Now that the Afghan war effort has gone down the drain, leaving only a twenty-one-year-old bathtub ring of defeat and great soapy bubbles of human misery, many much more thoughtful thinkers than I have advanced solid theories as to why the effort was doomed from the start. Right here, our theory is that an insouciant young President from Texas thought that he could win wars like his dad did. Coming from a baseball background, Bush Jr. knew that the ability to play that game was often passed down from father to son, and he thought he could step up to the Middle Eastern* plate and belt a few out of the park like Bush Sr. had in Kuwait, just on the basis of his genes.
But settling scores over there is not quite as easy as laying down a bunt, as twenty years and four Presidents have noticed. But blaming the entire fiasco on Biden is as easy as paying 14 bucks for a beer at the ballpark.
It’s woke culture and critical race theory that cost us the chance at victory in Afghanistan, say Tucker Carlson and Tom Cotton, among others. Since Biden came into office, the US military has been thinking too much about transgender rights and the history of racial justice in the US to shoot straight. Yes, Republicans are saying that Biden inspired the average foot soldier to start thinking, “Should I really call in that air strike? Those people who are shelling us could be LGBTQ’s.”
The right is unanimous that we can’t win wars and know history at the same time, and you know what they’d rather do. Even the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief called for Biden’s resignation after the fall of Kabul. He did it without calling for his own re-instatement, either, which goes to show how sincere he was, which is as sincere as Trump gets, which is to say, not even within missile range of actual honesty.
Trump didn’t mention that it was him who railed against “endless wars,” drew down American forces in Afghanistan to 2500 soldiers, which is the average size of the crowd at a high school football game in Texas, and signed a “treaty” with the Taliban, which the Taliban laughed at like it was a one-legged goat herder hopping across a minefield. Laughed hard, because that is considered a pretty good joke in a country where there are about the same number of amputations as goats.
The Republicans are also screaming that the fall of Kabul was due to Democratic disbelief in “American exceptionalism,” which is the belief that everything we’ve ever done as a nation is cool and righteous. The truth is, America is not even exceptional at losing control of Afghanistan—the Brits, the Russians and even Alexander the Great all bogged down there and gave up long before we did.
The Republicans actually know this, but they think they convince enough people that they don’t want healthcare, fresh roads and fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wages because it’s more important to stick a finger in the eye of them people that lost us Afghanistan because there are transgender bathrooms at the truck stop.
The right also has had a rush of concern for Afghan women, while remaining completely indifferent to the rights of women in the US. It’s true that Afghan women are the most deeply injured victims here. We spent a trillion dollars and twenty years letting them believe they lived in the 21st century, but that was an illusion.
They really live in the 14th. They know that now.
*Afghanistan is not actually in the Middle East. Don't think that was the problem, though.
But settling scores over there is not quite as easy as laying down a bunt, as twenty years and four Presidents have noticed. But blaming the entire fiasco on Biden is as easy as paying 14 bucks for a beer at the ballpark.
It’s woke culture and critical race theory that cost us the chance at victory in Afghanistan, say Tucker Carlson and Tom Cotton, among others. Since Biden came into office, the US military has been thinking too much about transgender rights and the history of racial justice in the US to shoot straight. Yes, Republicans are saying that Biden inspired the average foot soldier to start thinking, “Should I really call in that air strike? Those people who are shelling us could be LGBTQ’s.”
The right is unanimous that we can’t win wars and know history at the same time, and you know what they’d rather do. Even the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief called for Biden’s resignation after the fall of Kabul. He did it without calling for his own re-instatement, either, which goes to show how sincere he was, which is as sincere as Trump gets, which is to say, not even within missile range of actual honesty.
Trump didn’t mention that it was him who railed against “endless wars,” drew down American forces in Afghanistan to 2500 soldiers, which is the average size of the crowd at a high school football game in Texas, and signed a “treaty” with the Taliban, which the Taliban laughed at like it was a one-legged goat herder hopping across a minefield. Laughed hard, because that is considered a pretty good joke in a country where there are about the same number of amputations as goats.
The Republicans are also screaming that the fall of Kabul was due to Democratic disbelief in “American exceptionalism,” which is the belief that everything we’ve ever done as a nation is cool and righteous. The truth is, America is not even exceptional at losing control of Afghanistan—the Brits, the Russians and even Alexander the Great all bogged down there and gave up long before we did.
The Republicans actually know this, but they think they convince enough people that they don’t want healthcare, fresh roads and fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wages because it’s more important to stick a finger in the eye of them people that lost us Afghanistan because there are transgender bathrooms at the truck stop.
The right also has had a rush of concern for Afghan women, while remaining completely indifferent to the rights of women in the US. It’s true that Afghan women are the most deeply injured victims here. We spent a trillion dollars and twenty years letting them believe they lived in the 21st century, but that was an illusion.
They really live in the 14th. They know that now.
*Afghanistan is not actually in the Middle East. Don't think that was the problem, though.
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