Salem Political Snark

Marjorie Taylor Greene gives Joe Biden a gigantic gift

Watching last night's State of the Union address was highly pleasurable for me in several ways.

One, Biden gave a great speech with energy belying his 80 years. Two, ultra-MAGA-crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene gave Biden a great gift when she yelled "you lie" and other things at him while doing her best angry baboon imitation.

(To those who think it's insulting to baboons to pair them with Greene, the image popped up in my Twitter feed today, so complain to whoever came up with this inspired comparison -- which admittedly puts baboons in a bad light that they don't deserve.)

This was a truly memorable State of the Union address. Long-time observers of the ritual said that Biden's speech was the most confrontational in modern times, and maybe ever.

President Biden correctly recognized that while it was important to praise the bipartisanship that helped make his first two years such a legislative success, this is the beginning of what appears to be his reelection campaign, so the stark differences between how congressional Republicans and Democrats view our nation's problems and potential needed to be stressed.

Even so, the speech was shaping up to be fairly traditional until Greene and her MAGA cronies decided to ignore the advice of Speaker McCarthy to his caucus and act like jerks.

The impetus for their jerkiness, not that it takes much for the MAGA far-right to be pushed into this mode, was Biden absolutely correctly saying that some Republicans have called for the sunsetting of Medicare and Social Security, which would require that these essential entitlement programs be reauthorized by a Congress that currently can't do anything useful, given the new GOP majority in the House.

Gosh, where could Biden have gotten that sunsetting idea? Why, in part from Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who included it in his 12 point Rescue America plan that he fashioned when he was chair of the committee to elect Senate Republicans in the 2022 midterm election. 

(The GOP lost a Senate seat in that election, so obviously Scott didn't do very well.)

There it is, in the Government Reform & Debt section of Scott's plan:

Medicare and Social Security are federal legislation. So Biden was correct when he said that some congressional Republicans want to sunset these programs. And Greene's you lie outburst was wrong, which is par for the course in the world of Green's habitual purveyor of falsehoods.

But it got even better. Because Republicans at the State of the Union address kept complaining about Biden's accurate claim that some in the GOP want to sunset Social Security and Medicare. 

I loved it when Biden said that he admires conversions. Then he did some quick thinking and said that it sounds like congressional Republicans want to make sure that no cuts occur to Social Security and Medicare, that seniors will be protected.

That got a lot of applause, which meant that President Biden was able to negotiate an important aspect of upcoming budget talks with the GOP right in the middle of his State of the Union address. Now it will be virtually impossible for Republicans to try to make changes to Social Security and Medicare given how outraged they were at the very idea of this -- which, again, was part of Senator Scott's Rescue America plan.

Like most Democrats, I've been hoping that my party could find a younger alternative to Biden to run in the 2024 presidential election. I still lean that way, but Biden's masterful performance last night sure made me feel better about him. 

Whether he's able to keep up that level of energy in the coming election cycle remains to be seen. For now, what's clear is that he kicked the butt of Marjorie Taylor Greene, though she's so clueless, there's no way she'll ever understand how badly she got trounced by President Biden.

Biden's classified documents screwup irritates this Democrat

Even though I'm a proud member of the Democratic "tribe," I also believe that when my political party does something wrong, I should be almost as irritated as when Republicans do that thing.

I said almost because I'm a realist: even though it would be nice if I could be evenhanded when it comes to wrongdoing by Democrats and Republicans, the fact that I'm a Democrat means that I'm going to look somewhat more positively on screwups by my fellow Dems.

Which is how most parents look upon their children.

When your child gets into trouble, you're disturbed, but you know that they're basically a good kid. But if a child you don't know does the same thing, likely you'll be less forgiving.

Even so, I find it difficult to forgive President Biden for the discovery of classified documents both in a private office and in the garage of his Delaware home. Sure, there are important differences between the classified documents found in the possession of Biden and Trump.

Nonetheless, this is a huge gift to Republicans.

Just when the House GOP was looking all disorganized and chaotic following the 15 acrimonious votes needed to elect Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, Biden's classified documents scandal makes the Democratic occupant of the White House look all disorganized and chaotic. 

