Month: August 2021

Robert Wright has an excellent newsletter today about lessons unearned. In a nutshell:

Unlearned Lesson #1: The presence of a foreign army can strengthen the enemy by expanding its popular support.

Unlearned Lesson #2: Reports about a military intervention that travel through military channels are subject to systematic corruption.  

Unlearned Lesson #3: Countries are really complicated, full of cross-cutting allegiances and internal tensions that you need to understand if you’re going to invade and occupy them.

All true. Some people have known this for a while. I just randomly pulled up a couple from this blog over the years:

Memories of an earlier intervention from 2015:

Yes, we can make things worse. And we often do.

by digby

When the Libya crisis hit there were some very energetic debates on the left about whether or not it made sense to intervene in such a volatile and messy situation even if it was intensely frustrating to watch what was happening. The impulse to humanitarian intervention is a thoroughly understandable — any decent human being wants to do something if at all possible to stop violence and death if they can. But the US isn’t a superhero, just a superpower and there’s a huge difference. A superpower is often a bull in a china shop that is so clumsy and muscle bound that it makes things worse.

This article in Foreign Affairs takes a look at the failure of Libya. It’s well worth reading as the war drums pound in the background:

In the immediate wake of the military victory, U.S. officials were triumphant. Writing in these pages in 2012, Ivo Daalder, then the U.S. permanent representative to NATO, and James Stavridis, then supreme allied commander of Europe, declared, “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.” In the Rose Garden after Qaddafi’s death, Obama himself crowed, “Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.” Indeed, the United States seemed to have scored a hat trick: nurturing the Arab Spring, averting a Rwanda-like genocide, and eliminating Libya as a potential source of terrorism. 


That verdict, however, turns out to have been premature. In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.


Despite what defenders of the mission claim, there was a better policy available—not intervening at all, because peaceful Libyan civilians were not actually being targeted. Had the United States and its allies followed that course, they could have spared Libya from the resulting chaos and given it a chance of progress under Qaddafi’s chosen successor: his relatively liberal, Western-educated son Saif al-Islam. Instead, Libya today is riddled with vicious militias and anti-American terrorists—and thus serves as a cautionary tale of how humanitarian intervention can backfire for both the intervener and those it is intended to help.

[…]

I don’t doubt that people had good intentions in Libya. But the idea that the US has the capability of parachuting into a country, deposing a leader and then all the flowers will bloom just isn’t realistic. I know people want to help. But the sooner we get off the idea that the best way to help is by bombing and deposing, the better off we’ll be.

Libya was the one time where Obama let the military interventionists have their way. His instincts have proved to be better since then. Unfortunately, the war drums are getting louder and louder and I’ll be very surprised if he’s able to resist escalating. And I have not heard even one person offer a scenario in which that escalation will do anything to fix the situation. If experience is any guide, it’s likely to make things worse.

Not that that matters. Politics are now fully engaged, the hawks are circling, and when that happens, war happens.

“Our track record is dismal” from 2013:

by digby

Via Kevin Drum I find that John McCain went and got himself photographed with a bunch of Syrian rebels who had apparently kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. Considering McCain’s belief that he can “put people together in a room and tell them to cut the shit,” this might be funny except for the fact that it illustrates so perfectly why we must fight the American hubris that says we have the ability to sort out this conflict from afar.

Kevin quotes Joe Klein, who is right in this instance:

I don’t blame McCain for this. It’s hard to advance a trip into rebel territory….The point is: We just don’t know these places well enough to go over and draw grand conclusions about policy. In a way, McCain’s trip is a perfect metaphor for the problem of involving ourselves with the Syrian rebels. We may be siding with the greater evil. We may be throwing fuel on a fire that could consume the region. Our track record when it comes to such things is dismal.

That’s right. And this shows a rather amazing evolution by the Joe Kleins of the world. He used to be a lot more sure of America’s ability to get on the “right side” of everything. Very sure:

Klein: And, by the way, we’re very much well liked among the young, educated Iranians. But this is not Iraq we’re dealing with here. This is an ancient country, a very strong country, and a very proud country. And so, yeah, by all means, we should talk to them, but, on the other hand, we should not take any option, including the use of nuclea-….tactical nuclear weapons off the table.

Stephanopoulos: Keep that on the table?

Klein: It’s absolutely stupid not to.

Stephanopoulos: That’s insane.

Klein: Well I don’t think we should ever use tac-…I think that…

Stephanopoulos: Well, then why should they be on the table?

Klein: Why?

Stephanopoulos: Why do we want that specter of crossing that line?

Klein: Because we don’t know what the options on the other side…what their options are on the table.

That post contains the full Joe Klein treatment, circa 2006. That was a very creepy time. (It should be noted that he did later withdraw that statement and sort of apologized.)

