Let’s say you know someone in an unhappy marriage. And maybe you’re even sympathetic to his grievances, about which he never stops talking. For years, he has regaled you with his plan to dissolve that bond as amicably as possible, and you had become convinced that such an outcome was probably for the best. But when the time came to act, he left his family broken, indebted, bitter over their abandonment, and a source of constant concern to the community your friend left behind. Would you defend that person’s actions by insisting that, at the very least, he “had the moral courage to make a decision”? Probably not, insofar as the moral content of that “decision” is indefensible. But that is the last redoubt available to the few Democrats still willing to mortgage their credibility by defending Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“Joe Biden had the moral courage to make a decision that previous presidents had refused to make because of some cost bias and groupthink,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss (D., Mass.) in a Monday morning interview on CNN. “That war had no political endgame,” he continued. “The national government in Kabul had no agenda and no capacity to build a nation, and so Americans were left holding the bag.”
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