After the FBI raided Trump's Florida home in search of classified documents he refused to hand over, and Biden criticized Trump for being careless with these documents, it sure seems like people in Biden's orbit should have made sure that he didn't have classified documents squirreled away, either knowingly or unknowingly.

The first discovery of Biden documents in a private office struck me as disturbing, but not all that bad. Maybe a staff member carried a box into the office that Biden never looked into. But when more classified documents were found stored next to his 1967 Corvette, I felt that was inexcusable.

I'm not a highly organized person. But I'm familiar with what's in all of the boxes stored in our garage. It just seems difficult to believe that no one in the Biden family was aware of what was in the classified documents box (assuming it was a box).

I also don't like how Biden responded to a question about this.

There was one further, odd comment in an exchange with Peter Doocy of Fox News. 

Doocy asked Biden what he was “thinking” by having classified documents “next to your Corvette.” 

Biden shot back that he would speak more about the matter soon and added, “By the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. OK? So it’s not like it’s sitting out in the street.” 

Geez. Trump kept many of his classified documents in a locked storage room, and that came in for well-deserved criticism. So Biden shouldn't have implied that a locked garage is a proper repository for classified documents.

Hopefully Biden will handle this scandal better from now on.

It's great that he's being so cooperative with the Justice Department. I just wish Biden had been more honest and straightforward about how the classified documents came to be where they were found, apologizing for the screwup rather than making light of it in his Corvette comment.

Bring on higher gas prices, since it punishes Putin

Nobody likes to pay more for gasoline.

But we all should be pleased to do this when it keeps American money out of the hands of the Russian thug, Vladimir Putin, who is bombing residential areas in Ukraine mercilessly.

Today President Biden announced that the United States won't be importing Russian oil, which accounts for 3% of our oil supply. 

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine about two weeks ago, gas prices have risen considerably. I recall that the Shell station in south Salem where I usually fill up was charging about $3.95 a gallon pre-invasion. When I drove by today the price for regular was $4.45.

Rising prices makes many people feel this way when they pass by a gas station.

That's understandable.

Many people are living on a limited strict budget. Paying more for gas when you need your car to get to work hurts. Hopefully the Biden administration can find ways to help low-income people pay for gas until the price comes down.

Still, one thing is clear: Biden did the right thing.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine actually isn't a fight between those two nations. It is a fight between authoritarian tyrants who want to use military might to keep themselves in power and extend their control, and democracies who stand for the rule of international law and stable borders.

As President Zelensky of Ukraine has been saying, his country is battling for all of Europe, and indeed the world, against Putin's desire to restore the Soviet Union through military force. If he succeeds in taking over Ukraine, Putin and other authoritarian rulers will be emboldened to invade other sovereign nations.

Problem is, says Zelensky, only Ukrainians are fighting and dying in its war with Russia. So we Americans should be eager to do something much easier than what the brave Ukrainian people are enduring: pay more for gasoline. 

We've been spoiled by low gas prices. Europeans pay much more than we do. I recall seeing today that the equivalent price of a gallon of gas in Europe is $7.21. They'd view even $5/gallon as a bargain.

Of course, for a variety of reasons Europeans drive smaller cars that get better gas mileage. We've enjoyed such low gas prices for so long, purchases of large SUVs and pickup trucks have been strong. That's made us more dependent on fossil fuels, even as more people buy electric vehicles.

Sadly, even though Republicans have been calling for an end to importing Russian oil, thereby depriving Putin of money he needs to feed his war machine, they will shamelessly criticize Biden when gas prices rise further, as they probably will.

It needs to be remembered that American presidents have little control over gas prices.

We live in a free market economy when it comes to oil and natural gas. Prices are determined in large part by worldwide supply and demand, a point made in an excellent article in The Atlantic, "America Is the World's Largest Oil Producer. So Why is Losing Russia's Oil Such a Big Deal?"

Since 2018, the United States has been the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. On paper, “we are energy independent,” John Hess, the CEO of Hess, said yesterday at CERAWeek, the energy industry’s annual conference. But what a funny kind of independence it is.