Our (mis)adventures in the middle east, including the ongoing problems in Iraq and Libya, are proof that we are not particularly good at this sort of thing. It’s horrible to watch people suffering and do nothing, but unless one is very sure that intervention will make things better it’s best to be humble and accept that a country as powerful as we are is more often than not a bull in a China shop. It’s good to see that some of the “moderates” who were once inclined to see America as always being a benevolent and positive force for good finally realize that good intentions aren’t enough.

Judging from the past few days a whole lot of them have unlearned that lesson.

Ed Kilgore took a look at the mid-term Senate races. It’s kind of terrifying, to be honest:

Those hoping or fearing that Trumpism will become consolidated as the ideological creed of the Republican Party going forward are understandably focused on the 45th president’s activities and utterances. But there are growing signs that his malignant world-view is developing a life of its own, and will take a giant leap towards control of the GOP in 2022 Senate primaries to replace retiring Establishment types. As Politico’s Marc Caputo observes: “The 2022 midterms could usher in a wave of full-spectrum MAGA supporters who would turn the GOP conference an even deeper shade of red — and make the Senate a lot more like the fractious House.”

Five Republican senators have already announced retirements next year: Missouri’s Roy Blunt, North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Ohio’s Rob Portman, Alabama’s Richard Shelby, and Pennylvania’s Pat Toomey. Burr and Toomey voted to convict Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial, an obviously unforgivable offense to the GOP base. Blunt, Burr, and Portman also supported the bipartisan infrastructure bill that recently passed in the Senate, to the great fury of Republicans who viewed this action as either a betrayal of True Conservatism or as a larcenous misappropriation of a triumph denied to America’s real president. As the chairman of the socialistic Appropriations Committee, a close friend of Mitch McConnell, and a supporter of the treacherous Jeff Sessions’s 2018 comeback bid, Shelby is deemed unacceptably swampy.

All of these less-than-Trumpy lawmakers could be replaced (as Senate nominees if not necessarily elected U.S. senators) by loud-and-proud proponents of the America First cause, reports Caputo:

The three top candidates to succeed Sen. Richard Burr in North Carolina have all denounced his vote to convict Trump in his last impeachment trial. In Pennsylvania, the four leading candidates to succeed Sen. Pat Toomey — who, like Burr, was formally rebuked by the state party for his impeachment vote — have embraced Trump’s calls for an “audit” of the state’s presidential election results, to varying degrees …

The bipartisan infrastructure deal Ohio’s Sen. Rob Portman helped broker? Six of the top GOP candidates vying to replace him have rejected it.

In some of these states with retiring “moderates,” there are Trumpier-than-thou competitions underway (notably in Ohio, where Josh Mandel, Jane Timken, and J.D. Vance are fighting for the 45th president’s favor). In others, one or more major candidates are going maximum MAGA to an extent that makes Republicans nervous about their general election prospects in a year where there is no margin for error if the GOP is to retake Senate control. In the latter category is Missouri, where disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens may be too Trumpy for Trump himself (the former president is reportedly annoyed that his son’s significant other Kimberly Guilfoyle has been named national campaign chair for Greitens). In Alabama, the ever-fiery Mo Brooks, who spearheaded the challenge to Joe Biden’s electoral college victory in Congress on January 6 and spoke at the notorious “Stop the Steal” rally on the National Mall that very day, recently benefitted from a Trump attack on Shelby and his designated successor Katie Britt: “I see that the RINO Senator from Alabama, close friend of Old Crow Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby, is pushing hard to have his ‘assistant’ fight the great Mo Brooks for his Senate seat.”

The potential MAGA makeover of the Senate Republican Conference isn’t limited to the states of the five previously announced retirees. Trump nemesis Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is up next year and has not announced her intentions. If she does run, Alaska’s new top four primary system all but guarantees the incumbent a spot in the general election, but she is vulnerable to a loss of Republican support to Kelly Tshibaka, a former state-level administrator who already has Trump’s endorsement (Sarah Palin also keeps hinting at participation in this contest as well). Eighty-seven-year-old Chuck Grassley’s future is also in limbo, and even if he runs for an eighth term in 2022, he will be opposed by state senator Jim Carlin, a Trump bravo who wants to investigate non-existent 2020 election fraud and vows to fight “mammoth challenges from China, the disintegration of families, the decline of rural Iowa and the threat to free speech from big tech monopolies.” And South Dakota’s John Thune, who has drawn the ire of Trump supporters by mocking his 2020 Big Lie, could step down or attract a primary challenger next year (Governor Kristi Noem has said she’s not interested in taking down Thune for Trump, but could change her mind).

Any way you slice it, it’s very likely Senate Republicans overall will be less “traditional” in their conservatism in 2023. Whether or not they win back control of the chamber in the midterms, that’s bad news for any residual bipartisan plans Joe Biden might have for the balance of his first term, and good news for Trump or potential successors to the leadership of the right-wing “populist” political movement he has created.

