but you could get it from the white house, which is where you seem to receive your talking points from.
Wouldn't take a single question. His supporters are taking a beating and Joe can't stand up for himself.
I agree that they're both way too old. It'll be a failure of leadership if the two candidates running for president will be damn near 80 years old as literal symbols of an aging, declining democracy. It seems like there are some estimates of 10,000-15,000 American citizens in Afghanistan with 2,500 evacuated so far. About 48,000 people have been airlifted out since August 14, 23% of whom were rescued in 12 hours on Monday which suggests a quickening pace. Reports suggest that there were 6,500 people still waiting at the airport as of Tuesday morning. It's a human tragedy enabled by the Biden Administration not planning accordingly on the ground and not having proper intelligence that the Afghan government would collapse so suddenly. However, I am not sold that this will be a lingering political issue into 2022 and 2024 because two-thirds of Americans were in favoring of leaving Afghanistan entirely earlier in 2021. We're now in the morass of arguing counterfactuals: what would Trump have done, if he'd won reelection, by his May 31 deadline? What would've been different had Biden not drawn such a hard line in the sand? What would've happened if the Afghan army had fought? None of it is provable and none of it addresses the core unpopularity of our two-decade war in Afghanistan. The issue was so politically irrelevant before August 14 that the major news networks only devoted an average of 24 minutes per year to the topic since 2016. We're in agreement that the evacuation of people from Afghanistan was handled poorly by Biden. I just don't feel confident enough, especially without knowing how wrong military and intelligence reports were about the stability of the Afghan government and army, to cast judgment on what Biden's decision-making process was like. He gets a huge black mark on his legacy if he knew that the country would collapse in a matter of weeks and still didn't plan accordingly. If his sources of information were this wrong then the black mark extends across four presidential administrations and cost thousands of lives without a clear justification over 20 years.
If only this person had once been in a position of power to understand how the refugee vetting process worked! It's a shame he's as dumb as the rest of us.
I'm surprised there's that many of them. What are they doing there, and why were we waiting to the last minute to get them out?
The number was surprising to me, too. I think they likely didn't anticipate the government collapsing as fast as it did. It's like people who are slow to evacuate from a hurricane: you know the situation is dangerous, there are a lot of unknowns, but the storm hits faster than you think. The collapse of the Afghan government and army was the accelerant to this whole debacle.
they buried the lede. On Sunday night, Mr. Zeller said, veterans and contacts in Afghanistan organized an operation to bring to the airport some 500 S.I.V. holders who were considered at high risk of Taliban reprisals. They were able to get the Afghans inside the airport, he said, but were turned back at what he described as a State Department checkpoint. @SamFisher Taliban Reject Extended Deadline as U.S. Races to Finish Evacuation - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
