With help from corporate media, President Joe Biden clearly is trying to move on from the Afghanistan debacle in which Americans found themselves abandoned behind enemy lines.
Touring hurricane damage Friday in Louisiana, Biden obfuscated about climate change and spoke about Friday’s jobs report — which was a failure — before jetting off to a holiday weekend in Delaware.
While articles about the Afghanistan fiasco have not completely disappeared, it’s seemingly now up to alternative media and local newspapers to cover the issue and relay harrowing tales, since major newspapers, mainstream media, and cable news won’t.
“President Biden desperately wants to talk about anything but Afghanistan, but Americans who are hiding from the Taliban, ISIS, and the Haqqani network don’t give a damn about news cycles, long weekends, and polling — they want out,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who’s been consistent from the beginning, declared Friday. “The Biden administration has a moral obligation to give a full accounting: What is the exact number of Americans trapped in Afghanistan? What is the exact number of legal permanent residents? How many SIV allies? Without answering those questions, they’re just doing political propaganda.”
The Hill reported Thursday morning that “the White House is trying to move past the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by turning its attention to domestic priorities like President Biden’s economic agenda. . . . Biden allies think the public’s attention could shift back to domestic issues as soon as the end of the week, when the August jobs numbers from the Labor Department will offer a more fulsome picture of how the economic recovery has held up amid the surge of the delta variant of the coronavirus.”
CNN, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times — the latter ran three stories on the new Texas abortion law before a mention of Afghanistan on their front page — are obliging:
Mark it down, Thursday, September 2 is the day that vast swaths of the U.S. national media turned their attention away from the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan, and the Americans stranded there, and turned to domestic news stories.https://t.co/Qi2fWSrMz7 pic.twitter.com/md2ANiDRGl
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) September 2, 2021
Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency was destroyed by a hostage crisis involving about 50 Americans, and those were diplomats, not ordinary people disregarded in a chaotic evacuation from an enemy we fought for two decades.
“Carter’s entire foreign policy was upended by this. There is no parallel, except COVID or 9/11, of an all-consuming event people watched for 14 or 15 months,” John Podhoretz said on Friday’s Commentary podcast. “We are now talking about at least double that number…but we are somehow being told the number 100 isn’t large, when at the very least, it’s the rock bottom number of people trapped there. And we are not even talking about the tens of thousands who worked with our forces whom we’ve essentially given up on helping.”
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