As he spoke, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed U.S. gas prices to more than $4.10 a gallon, setting a new all-time high. Energy independence has neither insulated the economy from geopolitics nor provided the U.S. with more industrial capacity in an emergency. It certainly hasn’t helped slow down climate change.

Energy independence was not, let it be said, an altogether terrible idea. It was, like, fine. When oil prices leap worldwide, major oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are able to insulate their citizens from the shock.

For geological and political reasons, they maintain some spare capacity, that is, oil-pumping capacity that can be turned on and off within six months. They consider fossil-fuel production to be a question of national security, and they regulate it as such.

The United States does not take this approach to its fossil fuels. The federal government does not claim any right to the oil or gas under private land. It has no policy tool to quickly increase or decrease drilling.

...This means that although America may be “energy independent” on paper, American consumers have won no benefits from this independence, and American officials cannot assert this independence in any meaningful way. Market dynamics, not overzealous regulations, have imprisoned the industry.

...Energy independence was not an awful goal. But true independence cannot be achieved by the market alone. The U.S. ensures that its food supply, timberlands, and water quality are not administered solely by the market. That same philosophy can apply to two of its most important natural resources: its fossil fuels and its climate.

The first goal can be achieved through more aggressive management of the industry; the second, by a phaseout of fossil fuels altogether. Only through such stewardship can the United States secure the true dividends of prosperity and freedom.

With Ukraine, I'm becoming a progressive war hawk

It's sort of a weird feeling for me, wishing the United States would get more involved in a war after being opposed to the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan (I supported the initial push to get Bin Laden, but not the twenty years in Afghanistan afterward).

However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has pushed a warmonger button in my psyche. 

It's been infuriating to watch Putin's army bomb residential areas in Ukraine that have no military significance. I feel for the million or so Ukrainians who have fled their country after the Russian aggression. My heart aches to watch the brave Ukrainian fighters gradually get worn down by far superior Russian firepower.

Yes, it's wonderful that the United States and our European allies have been supplying Ukraine with much-needed military equipment, such as Javelin anti-tank and Stinger ground to air missiles. This isn't enough, though.

Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders have been begging for MiG fighter jets from NATO countries that Ukraine's pilots are familiar with and could fly immediately. So far they haven't gotten any, apparently because the countries that could supply them are worried that Putin will retaliate.

I understand why many believe the no-fly zone being pushed by Ukraine isn't a good idea. If the United States were to enforce a no-fly zone, we'd have to shoot down Russian planes violating the zone. That could lead to a war between two nuclear powers -- not a good thing.

However, a Reuters poll conducted the past two days found that about three-fourths of Americans support a no-fly zone over Ukraine. 

WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - A broad bipartisan majority of Americans think the United States should stop buying Russian oil and gas and work with NATO to set up "no-fly zones" to protect Ukraine from Russian air strikes, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on Friday.

The poll, conducted Thursday and Friday, suggests that U.S. outrage is growing over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which in recent days has increasingly involved Russian bombing of urban areas.

That puts pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden to take more aggressive actions against Moscow, although he has dismissed the notion of no-fly zones because of the risk of open conflict between NATO and Russian forces.

It was not clear if respondents who supported a no-fly zone were fully aware of the risk of conflict, and majorities opposed the idea of sending American troops to Ukraine or conducting air strikes to support the Ukrainian army.

Some 74% of Americans - including solid majorities of Republicans and Democrats - said the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine, the poll found.

An equally bipartisan 80% of Americans said the United States should stop buying Russian oil. The White House on Friday said it was weighing cuts to U.S. imports of Russian oil, though it is proceeding cautiously, concerned about a spike in gasoline prices that would add to high inflation.

Moreover, 81% of Americans think Washington should impose additional sanctions on Russia, up from 77% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday. Support for more sanctions was also bipartisan.

Some 77% of respondents said the United States should seize the assets of Russian oligarchs associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That's encouraging. Now President Biden has to put additional pressure on Putin to stop his war on the Ukrainian people. 

