MSM Re-Writing of Biden’s Afghanistan Tragedy Already in High Gear
As Biden’s stunning incompetence was laid bare for all the world to see by the nightmare in Afghanistan, even his most loyal media lapdogs were finding it difficult to keep up the charade, which I covered in my Morning Briefing a full week before the horrific ISIS-K attack at the Kabul airport. Here is an excerpt from that:
We will no doubt soon be back to a place where all of the usual horrible suspects in the media are fawning over Biden’s every lazy drool, but he and his pals are definitely taking a bit of a break this week.
Well, less than a week after the tragedy at the airport, the break is over.
The professional propagandists in the MSM are now circling wagons I didn’t even know they had in an effort to revise the immediate history of our ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Our esteemed leader Paula Bolyard had this to say in a post she wrote recapping Biden’s bumbling speech on Tuesday:
The Biden administration desperately needs to pivot away from Afghanistan and his lapdogs will soon forget what happened there. If they mention Afghanistan at all after this week, it will be in the context of the Great Statesmen Joe Biden saving us from the Republicans’ endless wars. No matter how mendacious and despicable Joe Biden’s decisions, they’ll be forgotten in service of left-wing politics. The media will not let Biden continue to take the blame for what he’s done. The momentary reprieve we’ve received from the sycophants will be back, as will the incessant Trump-bashing and blaming of Republicans for everything wrong in the world.
It’s already happening.
In fact, it began with a soft-sell over a week ago in The New York Times. During a stretch of several days when almost no one in the MSM had anything good to say about Biden, the Times‘s Thomas Friedman penned a lengthy Opinion piece assuring us rubes that Joe Biden “could still be proved right in Afghanistan.” Friedman actually makes some valid points about a few things, but then does his Tom Friedman thing with nonsense like this:
And let’s also remember: When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, iPhones, Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist. Flash forward to today: Afghanistan is not only much more connected to the world, but it’s connected internally as well. It will not be nearly as easy for the Taliban to hide their abuses from the world or from fellow Afghans.
Note to Tom: iPhones and social media aren’t going to be game-changers. The 2021 Taliban don’t care what the West thinks of them any more than the 2001 version did. The central flaw in any assessment of terrorist organizations by coastal media bubble elites is that they always presume that the jihadists have the same basic motivations as an American accountant in Poughkeepsie.
Friedman wrote that before Biden’s failure had a body count, though. Let’s see where a few of his cheerleaders are since last Thursday.
The Washington Post‘s permanently concussed Dana Milbank headlined an opinion piece “Trump voters should be loving Joe Biden.” From there, he proceeded to mention a couple of the Trump policies Biden hasn’t gotten around to rolling back yet, offering no proof that they’ll be kept in place much longer. Milbank also makes sure he participates in the newest narrative: Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal was just a victim of Trump’s circumstances.
An essential component of the Biden/MSM “blame Trump” narrative is the conflation of what Trump had planned and what Biden did, as if he were merely continuing a policy over which he had no control.
Cool story, bro.
But not true.
Strap yourselves in and get ready to read and hear “America’s longest war” in the MSM approximately every 2.7 seconds for the next several weeks. They’re deftly tapping into the fact that all Americans wanted that mess over. We just didn’t want the end of it to be even messier.
Over at The Atlantic, David Rothkopf swung for the fences in his first attempt at post-death-toll revisionist history:
America’s longest war has been by any measure a costly failure, and the errors in managing the conflict deserve scrutiny in the years to come. But Joe Biden doesn’t “own” the mayhem on the ground right now. What we’re seeing is the culmination of 20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders. If anything, Americans should feel proud of what the U.S. government and military have accomplished in these past two weeks. President Biden deserves credit, not blame.
See that? He leads with “America’s longest war.” No reason to wait to get to the marching order talking points. Good boy.
Related: Former SecDef/CIA Head Panetta: We ‘Have to Go Back’ to Afghanistan to Get ISIS-K
Rothkopf’s harshest criticism of Biden and the administration is that the early days of the withdrawal “could have been handled better.” He obviously thinks he’s vying for a Nobel Prize in Understatement.
Those who are fans of alt-history fare like The Man in the High Castle will love Rothkopf’s recapping of the last couple of weeks, which bears absolutely no resemblance to what we’ve all been seeing and reading about.
No examination of corrupt liberal propaganda media in America is complete without a visit to the eighth circle of Media Bias Hell: CNN.
In an op-ed posted on CNN’s site, Aaron David Miller spins so hard about Biden’s speech on Tuesday that I almost got too dizzy to walk after just the first paragraph:
Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the hit TV series The West Wing, once described the White House as the world’s greatest home court advantage. And President Joe Biden sought to use that home court Tuesday afternoon not to lay out the pros and cons of his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan as Barack Obama might have done, but to declare with vehement certitude and conviction as Ronald Reagan might that withdrawal was not just the best option but the only one consistent with the interests of the American people.
Many congratulations to anyone who had “Biden Is Reaganesque” on their media malpractice bingo cards.
Again, this is where they’re at mere days after our brave young troops were slaughtered in Kabul. The nation is grieving but these execrable jerks can’t take a breath and mourn them. They’ve got to get right to lying about the man who set the ball in motion for their deaths.
However long Biden ends up being in office, he will leave behind nothing but a trail of misery. No amount of spinning is going to be able to cover that up.