God help us if they gain the majority.

God help us if they gain full control of the government in 2024.

Considering the excessively harsh coverage over the past two weeks, I’m surprised these numbers aren’t a lot worse. I suspect that while Trump and his media minions will continue to rewrite history and flog this story as the greatest humiliation the world has ever seen, but the rest of the country will settle down and this will not end up being a long term burden for his administration.

The settlement of the refugees is likely to replace the withdrawal as the big story. I wrote about that last week for Salon as it became obvious early on that they were headed in that direction. It’s only gotten worse:

[D]uring his Fox News show on Monday night, Tucker Carlson framed the arrival of refugees from Afghanistan in terms that his show’s viewers would find familiar.

“They’re just using a crisis to change our country,” he said at the end of an interview, casually referring to a component of his toxic long-running White replacement theory rhetoric. “They’ll never lose another election. That’s the point, as you know.”

This is the esoteric side of the story. The rubes are all about this one. Dan Pfeiffer notes in his newsletter today:

According to the New York Times, even Kevin McCarthy, who voted to expedite the SIV program only weeks before, told fellow members of Congress that bringing Afghan refugees to the U.S. means:

 “We’ll have terrorists coming across the border.” 

McCarthy’s comment is notable because his only talent is sensing where the Republican base is headed and getting there before he gets left behind.

There are three ways Republicans will square the circle of their initial visa support and their criticism for Biden not evacuating more Afghan translators and others out of the country:

The first approach was previewed by J.D. Vance, the Ivy League-educated venture capitalist running for Senate in Ohio on a platform of performative MAGA-ism. Last week, Vance tweeted:

The people telling you they’re carefully vetting refugees are the same people who promised an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan.August 26th

Vance is gross, but not dumb. His focus on the competence of the vetting allows him to merge two Right-Wing narratives: muslims are dangerous and Biden is incompetent. He uses this focus to justify his opposition to the resettlement.

The second approach is Miller’s. He argues for resettling these refugees in the region instead of the United States because, in Miller’s words, we will adopt “an immigration policy that has brought the threat of jihadism inside our shores.” In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Miller made an argument that you can easily see being in one million ads next year:

“Those who are advocating mass Afghan resettlement in this country are doing so for political, not humanitarian, reasons. It is extraordinarily expensive to resettle a refugee in the United States. They get free health care, they get free education, they get free housing, they get free food, they get cash welfare. For the price that you could resettle refugees in America, you could resettle 10 times more, 15 times more, in their home region — in this case, primarily in Pakistan. Resettling in America is not about solving a humanitarian crisis. It’s about accomplishing an ideological objective to change America.”

This idea is both absurd and impossible. These Afghans helped our country and we promised them help in return, but other countries are not going to accept large numbers of Afghan refugees if the country that started this whole thing refuses to do so.

Finally, Republicans will rely on nativist NIMBY-ism as a political cudgel. Historically, a lot of people — and politicians — are okay with helping refugees as long as that help happens in some other city or state. The downfall of Obama’s efforts to close Gitmo was when the idea went from theory to practical reality. There was a massive political backlash when it came out that the Obama Administration wanted to resettle a small number of Uighurs — Chinese Muslim separatists — in Northern Virginia. It did not matter that the Uighurs were in Gitmo largely by accident, had no real ties to Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and had been determined by the Bush Administration to pose no threat to the United States. Members of Congress (from both parties) — even staunch supporters of closing Gitmo — revolted at the idea that any of those prisoners should end up in the United States. Mitch McConnell accused Obama of trying to “bring terrorist-trained detainees into American cities.” A similar dynamic existed when the Obama Administration attempted to hold a trial for alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in New York City. Throughout the Bush years, Democrats were ardent opponents of the military tribunal system set up to try terrorists, but their tune changed as soon as the Article One trials were slated to happen in the United States. There is no place in the country better equipped than New York City to handle the logistical, security, and political challenges that would come from such a high-profile event. But Obama’s Department of Justice backed down when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Senator Chuck Schumer came out in opposition. It’s easy to imagine ambitious and cynical Republican governors, and even some vulnerable Democrats, immediately declaring that they will not accept Afghan refugees in their states and districts.

He says that Democrats shouldn’t accept the premise or try to avoid the argument. They should have Vets tell the stories of Afghan heroism on behalf of the Americans and most of all they should stick together instead of running like a herd of gazelles as they did when Obama tried to close Gitmo.

Sounds good but I’m not holding my breath, especially the last point. Democrats are very easily startled.

