Chanting ‘Death to America’ Is the New ‘How Ya Doin?’
CNN’s Clarissa Ward, reporting live from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, says the locals are chanting “Death to America” and yet “seem friendly at the same time.”
“Please, come in. May I take your coat? All the better for the knife to slip between your shoulder blade.”
Snark aside, before we really get into this one, absolutely no one should disregard or dismiss even for a moment Ward’s bravery.
She’s not only reporting from a warzone, Ward is reporting from a losing warzone. Ward is a woman reporting from a losing warzone controlled by anti-Western Islamic zealots who have been known to rape female reporters for sport.
So let’s give Ward the respect that she’s due.
Still, it’s difficult to understand this statement she made — unless you have some small understanding of just how strange warzones are.
“They’re chanting ‘Death to America’ but seem friendly at the same time. It’s just bizarre.”
Indeed.
Everything coming out of Kabul these last 48 hours is either bizarre or awful or both.
Perhaps not as strange though as the non-response from the Biden Administration.
Recommended: Where Is Joe Biden?
While Presidentish Joe Biden will end his self-imposed internal exile to address the nation at 3:45pm Eastern on Monday, the best the White House could fiddle to while Kabul burned on Sunday was this gobsmackingly tone-deaf photo that has tongues wagging around the world.
This morning, the President and Vice President met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul. pic.twitter.com/U7IpK3Hyj8
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 15, 2021
ASIDE: I’ll leave it to future historians and philosophers to determine whether a photo can be tone-deaf or whether tongues can wag anywhere further than about the middle of the chin.
There’s Biden, alone in his shirtsleeves at a massive desk, watching TV.
Even Newsweek sat up and noticed:
Shortly after the photo was uploaded, a host of accounts noticed an error among the row of clocks on the wall, namely in the time difference between London and Moscow. The time for London read 16:29 (4:29 p.m.) and 19:29 (7:29 p.m.) for Moscow, giving it a three-hour difference.
While Moscow is three time zones ahead of London, the U.K. is currently observing British Summer Time, meaning its clocks have gone forward by an hour and will not go back until October.
Was this a bad photoshop? An innocent mistake? Real or fake, who in the White House thought that an old guy in a big room, watching TV with nothing but 15 or 16 unused notepads for company, was a strong image to send out during the rout of Kabul?
Whatever the case, the photo itself is just as bizarre as Ward saying that the Taliban seem friendly.
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