‘There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy,’ Biden said last month.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we decry the Biden administration and its enablers’ obfuscations among more media misses.
Biden’s Cloudy Crystal Ball
Just 39 days ago, President Biden claimed that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable. On Sunday, after a weeklong Blitz, the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country as Taliban militants entered the capital city of Kabul, signaling the collapse of the government.
As NR’s Charlie Cooke noted, on July 8 Biden argued that “the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.”
Biden argued then that Afghans “clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place. The question is: Will they generate the kind of cohesion to do it? It’s not a question of whether they have the capacity. They have the capacity. They have the forces. They have the equipment. The question is: Will they do it?”
When asked by a reporter if he “sees any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam” Biden interrupted to say, “None whatsoever. Zero.”
“What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken,” the president said last month. “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
On Sunday, the U.S. embassy in Kabul was evacuated. On Monday, thousands of Afghans flooded the tarmac of Kabul’s international airport, desperate to escape the Taliban. Some were so frantic that they grabbed onto an American military jet as it took off and fell to their deaths.
A quick fact check from NR editor Rich Lowry:
For those keeping track
Biden is the wise foreign-policy hand FALSE
The Biden team is pragmatic and highly competent FALSE
Biden is restoring U.S. leadership FALSE
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) August 16, 2021
Still, some have taken the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan and used it as anti-Trump fodder.
In a tweet on Sunday, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough shared a quote from Trump’s time in office:
“The relationship is very good that I have with the mullah. We had a good long conversation today and, you know, they want to cease the violence. They’d like to cease violence also.”
~Trump on his claim the Taliban is against violence https://t.co/Y2aljvT9mA— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) August 15, 2021
The former president’s posture vis-à-vis Afghanistan is surely worthy of retrospective criticism, but the decision to move forward with withdrawal, and to do so like this — with Afghan civilians falling from American cargo planes as Kabul falls to the Taliban — is entirely on the White House’s current occupant.
The Enablers Do Their Worst
While President Biden is the one who bears responsibility for the ill-thought-through withdrawal with devastating humanitarian and geopolitical consequences — China is already touting it as evidence that the U.S. would allow Taiwan to suffer a similar fate without taking action — he has boosters in the media looking to pin the carnage in progress and to come on someone, anyone else.
Take Tom Nichols, who argues in the Atlantic that it is not the president of the United States who is at fault, but you. Stupid, silly, flag-waving, Lee Greenwood–singing you.
“After the worst attack on U.S. soil, Americans had no real interest in adult conversation about the reality of anti-terrorist operations in so harsh an environment as Afghanistan (which might have entailed a presence there long beyond 20 years), nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan (which would mean a lot more than a few elections) was worth the cost and effort,” he writes, attacking Americans for their “cheap patriotism” in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks that killed 3,000 of their countrymen.
Biden, on the other hand, “was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president.” Nichols doesn’t explain why — the important thing is to remember that Biden and Nichols are right, and they’re both a whole lot smarter than you.
If Nichols is going to chide “Americans” with jobs wholly unrelated to politics for not understanding the intricacies of anti-terrorism strategy, one might expect him to demonstrate some himself.
A few years ago, he seemed alarmed by — not resigned to —withdrawal as an option. What changed?
I had an email from a colleague not an hour ago who said: "Afghanistan is next. Wait for it." https://t.co/Rk4K8wwxi7
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 21, 2018
Headline Fail of the Week
This week’s dishonor goes to NBC News Chicago: “203 Lollapalooza Attendees Later Tested Positive for COVID, Chicago’s Top Doctor Says.” The headline fails to provide the context that upwards of 385,000 people attended at least one day of the four-day festival.
Yet 14 days past the beginning of the festival, Dr. Allison Arwady — the aforementioned “top doctor” — said herself that “there have been no unexpected findings at this point and NO evidence at this point of super-spreader event or substantial impact to Chicago’s COVID-19 epidemiology.”
Media Misses
-Political pundit Matthew Dowd last week exhibited signs of what we have dubbed “DeSantis Derangement Disorder” — with a twist! After New York governor Andrew Cuomo resigned following an investigation by the state AG that revealed he had sexually harassed 11 women, Dowd wrote in a tweet, “what gov. Cuomo did was awful and resigning was appropriate, but what governors abbott of Texas and desantis of Florida have done/are doing is far worse: harming democracy, worsening a public health crisis, stirring up hatred of others. Both should immediately resign.”
-Dave Wasserman, U.S. House editor of the Cook Political Report, called out Mother Jones last week after it published an article titled, “GOP Could Retake the House in 2022 Just by Gerrymandering Four Southern States.”
Wasserman tweeted, “Reminder: if you write 2,500+ words about how GOP could net 11-16 House seats by gerrymandering TX, FL, GA, NC (unlikely) without *once* mentioning Dem prospects of gerrymandering NY, IL, MD…you’re not covering redistricting objectively or accurately.”
-The Daily Beast came under fire for calling Israeli soldiers “genocidal” in a hit piece about the new Jeopardy host Mayim Bialik.
“Speaking of gods and shady behavior, Bialik loudly proclaimed her donation toward bulletproof vests for the genocidal Israeli Defense Forces back in 2014 just out of ‘a need to do something.’ After facing backlash, she quieted for a time until May of this year, where she self-identified as a ‘liberal Zionist’ who, like many other celebrities, spouted bothsidesism,” Reporter Tirhakah Love wrote.
Love later doubled down on his criticism of Israel, defining Israel in a tweet as “a faux ethno-religious liberation movement that is staunchly imperialistic as it’s an extension of british colonialism and an articulation of white supremacy.”
-MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid (again) drew criticism over the weekend for likening the religious Right in the U.S. to the Taliban. “A true cautionary tale for the U.S., which has our own far religious right dreaming of a theocracy that would impose a particular brand of Christianity, drive women from the workforce and solely into childbirth, and control all politics,” she tweeted.