From one of my favorite newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. He collected some quotes from the right wing id:

Rep. Charlie Beetroot (R.-Ar.): “After a mere 20 years — not even two dozen! — the treasonous son of a I-won’t-say-it Joe Biden has cut and run from our beloved Afghanistan. I have more reason than most to mourn this betrayal: Years ago one of my constituents gave me an Afghan rug, and my wife and I liked it so much we gladly endured a tiresome ethics investigation so we could keep it. The rug came with the address of the rugmakers in Adraskan, two brothers named Abdul and Amos O’Grady. They were originally from Poughkeepsie, but their parents loved Afghanistan and moved the family business there. I wrote to them and we became fast friends. Abdul and Amos were apparently masters of ‘baksheesh,’ which they told me was what Afghans call the art of persuasion, and they managed to visit me very frequently in Washington and Hattieville no matter what was going on ‘back home.’ Of course they loved America — even on their short visits, they managed to catch up on all the American trends and wore all the latest outlet fashions; you’d think they actually lived here full-time! — and supported our troops 100%. I am holding a telegram from them now and I am shaking with rage. They are trapped in Adraskan by Biden’s fecklessness and they need $500,000 US to get out. I have raised some of that with a Kickstarter but it’s not enough, so I have introduced a bill to allocate federal funds to get out Amos and Abdul and the many others who have been left behind, like Seamus and Abas Schwartz, Hameed McGillicuddy, and Mary Jane Smith-Wharton, to name just a few. America will not soon forget the day of shame!”

Caroline Screamer Bayes (R.-Mo.): “I hope you’re proud of yourself, Joe Biden. Like the traitors Obama and Clinton before you, you have turned your back on billions of good men and women who trusted us when Donald Trump was President and still is except you stole it, you traitor! Look at this picture if you dare, you coward-in-chief! It’s a picture of the last true Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, with a simple Afghan tribesman:

“This brave man came all the way here to visit because he loved and trusted President Trump; he even wore a surgical mask, not because he believed in the fake COVID plandemic, but to honor his hosts, because honor is important to these people, Mr. Not My President!  Now can you imagine, Joe Biden, what that simple Afghan farmer thinks, wherever he is? He’s probably surrounded by Taliban right now! Imagine what he’s thinking! He probably laughs when he thinks of America. And whose fault is that, Joe Biden? Yours and the fault of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Jew-mer and your cackling I-won’t-say-it not-my-Vice-President. And that’s why we’re going to bring our brave boys back to the Capitol to murder all the Democrats and RINOs and then we’re coming to kill you, Joe Biden, and your whole family, we’re going to cut you to pieces with an axe and grind those pieces into the carpet and spit on them and set fire to the EPA and Lincoln Center and all the Deep State fortresses where the pedophiles are hiding out, and I’m going to keep on saying it because nobody ever does anything about me saying it which must mean everyone agrees!”

Christopher Hitchens (contacted by Ouija board): “I might have said ‘that I should live to see this day,’ except of course I haven’t. You can imagine how long I’ve been waiting to use that joke. I would also like to say that conditions here are not so dire as advertised, especially if you did some good in the surface world; I, for example, suffer very little physical pain, owing to my denunciation of torture. Our new arrival Donald Rumsfeld is having quite a different experience. The funny part is, I only did it to preserve my credibility with the higher-paying magazines. Oh shit, I think they heard me.”

If you read any of Trump’s dispatches or watch his interviews on Fox you’ll see that this is barely satire.

His newsletter is great. Subscribe if you can. You won’t regret it.

I don’t know if I’ve ever posted a Ross Douthat NYT column before — he’s generally a very annoying conservative — but this one is right on and deserves wide dissemination.

Jamelle Bouie writes:

President Barack Obama promised unity. In his 2008 campaign, he said he would heal the nation’s political divides and end more than a decade of partisan rancor.

To keep this promise, Obama needed allies, or at least partners, in the Republican Party. But they said no. If they could block Obama — if they could withhold support on anything significant he planned to do — then they could make him break his promise. Republicans would obstruct and Obama would get the blame. Which, you might remember, is what happened. By the 2010 midterm elections, Obama was a divisive president.

Joe Biden, in his 2020 campaign for president, promised to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. With additional aid to working families and free distribution of multiple effective vaccines, he would lead the United States out of its ongoing public health crisis.

I think you can see where this is going.

Rather than work with him to vaccinate the country, Biden’s Republican opposition has, with only a few exceptions, done everything in its power to politicize the vaccine and make refusal to cooperate a test of partisan loyalty. The party is, for all practical purposes, pro-Covid. If it’s sincere, it is monstrous. And if it’s not, it is an unbelievably cynical and nihilistic strategy. Unfortunately for both Biden and the country, it appears to be working.

Naturally, some of the loudest vaccine-skeptical Republicans are in Congress. “Think about what those mechanisms could be used for,” Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina said of the Biden administration’s plan for door-to-door vaccine ambassadors. “They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your Bibles.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has similarly criticized the president’s effort to reach the unvaccinated. “People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations,” she tweeted. “You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment.”

