If Biden had known the intelligence community estimate for how long the Afghan government would last was wildly wrong, they argue, he could have started a mass evacuation sooner. But they cannot explain precisely how an earlier mass evacuation would not have brought down the Afghan government even sooner. The Biden administration made specific errors.... Nevertheless, expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair — and cowardly. Reporters who have themselves been spun about the war’s progress might be more candid about what the administration is achieving despite the chaos. Ah well, it seems there’s no market for that message during a pile-on.
But the media had been protecting Biden for so long, so uncritically, and the media, including Rubin, piled on Trump for his entire presidency, whether things were looking chaotic or he was pushing back chaos.
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Rubin is insufferable...such a hack. She will write anything in support of the democrats.
Maybe that's her role, kind of like Juan Williams on Fox. You knew he was a liberal, but there was no way he was stupid enough to say half the things he did.
The biggest insult is maintaining the falsehood that she is 'conservative.'
Ha!
I don’t want to use overly complicated or technical language, but I think the precise diagnosis for Jennifer Rubin is “dumb as a box of rocks“.
For a long time she was tolerated by everyone as the overly moderate conservative voice at Washington Post. Yes she was kind of a squish, but at least she was able to get some sort of conservative viewpoint into that newspaper.
The final break with conservatives occurred during the Trump era, where she reversed several of her long held “positions” (I.e. moving the US embassy to Jerusalem) simply because they were adopted by Trump. Since then conservatives have had no time for her whatsoever. I can’t really speak for liberals, but I can’t imagine that they are overly impressed either with her 20 watt intellect. They probably found her to be something of a useful tool against Trump, but now that doesn’t matter.
Jumping to present day where she has embarked upon a reality-defying defense of Biden. She is apparently so enamored with Slo Joe that she is now protecting him when even his palace guard at CNN and NYT won’t.
If Biden had known the intelligence community estimate for how long the Afghan government would last was wildly wrong, they argue, he could have started a mass evacuation sooner. But they cannot explain precisely how an earlier mass evacuation would not have brought down the Afghan government even sooner.
Isn't the point that an earlier evacuation of US citizens instead of military means it wouldn't need to have been "mass" at all?
And, to facilitate that, the final evacuation of military personnel and material could have been extended and managed competently from defensive positions at Kabul Airport and Bargram Airbase.
Isn't it only the trapped US civilians that make it difficult for the US military to stand and fight at those airfields and determine the timing of their departure?
Maybe that's why Rubin is an easy target?
....cuz she writes propaganda??
She's not very bright is another reason.
Writer's aim for a demographic.
But they cannot explain precisely how an earlier mass evacuation would not have brought down the Afghan government even sooner.
I was just a Signal Puke, but the issue is who controls the city. A competent military leadership would have brought more troops into the country to patrol Kabul and the surrounding countryside, deploy armor and artillery to repel the Taliban advance in case of the collapse of the ANA, which was easily predictable. US intelligence was predicting that the ANA could hold out for 90 days. Did no one think to ask, if they are going to ultimately lose why would they risk their necks at all? Oh, and keep Bagram open so that air support can also be used to repel Taliban advances. Do all that and the Taliban might not of even tried to advance on the city. After all, the US and their allies are going to leave anyway, why should they risk their necks?
There's a lot of room between a flawless exit and what we saw.
The question is was there really a lot of chaos associated with Trump or what is that the media was telling us that there was a lot of chaos associated with Trump. I think that a great majority of the chaos that surrounded Trump was created by the media. They created so much that during the election the message to the people was "lets end the chaos." They were determined to destroy Trump and they did.
"Nevertheless, expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair — and cowardly." Common game-playing, presenting it as binary. We aren't talking about a "flawless exit". We are talking about certain specific egregious errors that are so huge that they boggle the mind.
Even the MSM doesn't know what to do with this one. Except for Jennifer Rubin, I guess.
It was a fault line. Reality and the media fantasy of Biden's performance could co-exist, but sooner or later the public was going to notice and there would be a huge quake that shakes the foundation of the MSM as reality and fantasy snap back into alignment for a while on the topic of A-stan.