There's got to be steps in between what we're doing now and full-out war with Russia. It irks me that Belarus is openly fighting on the side of Russia, but supposedly if any NATO country fought on the side of Ukraine that would be a horrible provocation. 

As if Putin responds to anything except brute force. Putin likes to scare other nations with a threat to use his nuclear arsenal, but there's no evidence that Putin has a death wish -- for himself personally or for Russia. He's not going to start a nuclear war.

Putin got away with sending his Little Green Men, thinly disguised Russian soldiers, into Crimea in 2014. That led to him taking over that part of Ukraine. It sure seems like the United States or other NATO countries would be justified in sending Special Forces into Ukraine to aid in the fight against the Russian invasion.

Or, today I heard retired Colonel Alexander Vindman speak about how the NATO countries should set up massive staging areas for weapons needed by Ukraine just over the border of that country. He thought that large amounts of offensive weapons such as tanks and drones needed to be sent to Ukraine. 

If Russia succeeds in taking over Ukraine and installing a puppet government, then the priority would shift to supporting an insurgency in that country, as we did in Afghanistan after the Russians invaded that county.

So, yeah, I'm becoming a war hawk to a much greater degree than I could have imagined before Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Given the Reuters poll, it looks like I have a lot of company among both conservatives and progressives. 

There's no way I'm going to thank Putin for anything. But he has succeeded in bringing our country, and the world, together on supporting the Ukrainian people against his aggression.

Why I'm worried about Putin invading Ukraine

Most Americans don't seem to be very worried about the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, invading Ukraine, even though Putin has massed over a hundred thousand troops on the Ukraine border, along with everything needed to invade the country that used to be part of the Soviet Union.

But I'm deeply concerned. Here's some reasons.

First, being 73, I grew up during the height of the Cold War. Above-ground nuclear tests were being conducted in Nevada on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains where I lived in California. People were building bomb shelters and stockpiling supplies in case the United and Soviet Union started firing nuclear weapons at each other.

In 1962 an eighth-grade friend and I conducted a "Hines-Hart" poll asking our classmates if they thought a nuclear war would happen soon. I recall that most of them did. Fortunately, they were wrong.

But war with the Soviet Union was a lingering source of anxiety in the 1950's and 60's. I'd look around our concrete block house, trying to figure out where the safest place would be if radioactivity drifted over us following a nuclear exchange. 

So when I watched Bill Maher's HBO show last Friday, it was irritating to hear Maher say that he didn't think NATO was needed any more, since NATO was established to prevent the Soviet Union from attacking Europe, and the Soviet Union no longer existed. 

I yelled at the TV, "Bill, you idiot, Putin is trying to re-establish the Soviet Union by expanding Russia's sphere of influence in the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union! That's why NATO is needed now as much as it ever was."

Since Putin is making such a serious threat against Ukraine, which doesn't belong to NATO but has a halfway decent military, there seems little doubt that if NATO didn't exist, the small former Soviet block countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would be part of a reconstituted Soviet Union before too long.

Last night my wife and I finished watching Munich: The Edge of War on Netflix. It's a timely movie, having cogent lessons for the Ukraine crisis. 

In 1938 Hitler convinced Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, that all Germany wanted was some additional room for the German people to live in. So if Hitler could just take over a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, that's all he wanted, and peace would reign.

Of course, the peace only lasted a year. Then World War II broke out after Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939. 

Putin has already taken over part of eastern Ukraine via thinly-disguised "militia" backed by Russia. He also was able to annex the Crimean Peninsula area of Ukraine in 2014. So far Putin hasn't suffered serious consequences from either move, which gives him confidence he could get away with taking over all of Ukraine.

Biden is doing fairly well in managing the current Ukraine crisis.

However, it bothers me that the Biden administration seems overly concerned about provoking Putin by taking steps to admit Ukraine into NATO, which should have happened after 2014, and imposing tough sanctions on Russia now, rather than after he invades Ukraine. 

Neither the United States, nor the world, wants to see the Soviet Union come back to life under Putin. Well, let's make that most of the world. No doubt China and North Korea would like to see Putin take over Ukraine, as this would weaken U.S. influence and hurt Biden's already shaky presidency.