Cawthorn and Greene are obviously fringe figures. But these days, the fringe is not far from the center of the Republican Party (if it ever was to begin with). Their rhetoric is not too different, in other words, from that of their more mainstream colleagues in the Senate.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has attacked vaccine mandates — “There should be no mandates, zero, concerning Covid,” he said in a recent interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity — while Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has urged Americans to “resist” efforts to stop the spread of the virus. “It’s time for us to resist,” Paul said in a video posted to Twitter. “They can’t arrest all of us. They can’t keep all of your kids home from school. They can’t keep every government building closed, although I’ve got a long list of ones they might keep closed or ought to keep closed.”

Republican rhetoric in Washington, however, is a sideshow to the real fight over Covid, in states like Florida and Texas.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected vaccine passports and launched an aggressive campaign against mandatory mask-wearing in schools. “It is very important that we say, unequivocally, no to lockdowns, no to school closures, no to restrictions and no to mandates,” he told a gathering of conservative activists in Utah last month. DeSantis has suspended city and county emergency orders, put limits on future mitigation efforts and signed a law that “shields nursing homes, hospitals and businesses from legal liability if employees and patrons contract the virus on their premises.”

All of this, even as the state has been ravaged by the Delta variant of the virus. Florida has been reporting more than 20,000 new infections a day and has averaged 262 Covid deaths — the most of any state, at least in absolute numbers. More than 16,000 people are hospitalized and thousands have been taken to intensive care units. Who does DeSantis blame for these outcomes? Biden.

“You know, he said he was going to end Covid. He hasn’t done that,” the Florida governor told the Fox News host Jesse Watters last week. “At the end of the day, he is trying to find a way to distract from the failures of his presidency.”

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has banned mask mandates, signed legislation that would deny state contracts or licenses to businesses that require proof of vaccination and — after recovering from a breakthrough Covid infection himself — barred local governments from requiring the vaccine for any public agency or private institution. In a statement, Abbott said that this was to avoid a “patchwork of vaccine mandates across Texas.” But in a message to the state legislature, the governor appeared to be asking lawmakers to consider an outright ban on vaccine mandates. On Aug. 25, the day Abbott sent his message, Texas reported more than 23,000 new cases of Covid, along with 14,000 hospitalizations and 245 deaths.

Abbott and DeSantis are not alone. Earlier this month, the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, created two new grant programs that would give funds to families and school districts that rejected mask mandates. And in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem once again cheered the Sturgis motorcycle rally, a year after it contributed to a Covid outbreak throughout the region and into the Midwest. This year, health officials have already linked the rally to cases in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

The effect of all of this for the country is a pandemic that won’t die. The effect of it for the Republican Party is a substantial part of its base that won’t take the vaccine. According to data collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Republicans lag behind most of the rest of the country in vaccine uptake; 54 percent said they had received at least one dose at the time of the survey, compared with 67 percent of all adults. And the effect of this for Biden is a sharp drop in his approval rating; a Reuters poll conducted mid-month found the president down 21 points among all Americans for his handling of the pandemic.

What amounts to a Republican effort to prolong the pandemic shows no sign of abating. It may even get worse, as powerful conservative media personalities spread vaccine skepticism and embrace dubious miracle cures like ivermectin, a drug typically used to treat parasitic worms in livestock, not viruses in humans.

If Biden does not want the kind of backlash that his Democratic predecessor faced, he needs to act aggressively to push the United States off its vaccination plateau. Republicans might be setting him up to break his promise to stop Covid, but the president should understand that he’s not actually at their mercy.

The framing of this is very interesting coming from Douthat. He’s openly accusing the Republicans of doing all this to sabotage Joe Biden. And I have no doubt he’s right. This idea that they are acting out of conservative principle is completely laughable in light of their support for the clownish authoritarian libertine Donald Trump. The best you can say for them is that they are so self-serving and afraid of losing elections that they are willing to coddle a bunch of voters who are so braindead that they’d rather take horse worm medicine than a safe, effective vaccine that could save their own lives. The worst is that they are doing this knowing full well it’s killing people and they simply don’t care.

Correction: The dumbest error I’ve made on this blog. And I’ve made quite few. This piece was by Jamelle Bouie and I originally attributed it to the conservative Ross Douthat. What a mistake…

In his own words, that’s what Trump would have done:

Donald Trump has had a lot to say about how Joe Biden has mishandled the withdrawal from Afghanistan—but, when given the chance to explain what he would have done differently, Trump’s master plan boiled down to leaving the country in smouldering ruins before leaving it forever.

The ex-president appeared on Fox Business on Tuesday morning to get some things off his chest a day after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan. During a curious rant about how he believes unnamed shadowy forces are controlling Biden, Trump shared his alternative withdrawal plans.