They’re not going to stop trying.
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Excellent piece Bill. Our empty suit prez deserves every word and it’s almost unbelievable that the MSM can’t bring itself to any sense of intellectual honesty on such an important point in our history.
Absolutely agree
Where did the “America’s longest war” trope come from anyway? As I recall, the USA rather decisively defeated Germany and Japan over 75 years ago and still maintains troops of 25,000 to 30,000 in each country. The Korean War never ended (there was only an armistice), and we still maintain a force of 20,000 troops there. In Afghanistan our support force in-country of only 2500 had gone eighteen months without a single death and had still held back the Talliban. Biden’s hand-picked handlers (aka White House staff) have been thoughtlessly using this phrase constantly. I think the past week would be more accurately described as “Saigon 1975 on steroids”.
Spot on, RJ. You know your stuff!
I don’t think the writer of this piece even watches the MSM. The reporting from Afghanistan I saw, including NBC, seemed to go out of its way to show the tragedy of events there, but leaving out information crucial to understanding what went on. For instance, there were stories of the military equipment left to the Taliban without reporting that what had been left was either made unusable, obsolete, or what had been used to arm Afghanistan government forces. Mitt Romney sees fault on the part of Trump as well as Biden, and while he is on the outs with the Trump people, he is hardly an apologist for Biden. There is a point of view different from that of the author, and he seems to object to that point of view being presented. I wonder if he thought the MSM were apologists for George W. Bush when terrorists flew plans into tall buildings a month after Bush was told terrorists planned to fly planes into tall buildings?
You have rosey democratic glasses on.
It would be helpful to cite facts or logic explaining where I have been mistaken.
Richards is right. The author doesn’t appear to allow contrary views. He forgets he was the one who said the Flint water crisis was a one-day story.
Fecklessness requires multiple props.
The headline and the thesis of the article are accurate: The MSM will try hard to cover for Biden and ignore Afghanistan quickly. It is like fish & swimming, they will do what they naturally do. But be careful of some of “our” media that will try a corrective view (not the BR). A good example is today’s National Review article, which appropriately described Biden’s bungled Dunkirk of withdrawal…then closed with a video of former President Trump doing his own ham-handed commentary. Too many of the outlets calling themselves conservative want to obfuscate the cruelty and harm that was done (still doing) by Trump to Country & Party. This even includes NR, source of the wonderful “NeverTrump” edition. Having suffered subscription damage from that brave venture, it tries to back into Trump’s good graces with this kind of gesture. In this case an arbitrary, and time-limited withdrawal was first promulgated by Trump, then adopted by Biden, and managed quite badly. Sudden amnesia by the MSM should not justify similar amnesia about the role played by Trump.
I read the New York Times morning e-version almost everyday to understand the pattern of “news coverage” which will be followed the rest of the day by all three broadcast networks and the cables. Fox offers contrary opinions but the Times has framed the daily talking points.
Front page stories are subject to the approval of the Democrat National Committee which on occasion calls in to get a headline or gist of the story changed to comply with party line.
The editor, Dean Baquet encourages his reporters to inject personal opinions into news articles and they do so with reckless abandon – so long as they toe the party line. If they don’t, they are fired.
That probably is not going to change anytime soon. People like reading articles written by people with whom they agree. It would help if those readers would at least watch Fox News reporting once in a while. But many of them see Fox as some kind of enemy and won’t even consider an alternative point of view. Too bad for them.
I believe that most people have opinions on just about any topic, sometimes they will share that opinion without being asked, other times, only if asked. I also have no problem with considering an alternative point of view as suggested by someone in a reply to this article. What concerns me is people (like Trump
spokesperson KellyAnne Conway) who have “alternative facts” to support their position. As reported in a Washington Post article dated August 24, 2020, “Conway used the phrase to explain then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s utterly false and easily disprovable claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd — comments clearly meant to bolster Trump’s own false claims and ego”. An alternative point of view is acceptable, “alternative facts” are not. I’ve watched Fox in the past and find that quite often, some of their reporters tout opinion as fact, I guess it’s their version of “alternative facts”. There is no such a thing as “alternative facts”, just the facts. As the character of Detective Joe Friday in the old TV seres Dragnet was fond of saying, “Just the facts Mam, just the facts”.
Robert Gates covered this subject to a tee when he said Biden has been wrong on every major issue regarding foreign policy and national security over the past four decades. So what should we expect from someone who still does not understand the value of maintaining peace in the Middle East? To give up all of our sophisticated weaponry and just walk off the job? Any moron knows that when you pick up a rifle, you first get ready, then aim, then fire. Biden fired first with no aim other than abandoning what he felt was a lost cause, never mindful of those on the ground, most notably his own interpreter. The MSM can go ahead and spin this way any way they want, but there will be hell to pay in the next election cycle. Geez, and God forbid, but even Trump is starting to look good by comparison, much to my sad chagrin……
The era of honest journalism, when reporters such as Walter Cronkite nobly suppressed their ideology in pursuit of reporting news in a non-partisan and objective manner, died a long time ago.
That the mainstream media can so much as attempt to sugarcoat Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal speaks to how low “journalism” has sunk.
Plato was right: we get the government that we deserve. Just like the border crisis, Chicago homicides, and runaway inflation, this can all be laid at the feet of our ill-informed body politic and corrupt media.
I think they should have trained the women to fight. Obviously, they have the most to lose.