over the last few months/years? For all their hand-wringing about what’s happening there, I don’t recall many attempts to prepare the public for any of it, do you?
What Chuck Todd did there was despicable. Also predictable.