“It’s something that’s rather incredible,” he said. “They [the people supposedly controlling Biden] do horrible things, vicious things. They cheat, steal, lie. But they can’t do a simple withdrawal from a country that we should never have gone into in the first place… We should have hit that country years ago, hit it them really hard, and then let it rot.”

The former president was repeatedly thrown softball questions about how he would’ve handled the situation if he hadn’t lost the election. However, he repeatedly failed to give any answers of substance, merely saying that he would’ve won the war in Afghanistan if only he’d had a few more months.

“He [Biden] handed them a country on a silver platter,” said Trump. “He ought to apologize and stop trying to, excuse the language, bullshit everybody into thinking that what he did was good. We should have withdrawn but we should have withdrawn in a totally different way, with great dignity. It would have been a tremendous win for us.”

Again, he didn’t elaborate on what “totally different way” would have resulted in the “tremendous win” despite being asked for details.

While Trump repeatedly tried to criticize Biden for the failings in the U.S. evacuations from Kabul, he also laid into the thousands of desperate evacuees. With zero evidence, Trump claimed Afghan evacuees who have arrived in the U.S. include “many terrorists” and “criminal rapists.”

Needlessly linking the situation back to one of his presidential obsessions, Trump added: “The level of incompetence on this withdrawal is even far greater than the level of incompetence at the southern border.”

There was more:

Trump also argued on Tuesday that ending America’s longest war “should have been a positive, but it was a massive negative by anybody who has a brain.” 

“We were all set to have a victory in terms of getting out and getting out with dignity and you could even say with victory,” Trump told host Stuart Varney, stressing that it “was all lined up.”  

“The Taliban was petrified of us,” the former president continued. 

He went on to argue that “all” Biden had to do was “take what we did and finish it up and take all the equipment out.” 

Trump also said Biden should have kept Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield.

Steve Bannon, talking to Michael Lewis (Bloomberg opinion February 9, 2018), “The Democrats don’t matter,” he had said to me over our lunch. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The following twitter thread aptly points out why the obsessively negative coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal feels so relentless and overwhelming. It’s because they are focused on it almost exclusively and we’re not used to it. And that’s in spite of the fact that there is a boatload of huge news out there from COVID and school opening, Hurricane Ida and the raging wildfire about to swallow Lake Tahoe in California among a dozen other important stories.

But none of those stories speak to a Biden screw up which is their current orientation so none of it is getting even a small portion of the coverage that the Afghanistan story is getting. And it would probably even be understandable if the coverage was at all meaningful but it isn’t. It’s mostly just pointing and screaming, ‘Look!!!” over and over again.

Thinking about this thread compared to what the last 10 days of coverage has looked like for Biden.

If you need any evidence that the Steve Bannon flood the zone method was pretty effective at distracting from Trump’s most egregious failures, the coverage of his betrayal of the Kurds is a good case study.

Compare the tone here https://t.co/vSwRYI2c0y

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 21, 2021

To herehttps://t.co/HP9kjzxH1q

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 21, 2021

The US had been in Iraq and Syria almost as long as it was in Afghanistan. But the press viewed the abrupt pull out from Syria as just another story, despite the cynical betrayal of the Kurdish allies and the geopolitical consequences of the odd relationship between Trump and Turkish president Erdogan that precipitated it. It was just one of many stories about Trump’s incompetence. “Flooding the zone” worked quite well for Trump. There was so much wrong that he got away with all of it.

The Gadsden flag became a symbol of the anti-Obama T-party soon after the election of the first black U.S. president. Perhaps it is no surprise that the symbol of a snake became its logo.

Paul Krugman this morning notes how much the selling of snake oil and the peddling of fringe-right ideas go hand-in-hand. So much so that, given the financial incentives in play, “extremism can probably be seen not as a reflection of deep conviction, but as a way of promoting snake oil.”

Vaccine refuseniks spurn life-saving medicine not just because they want to see a Democratic president fail. They are adopting quack medicines because of a long association between cure-all remedies and right-wing ideas.

To be fair, as an observer of the New Age Movement of the 1990s, I witnessed a lot of quack medicine sold as enlightenment by lefty practitioners of recently rediscovered “ancient” healing techniques. But later I encountered get-rich-quick scams in right-wing spam far more often. Snake oil was just around the corner.

Then Donald Trump arrived to sell political snake oil in bulk and to show budding amateurs how it’s done.

Once you start noticing snake oil in right-wing circles, Krugman observes, you see it everywhere:

This is clearly true in the right’s fever swamps. Alex Jones of Infowars has built a following by pushing conspiracy theories, but he makes money by selling nutritional supplements.

It’s also true, however, for more mainstream, establishment parts of the right. For example, Ben Shapiro, considered an intellectual on the right, hawks supplements.

Look at who advertises on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. After Fox itself, the top advertisers are My Pillow, then three supplement companies.