If Putin is able to invade Ukraine without Russia suffering truly horrible consequences, this will embolden other countries to try the same thing with weaker nearby nations. China already is making noises about taking Taiwan by force. 

If Putin gets away with invading Ukraine, China will be more likely to do the same with Taiwan. The world will be a much more dangerous place if national borders can be erased by whoever has a large enough military to do the erasing.

Hopefully my worrying about Ukraine is misplaced.

It just seems increasingly unlikely that Putin has gone through such a massive military buildup on Ukraine's border and now will simply walk away from that confrontation without getting major concessions in return -- which the United States correctly doesn't want to give Putin.

Here's my plan about how Biden can bounce back

Ten days ago I wrote about how bothered I am by how poorly Biden has been performing as president. Today I watched Meet the Press and saw that I'm not alone in being disappointed by Biden.

But after sharing some of the bad news on Meet the Press, I'm gong to light a Biden candle instead of cursing the darkness of his dismal poll results at this point in his presidency.

So scroll past the depressing (unless you're a Republican) photos I took of some survey results, and you'll find my prescription for how Biden can restore the mojo that progressives like me want him to possess.

OK, that's definitely ghastly. The groups that produced Biden's win over Trump now are souring on him.

It's possible to debate whether that's justified, since Republican obstructionism, along with Manchin and Sinema holding back voting rights legislation and the Build Back Better bill from within the Democratic Party, are a big part of the reason Biden hasn't had a political win for a while.

But politics isn't about fairness. It's about winning, while doing what's best for the country. So here's my plan for getting Biden out of the popularity black hole he's currently trapped in.

(1) Be much more forceful about tooting your own horn. It looks like Biden has started to do this. His recent press conference was a decent start. But Biden and the rest of his team need to shamelessly plug what's been accomplished through the Covid relief bills passed last year and the benefits the bipartisan infrastructure bill will bring, along with other administration actions.

(2) Go all out on combatting Covid. As the coronavirus goes, so will Biden's presidency and Democratic hopes in the November midterm election. It's good to see that Covid tests are becoming more available at no or little cost to people. This should have happened earlier, but better late than never. Call out Republican governors and judges who stand in the way of public health measures needed to get the coronavirus under control.

(3) Let Manchin write a scaled-down Build Back Better bill. Biden should forget about fulfilling every Democratic wish list. Whatever Joe Manchin wants in the Build Back Better bill, let him have it. The key thing is to preserve the half trillion dollars to fight climate change. Getting that done will go a long way toward pleasing progressives, independents, and young people concerned about global warming. Anything else is a bonus: lowering prescription drug prices, universal pre-kindergarten, etc.

(4) Get tough with Putin over Ukraine. After the not-so-good pullout from Afghanistan, it's important for Biden to look like a strong competent leader when it comes to foreign affairs. Today I saw reports that the United States is planning to back an insurgency in Ukraine if Russia invades the country, and will send troops to the Baltic nations that used to be part of the USSR. Good moves. Even better would be preventing an invasion through very tough specific threats to Putin about what will happen if he invades Ukraine. 

(5) Showcase Kamala Harris with voting rights. Biden picked a woman of color to be his vice-president. His approval rating is sinking with women and Blacks. Biden needs to elevate Harris to a much more prominent role in his administration. She's supposed to be working on voting rights, but Harris isn't very visible on this crucial issue.

Harris should have a press conference every couple of weeks where she lays out what the Biden administration is doing to counter Republican efforts at voter suppression and manipulation of election results. Not as good as a voting rights bill, but no bill is going to pass so long as Sinema and Manchin refuse to do away with or modify the Senate filibuster. 

I'm a loyal Democrat who's already tired of Joe Biden

Joe Biden was really appealing when the alternative was Donald Trump. But after a year of Biden's presidency, my attitude toward him ranges from grudging acceptance to outright irritation.

Today I'm at the bottom of my personal Joe Biden approval rating. And there's a good chance my mood is going to darken further.

I've got this theory -- not exactly original to me -- that a person's good qualities also are their bad qualities. It just depends on how those qualities are expressed, and their context.