Some journalists have come tumbling down if their fantasies were too far out. Biden is permanently damaged overseas, hurt at home on foreign policies and perhaps his domestic agenda is also at risk as the public notices the lies told by both Biden and the press on other topics. Those faults may rip as well.
If Biden had known the intelligence community estimate for how long the Afghan government would last was wildly wrong, they argue, he could have started a mass evacuation sooner.
That's not what Biden's critics are saying.
But it's so like the WAPO to knock down straw man arguments so their readers don't have to consider uncomfortable thoughts.
"Why so many people find Jennifer Rubin an easy target"
Well, because she's a lying hack who claims to be a "conservative" / "Republican" (just like Chuck!"
"The Biden administration made specific errors.... Nevertheless, expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair — and cowardly"
1: The Obama / Biden admin "surged" to Afghanistan. So Biden bears a lot of responsibility for he size of the problem
2: Multiple people have pointed out how the Biden* Administration's unforced errors (closing Bagram Airbase first, instead of last, for the most obvious example) made the situation far worse
3: Pulling out US civilians, while keeping the US Military out there working with the ANA, would most likely have slowed the collapse, and most certainly not have sped it up. Which anyone competent would have done, regardless of when they expected the collapse to be
Dear lefties: When you make excuses, you force us to once again list some of the many things the Biden* Admin screwed up here. Give it up. Just say "yes, it's a total Charlie Foxtrot, the Biden* Admin totally screwed this up from top to bottom. I'm embarrassed and ashamed" and leave it at that
The media continue to ignore America's Taliban: Antifa.
Rubin is a particularly vile partisan hack. Sell-out doesn't even begin.
Jen Rubin. I used to read her when she told me Mitt Romney walked on water..
She misses the point or tries to deflect by arguing a different line than Biden’s critics are offering. The problem is the fecklessness of the withdrawal. Biden and his generals look stupid and naive. We stood down before we started to evacuate our nationals and the folks who helped us. Why did we do that? Because our gaga commander in chief and his generals could not conceive that the Taliban would be difficult to deal with on the way out—they would just be glad we were leaving. WRONG! Islam has a long history of taking Western hostages and demanding ransoms—think the Barbary pirates, the Iranian invasion of the US Embassy, Bowe Bergdahl, Father Lawrence Jenco, etc. Read about the retreat from Kabul at the end of the First Afghan War in 1842. This was never going to be easy, and we had to have a strong hand to play.
Also, Biden has knocked over NATO and given China, Russia, and Pakistan free reign in Central Asia. The CCP don’t think we will do much to save Taiwan. The English news sources, including the BBC, have been vicious about Biden’s manifest incompetence, and sources in the UK government have said they would have to rethink their entire foreign policy after this blunder by the Biden administration and the US military.
I have made no secret of my longstanding contempt for Biden, but he has exceeded expectations here. By defending him, Rubin has proved she is a ninny.
When it comes to Jennifer Rubin, one never has to post an argument. You simply need to let her write or say her own words, and walk away. The picture is complete.
I will say that, had I known getting a lifelong job on the payroll of major media was so easy, I would have certainly gone for that journalism degree instead.
By employing a politically conservative columnist like Jennifer Rubin, The New York Times is demonstrating that it is non-partisan.
Rubin ignores Trump’s pla for withdrawal - Biden could have followed it. Rubin could publish the specific provisions of it. But her mission is to ignore anything good Trump did and to obfuscate Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal results.
But they cannot explain precisely how an earlier mass evacuation would not have brought down the Afghan government even sooner.
This is such a transparently bad-faith bit of goal shifting. The point people are making re earlier mass evacuation isn't that the Afghan government would have been more durable. It's that the evacuation could (in theory) have been sequenced in a more orderly fashion. Maybe that's beyond the organisational capabilities of the professionals who staff modern American civil service, and maybe civilians wouldn't have agreed to evacuate until the government had already fallen to the Taliban. But both of these are propositions that need argument, not mere assertion.
