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My UK friend cut and pasted this from The Telegraph. It's subscription so no link.
Joe Biden has lost touch with reality, and that’s the way he likes it. The man who campaigned on empathy and a return to normality seems bizarrely disconnected from the American public and the wider world. He is quick to anger when challenged – and quicker still to take liberties with the facts.
The collapse of America’s position in Afghanistan has been mirrored by the disintegration of Biden’s administration in its first serious test. The “adults”, remember, were supposed to be back in charge, and America too was back in the room. Instead, America has abandoned its allies, and Biden turns his back on the American public each time he reels away from one of his shambolic press conference
My friend just sent me the rest of the article via cut and paste. I've edited it for length.
On Tuesday afternoon, Biden took to the teleprompter, called America’s shameful flight from Afghanistan an “extraordinary success”, and praised the “diplomats and intelligence professionals” that he had blamed last week for creating the mess in the first place.
The successes are all his, the strategic failures are someone else’s fault: the Afghans, the military, Donald Trump, even the British who were being exfiltrated when an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed thirteen Americans and dozens more Afghans last week.
Not for the first time in recent weeks, he is making it up. He said a Taliban takeover was not “inevitable”, until he said it was.
We now know that on 23 July, Biden told Ghani that “whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture” to the truth of the Taliban’s rapid advance on Kabul.
Ten days ago, Biden pledged that the evacuation would continue until every American had been extricated from Afghanistan. On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that one to two hundred Americans “remain in Afghanistan and want to leave”. By Tuesday, Biden was saying they had “some intention to leave” and that “we will make arrangements to get them out if they so choose”. The missing include two dozen high schoolers from Sacramento, California. Are we really to believe they have chosen life under the Taliban?
Biden is gaslighting the American people. He rolls out tired threats at ISIS-K – “we will not forgive, we will not forget” – but he’s really hoping that it’s early enough in his presidency for the voters to forgive his ineptitude, and forget his feeble performance by the time of the midterms in November 2022.
Meanwhile the Afghan disaster is following America home. When Biden travelled to Dover Airforce Base to receive the bodies of the Americans killed in the Kabul bombing, the cameras caught him checking his watch as the coffins came out of the C-135.
The reactions of the bereaved project an even worse picture. Not since the end of the Vietnam War have military families shown such open contempt for America’s commander-in-chief. Some of the family members who met with Biden at Dover accused him of “fake” sympathy and “total disregard” for their loss. One mother called him a “feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap”.
Senior Senate Democrats with a sharper appreciation of the domestic realities are preparing their exit strategies.
The reality is that Biden has been in high office for sixteen of the twenty years of the War on Terror. No one in this White House was more for it before he was against it. Even when he did develop misgivings about nation-building, Biden supported funding and arming the Afghan allies that he now denounces for “corruption and malfeasance”. The failures of empathy and honesty that we are now witnessing, and his rage at being called to account, are truthful reflections of Biden’s career as a paragon of institutional folly.
Why would our allies have any faith in Biden when over half of the American people have zero faith in him…. And more and more Americans are losing faith in him daily. Two of my most liberal family members, that voted for Biden now regret voting for him.
My UK friend cut and pasted this from The Telegraph. It's subscription so no link.
Joe Biden has lost touch with reality, and that’s the way he likes it. The man who campaigned on empathy and a return to normality seems bizarrely disconnected from the American public and the wider world. He is quick to anger when challenged – and quicker still to take liberties with the facts.
The collapse of America’s position in Afghanistan has been mirrored by the disintegration of Biden’s administration in its first serious test. The “adults”, remember, were supposed to be back in charge, and America too was back in the room. Instead, America has abandoned its allies, and Biden turns his back on the American public each time he reels away from one of his shambolic press conference
I remember all the “Adults are back in charge” rhetoric. The American media protects Biden, but the world media will not.
As in Vietnam, I see a POTUS who made the hard (and right) call.
The right call would have informing Great Britain and France, evacuating our citizens first, and getting the black hawks, planes, etc… out first…. Nobody believes we shouldn’t leave, it was the ignoring advice and not considering the consequences of how it was done, plus not taking calls from the prime minister of England for close to 30 hours.
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