Snake oil peddlers, clearly, find consumers of right-wing news and punditry a valuable market for their wares. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find many right-leaning Americans ready to see vaccination as a liberal plot and turn to dubious alternatives — although, again, I didn’t see livestock dewormer coming.

Krugman speculates that it may not be right-wing ideas driving the promotion of quack medicines, but the other way around:

Put it this way: There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable. (In 2014 Alex Jones’s operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue, mainly from supplement sales.) Do these financial rewards induce pundits to be more extreme? It would be surprising if they didn’t — as conservative economists say, incentives matter.

Even Phineas T. Barnum would be impressed.

The young woman addressing the assembled activists had a depth of experience in deep canvassing. Rather than trying to get people to vote or to vote for a specific candidate, deep canvassing involves front-porch conversations more about listening than persuading. It is a technique for changing hearts and minds over time, especially in conservative, rural America.

After several encounters with one man in a county west of here, she finally saw that the source of his general resentment was not liberals or government at all. He had lost a good friend to opioid addiction. He needed someone to blame for it.

What brings that to mind is Russell Berman’s article in The Atlantic about voter ID. Especially, issuing some form of national identity card to use for voting. “[T]he nation’s current hodgepodge of identifiers stuffs the wallets of some people but leaves millions of Americans empty-handed and disenfranchised.” National ID cards are the norm in many countries.

The problem in the U.S. is that the concept evokes images of Big Brother across the political spectrum.

“There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it,” says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Even so, Republicans have spent decades promoting the idea. Insisting on it. Election integrity, voter fraud, and all that. But like the rural man hostile to liberals and government, those are not the real reason Republicans insist on IDs for voting. “Studies over the years have found that as many as one in 10 citizens lacks the documentation needed to vote. Those who do are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, poor, or over the age of 65,” Berman writes:

To understand why Democrats have so strenuously opposed voter-ID laws over the past two decades, consider the experience of Spread the Vote. With a staff of 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, the organization now operates in 17 states that require an ID to vote. [Spread the Vote’s Kat] Calvin’s staff and volunteers work with people—many of whom are homeless or were recently incarcerated—to assemble and pay for the necessary documents. Securing just a single valid ID can take days or weeks. In its four years of existence, Spread the Vote has been able to get IDs for about 7,000 people. The organization estimates that the number of eligible voters in the U.S. who lack the IDs they need to cast a ballot is at least 21 million.

Generally, Democrats have long believed that negotiating with Republicans over ID laws was pointless because the GOP’s insistence on them was less about protecting ballot integrity than about shaping the electorate to its advantage by suppressing the votes of people likely to back its opponents. “It’s hard not to see it as a part of a comprehensive strategy to engineer outcomes,” Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor (and, briefly, a 2020 presidential contender), told me.

Because it is.

But in the current fight to pass voting rights legislation through Congress, even Democrats are rethinking the ID requirement. Even voting-rights icon Stacey Abrams and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina will consider Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal to add some form of ID requirement to the bill.

To Calvin, however, the initial acquiescence of Democrats such as Abrams and Clyburn to an ID proposal was a betrayal. “My reaction was blinding rage followed by massive heartbreak and disappointment,” she told me. A utility bill, she said, was a meaningless alternative for most of the people she tries to assist. “My whole job is helping people who don’t have utility bills get IDs,” she said. “What they were saying is: If you don’t have a home or an apartment or if your name isn’t on the lease on that home or apartment, you don’t deserve to vote, you don’t deserve to participate in democracy.”

Calvin told me she would enthusiastically support a national voter-ID law on one condition: if it followed immediately after the creation of a national ID for everybody, “with a plan and a budget to implement it.” She suffers no illusions about the likelihood of that happening, however. “It’s a pipe dream,” she said. Calvin’s right. Democrats may be open to requiring voter ID, but the prospect of a national ID is still too hot to touch.

But beside logistical obstacles, there is another reason to oppose the ID requirement. Satisfy that demand and Republicans will just make another. Because voter fraud is not the real source of their election anxieties any more than liberals or big government were to blame for the opioid addiction cited above. Republicans champion requiring IDs to vote because in their minds the hurdle will require nothing of most of their voters. It will impact more Democratic voters than Republican ones, even though it will impact their own, too. It’s a game of percentages. Resistance to IDs feeds their narrative that Democrats oppose it because they want to cheat. Either way, they win.

Satisfy Republicans’ demand and they’ll simply make another. With abortion as well. The issue is too powerful to lose for Republican voter mobilization. Should the Supreme Court finally kill Roe, another issue will have to be found to replace it.

They want their weapon, as Dustin Hoffman said in Outbreak.

The last plane left Kabul this afternoon, meeting the deadline Biden and the Afghans had agreed upon. The final days were ugly, chaotic, violent and tragic. I don’t know how anyone could have expected otherwise. This is why we should never go to war unless there is absolutely no choice.