In contrast, there's plausible explanations for a smoother early evacuation or a slightly more durable government if the evacuation of combat troops were postponed to October, as the Afghan government had apparently requested. Though in the latter case, the enemy might have had their own conflicting plans.
Add a Tag for "Pirandello."
Rubin hasn’t looked well for many years now…
Fruit… (bass guitar notes)… Salad… hunhhh!!!
Because she is a lying propagandist that pretends to be conservative like Chuck, but is anything BUT. It is hilarious to read her articles and how idiotic and dumb she thinks people are that would believe her drivel. Seriously. Anybody with a brain would have figured out that withdrawing from Afghanistan, leaving Americans behind, after closing Bagram AF Base is nuts. But not Jen. She thinks it is wonderful.
Shorter Jennifer Rubin: C'mon man. It's been four five days. I wanna talk about something else...
Bonchie: Prediction-
Talking Points will soon revert to Biden ass-covering.
"One of the oddest things about the last couple of weeks has been the realization by some in the news media that they are supposed to actually be journalists. After eight months of knee bending to the Biden administration, the chaos and death following the Afghanistan withdrawal had finally encouraged them to actually do, you know, their jobs. CNN, of all places, had one of the best on the ground reporters in Clarissa Ward directly countering the White House’s false narrative.
But as I warned earlier this morning, with the pullout of those journalists giving direct reports (Ward evacuated over the weekend), the administration has newfound room to obfuscate, and it’s just a matter of time before the media get on board.
Well, I didn’t have to wait long. White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain, who spent the last week retweeting Joy Reid and Jennifer Rubin, has sent out the latest talking points. And like clockwork, they are being repeated by the usual suspects."
usher in : Jen Rubin(D) - Biden apologist extraordinaire
I heard reports from journalists on the ground that the Taliban hare executing Afghan police chiefs after they surrender, and killing babies.
MOre
"Klain’s brag, repeated by Biden stenographer John Harwood, completely absconds from the fact that this disaster was preventable. You don’t get to set the house on fire, call the firefighters, and then brag about how good they are at putting the fire out. Biden’s senile and incoherent decision-making led to this situation, which now entails thousands of trapped Americans who can’t even get to the airport to evacuate."
Jen Rubin to the rescue!
This is another in the vein of "how could it not end this way" which is maddening. For one, this has not ended at all. We are in the thick of it, no more so than the poor Americans trapped and hoping their government comes through.
Yet Rubin who showed such imagination when it came to projecting crimes onto Trump, cannot see any way out except "mass evacuation." How lame. For one she could fall back on her need to warn how Trump was not working well with our allies. Perhaps she could ask herself how well Biden is doing with our closest ally Great Britain! Or the French or Germans. They all have strong opinions and they all seem to grasp that this is an ongoing catastrophe, still in need of strong leadership.
Which sadly, is not evident in word or deed at this time. Jennifer Rubin epitomizes not only journ-o-lism's sad decline in the Trump Era but the horrible trend of opinion about events replacing reporting about events. Shouldn't we suss out the facts first, ascertain the WHAT WHERE WHEN of it all, and then decide if the consensus agrees with Easy Target Rubin about the goddamn tone of the news?
"The Biden administration made specific errors.... Nevertheless, expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair — and cowardly."
Errors were made.
I know of no one who expected a flawless exit. In fact, Biden badly missed the much lower bar of a competent exit. Biden replaced order and safety with chaos and danger.
Apparently Rubin thinks Biden simply continued her undefined "quagmire" into the exit.
And, of course, having modest expectations for the exit is cowardly while dodging blame and lying about what happened is somehow brave and noble.
But they cannot explain precisely how an earlier mass evacuation would not have brought down the Afghan government even sooner.
Protip NOT abandoning Bagram would be a start
As opposed to Abandoning Bagram AT the start
SO on brand! Jennifer Rubin DRAGGED for claiming ‘ignorant public’ is to blame for being too stupid to understand Biden’s #Afghanistan strategy
Rubin is falsely claiming that conservatives are blaming the military. How pathetic and insulting. LIES.
No - Everyone with a functioning heartbeat places the blame on Biden and his inept generals.
"expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair"
OK, glad I never expected that, otherwise Jennifer Rubin would consider me cowardly.
But is a basically competent exit so much to ask? I'm hearing lots of people who are not experts in logistics, nor military strategy, asking questions that are actually quite sound - and I'm left wondering, Did the people in charge not ask these questions? Or did they, more likely, wave them away? They didn't like the answers, so they "estimated" that these problems wouldn't be problems.
23 Americans who live and work in Kabul say the government is going to collapse very quickly after we leave? No problem - the consensus of the intelligence community is that they're wrong. Now let's not argue and bicker over who killed who.
Tony Blair slams Biden’s ‘imbecilic’ Afghanistan policy
What does white-wash for Biden Rubin have to say about that?
Rubin is a clown.
I guess Rubin has decided to fellate Biden some more, even with her most recent fellating of Cuomo blowing up in her face.
U.K. Parliament Holds Joe Biden In Contempt: “Catastrophic, Shameful” –
U.S. Media ignore.
Temujin said..."I will say that, had I known getting a lifelong job on the payroll of major media was so easy, I would have certainly gone for that journalism degree instead."
Oh, what a delight that alternate reality of you would have been, Temujin!!
Even Jennifer Rubin is smart enough to understand that the blindingly obvious alternative to first withdrawing the military from Afghanistan and then evacuating civilians is to evacuate the civilians first and then withdraw the military. But she has to scramble to prop up a hastily-stuffed strawman to try to cover for the massive failure of the man she supported for President, so you get a column like that one.
It is, of course, obvious that if the military is still deployed during the civilian evacuation, propping up the Afghan government, the Afghan government doesn't fall during the civilian evacuation, especially since we've got a peace agreement with the Taliban.
And, IMO, the only morally-legitimate excuse for missing the May 1st withdrawal date specified in our agreement with the Taliban would have been to provide cover for evacuating civilians and allied military forces. The current situation clearly shows that Biden violated the US's commitment while failing to use the extra time to achieve anything worthwhile. It was a double-barreled shotgun blast to American credibility.
"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" "I think we'll let the head of Lincoln's protective detail speak through his PR person's lawyer on deep background." "Well, I think we all know that an assassination is going lead to a certain amount of chaos. But really everything went well that evening for everyone except for just one person, one small percentage of all the people there. And if we look at the big picture we can even say that, as a whole, the evening was quite safe and pleasant even for the President except for a few minutes at the end. Seconds really, since he never recovered consciousness. This is what we need to focus on, the big picture, and not on recriminations and finger pointing."
I found her sycophancy insufferable even when she was writing columns in support of politicians that I too supported. She was so over the top that it seemed she wasn't doing any thinking.
"The Biden administration made specific errors.... Nevertheless, expecting a flawless exit from a quagmire one perpetuated over two decades is unfair — and cowardly."
I'd have settled for an exit that didn't involve people parts in wheel wells and thousands of Americans at the mercy of heavily armed goat herders. According to Jen, that's a bridge too far.
I saw a clip the other day of Bill O'Reilly taking down Rubin in 2016. First time I'd ever heard her speak.
I thought of Didi Conn...with a lobotomy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jksrQ0Ubg7Q
If Maureen Dowd was bitter and dumber.
Jen is simply the LLR of the New York Times.
She has always been a leftist on every issue, she just pretended to be somewhat less lefty-crazy than others in order to solidify her standing as the "conservative" at the Washington Post in order to always enable the Post to claim they offered both the "far left" and merely "left" take on current events.
She was the parallel to David Brooks at the NYT.
Who can forget all those Brooks and Mark Shields "discussions"/"debates" (play acting) on PBS where Brooks and Shields would always battle to see which one could assume the farthest left position on every single issue?
JaimeRoberto - good point.