The New York Times assigned one of its reporters to see what Real People are thinking. Uncharacteristically, they went to a swing district in California of all places. (How many Real Americans can there be in that godless place?)

Spent the weekend talking to dozens of voters in a split district about Afghanistan.

The overarching sentiment was crises fatigue — and not much anger at Biden.

“It’s not our war to fight anymore,” one mother of three told me. She was far more focused on getting her kids back to in-person school.

Originally tweeted by Jennifer Medina (@jennymedina) on August 30, 2021.

Here’s the story:

At a time of deep partisan division, in a Southern California congressional district where Democrats narrowly outnumber Republicans, voters interviewed over the weekend were largely united on at least one issue: After a two-decade war, President Biden was right to pull American troops out of Afghanistan.

The bombing at the Kabul airport had done little to change their minds, the killing of 13 soldiers leaving them more numbed than saddened. Many said they were simply too overwhelmed to pay close attention to another overseas crisis. “We have a lot of mending here to do,” said Ms. Ortiz, who considers herself a political moderate and voted for Mr. Biden.

Amid a still-raging pandemic and a still-recovering economy, this was a time to be focused on problems at home rather than abroad, more than a dozen Republican, Democratic and independent voters said in conversations in and around Hacienda Heights, a community of 55,000 people about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles where first- and second-generation immigrants fill the subdivisions and strip malls.

Afghanistan could be ignored, they said, but the possibility of their too-young-to-be-vaccinated children getting sick could not. Leaders in Washington might worry about the threat of terrorism or America’s standing with allies, but voters in Hacienda Heights said they were far more concerned about issues affecting them directly: Covid-19, homelessness and climate change, to name a few.

They also seemed hesitant to hold Mr. Biden accountable for last week’s attacks, at least for now.

“When you have no good choice, you still have to pick one,” said Patrick Huang, a 65-year-old independent who has voted for both Republicans and Democrats. “They had plenty of time to prepare to get everybody out, and they totally messed it up. But I don’t blame President Biden for everything. This came after many, many presidents made mistakes.”

Less than a decade ago, California’s 39th Congressional District was reliably Republican. Encompassing the intersection of suburban Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside Counties, it is perhaps best known as Richard Nixon’s birthplace. Today, the district is about evenly divided among Asian American, Latino and white voters and is among the more competitive in the country: Although Mr. Biden won easily, a Republican captured the House seat from an incumbent Democrat in 2020.

Richard Yeung and Emily Chen, who both voted for Mr. Biden last fall, remember the unity that came after the Sept. 11 attacks, when they were teenagers. By the time they were in their mid-20s, they said, they began to question why the United States remained in Afghanistan.

Ms. Chen spoke of the human toll in Afghanistan, but quickly added: “There’s nothing we can do. My priorities are more domestic — health and climate, what is that going to look like?”

Even some Republicans who voted for Donald Trump last fall were reluctant to criticize Mr. Biden.

“They maybe exited more quickly than they should have, but I think it was right to be out,” said Andrew Chang, 40, as he shopped with his wife, Tonya Chang, in downtown Fullerton. “It was multiple presidents’ missteps. And we couldn’t have stayed there forever.”

Ms. Chang, 32, said she had largely paid attention to what was happening with Afghan women through forums on Reddit.

“Hearing what they go through is horrible, there’s no way around that,” she said. But she said her vote was highly unlikely to be swayed over international issues. “I’m much more concerned about what is happening here,” she said. Taxes remained the most important issue for her.

Even Representative Young Kim, a Republican who flipped the seat last year, was less critical of the president than many lawmakers in her party.

“We don’t have the luxury to be sad about what is happening, but we have to be resolute, gather information and get people to safety,” Ms. Kim said in an interview. “This is not the time to point fingers, when people are desperate and people are dying.”

But Ms. Kim added that she has heard from constituents who “are not satisfied with what they are seeing and hearing from our commander in chief.”

Inja Yun, 76, who voted for Democrats for much of her life until Mr. Trump convinced her she had been “brainwashed” by liberals, said she did not support anything Mr. Biden has done.

“He left Americans behind,” Ms. Yun said. “He left how many people there. He led them to become sacrifices. He is old, and he allowed young people to die. The only thing that makes me optimistic is that Trump is willing to fight back.”

Though many voters seemed to be disengaging emotionally from events in Afghanistan, they seemed inclined nonetheless to see the United States do more to take in Afghan refugees. This month, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to call on Mr. Biden to increase the cap on refugees and include an additional 100,000 people from Afghanistan.

There’s more of the same at the link. I suspect that reflects a majority of the country. There’s just so much going on at home. These people seem to be tired of the war and are ready to let this go.

The right wing and the media clearly are not. So we’ll have to see where we are in a few weeks. I honestly cannot predict how that’s going to go.