Her writing reeks of "they paid me big bucks to say this crap."
Re: Can of Cheese:
I saw the Telegraph headline, but I'm not a subscriber . . . other news reports indicate that MPs from all sides of the political spectrum expressed contempt for Biden, but I haven't seen anything indicating they exercised contempt powers (which wouldn't seem to be justified against Biden here) or even that they voted to censure or anything like that. I think the repetition of Parliament holding Biden in contempt is more misleading than anything else.
Biden screwed the pooch, and if you think Biden could have done anything other than screw the pooch, you are a coward.
And if you think Jennifer Rubin's theatrics over the last 10 years are over the top, just wait until the Team Dementia cough up a report on COVID origins that completely protects the ChiComs and attacks republicans.
The ChiComs have Dementia Joe over the barrel with all the drugs and underage Chinese girls given to Hunter Biden (10% for the Big Guy!) so I hope no one had any delusions about ChiCom Joe holding the ChiComs to any account for what they unleashed (with lots of Fauci Dollars and Fauci support through the NIH grants), on the entire planet.
And while we are on about "unhinged behavior", we had the same problem in Iraq with ISIS when the obambi/Biden team unleashed ISIS on the west and "accidentally" gave them hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment.....followed by obambi/Biden giving billions in cash to Mad Mullahs of Iran...Followed by Dementia boy as President giving even more billions to the Iranians.....followed by "accidentally" allowing hundreds of millions of US equipment to be abandoned (along with billions in cash) to the Taliban.
You know, after awhile, it begins to look like its not really a series of "accidents" anymore.....
I started reading the WaPo daily only a few years ago, and I find Rubin a puzzlement. It is difficult to imagine her ever having been a Republican. But she gets deference as a "conservative voice." She's not.
The weird thing is that WaPo actually has a number of regular columnists who are some flavor of conservative. Off the top of my head: George Will, Marc Thiessen, Henry Olsen, Hugh Hewitt, Megan McArdle, Gary Abernathy. Judging by the comments, these writers are there for the sole purpose of letting the more rabid readers shake their froth-flecked jowls every morning, but they are, in fact, there.
But what do you do with readers like that? Will, the other day, wrote a perfectly lucid, unobjectionable column about "transnational repression" -- you know, governments kidnapping their own exiled citizens and incarcerating or assassinating them, as we've seen recently wrt Belarus -- and the comments were all about how this celebrated NeverTrumper wasn't writing about Biden Is Great instead. Oh, and he's too old, older even than the CiC, though not by all that much. (If he hadn't written an 80th birthday column, I doubt most of these people would have a clue as to Will's age.) And he uses big words, and even spells them correctly. Ye gods!
But Will and McArdle get the least of it; the real spittle goes to the other four. I wonder what brand of non-running ink the WaPo uses to prevent their readers' clothes from being soiled after a good morning read-through. Still, better them than the NYT, whose quasi-conservatives are limited to Douthat and (occasionally) Stephens. Mind you, I like Douthat. But I can't help wondering when he's due to decamp for Substack like Bari Weiss.
Oddly, I find myself slightly on Rubin's side, in that I don't blame Biden for what's happening. I don't know that it would have been different under Trump. I blame the Taliban first and foremost. They are evil, the worst kind of evil, religiously motivated evil. Beyond that I think US military leaders made a classic mistake of underestimating an enemy. I also question the wisdom of withdrawing the troops at all, even though it's long been in the works. It's not like there aren't US troops all over the world, keeping the peace. Why not maintain some in Afghanistan to maintain a small bubble of freedom there? But that's hindsight, which is always easy.
what is the significance and effect of ...
U.K. Parliament Holds Joe Biden In Contempt: “Catastrophic, Shameful” –
does it mean - Biden does not get to visit the Queen? again?
You should read the Wikipedia entry for Rubin. It's not flattering.
And if she was ever politically conservative, she renounced it several years ago.
The Post always keeps a couple of opinion writers on the staff who just serve to piss people off. She's the Jewish female they've chosen.
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