Along with lots of other people, I relished having a calm, competent, low-key president in the White House after four years of Trumpian chaos. Now, though, those qualities are looking more like liabilities, especially since competent is fading away as a Biden descriptor.

My current gripe with Biden, and it's a significant one, is that he pretty much ignored voting rights legislation until very recently, when he gave a speech in Georgia about the urgent need for Congress to pass two voting rights bills.

Too late and too little, Joe. 

Today Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin both announced that they aren't willing to do away with the Senate filibuster even if that's necessary to pass voting rights legislation, which it definitely is. 

Also today, Sinema and Manchin met with Biden at the White House to discuss their position on the filibuster. So far there hasn't been any word that Biden changed their mind, probably because he didn't.

I get it that Sinema and Manchin are really difficult to deal with, being full of themselves, refusing to negotiate in an honest fashion, and uncaring of whether they're acting in the best interest of their constituents in Arizona and West Virginia.

Still, it sure seems like Biden has been weak in how he's interacted with them, choosing to play the role of Mr. Nice Guy rather than President Who Should Be Feared. 

Lyndon Johnson played that latter role well. So did Trump. Again, I don't want Biden to be Trump-lite, just that he display some of the aggression and passion that makes Trump beloved by his base.

Early on in January 2021, congressional Democrats said that voting rights bills would be a top priority. As Republicans in state after state passed their own legislation to make it harder to vote, especially for  black and brown people, voting rights should have risen to the top of Biden's agenda.

But it didn't. 

Covid relief bills did. Then the bipartisan infrastructure bill did. After that, the Build Back Better bill was pushed by Biden.

It made sense to focus on Covid given how the pandemic was ravaging our country. However, Biden botched the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which was supposed to go hand-in-hand with the Build Back Better bill -- social/climate change infrastrucure as opposed to physical infrastructure. 

Manchin and Sinema were heavily invested in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. That should have given Biden leverage for him to use in pressing for them to do a carve-out of the filibuster on voting rights legislation.

And leverage to get them to commit to supporting the Build Back Better bill. Now that bill is stuck, going nowhere fast. Biden seems to have given up on it after Manchin said he's done talking about it. 

Yet last year Biden cajoled progressive House Democrats to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which already had been approved by the Senate, when he assured them that Manchin had bought off on a framework for Build Back Better, so now the two bills could be decoupled.

Build Back Better contains half a billion dollars or so of vitally needed support for our country's efforts to combat global warming. 

So Biden is batting .000 on the two legislative areas that mean the most to me, and many other Democrats: voting rights and climate change. I've read that Manchin was willing to go along with a $1.8 trillion Build Back Better bill that included all that money to fight global warming.

Biden reportedly walked away from that agreement for some reason. Unforgivable. 

Since I'm 73, not a whole lot younger than Biden, it pains me to say that Biden is looking more and more to me like a kindly grandfather whose best days are behind him.

Sadly, he hasn't given Vice-President Harris much of a viable role in his administration, because while Harris has her own weaknesses, she's more energetic and a much better speaker.

My mood toward Biden definitely would perk up if somehow he could pull off a win on either voting rights or Build Back Better.

Right now, though, it looks like neither legislation is going to pass. Since Republicans are favored to take back the House in November of this year, this means Biden has little time left to get his first term agenda through Congress.

And I haven't even mentioned the failure of Biden and his fellow Democrats to do anything about police reform and immigration reform. No wonder Biden's approval rating is so low. When he's losing many members of his own party, there's no way to go but down.

Painful truth: Afghanistan was a mostly useless war

Recently I've seen interviews with veterans of the twenty-year Afghanistan war where the interviewer says at some point, "Thank you for your service; it wasn't in vain."

Not true. It was mostly in vain.

So were the 2,448 deaths of American service members, the 66,000 deaths of Afghan military and police, the 47,245 deaths of Afghan civilians, the 444 deaths of aid workers, and the 44 deaths of journalists.

I realize that it's really tough to admit that a war which cost the United States over 2 trillion dollars and caused so many deaths was a big mistake -- at least after Osama bin Laden had left the country and Al-Qaeda no longer had a viable presence in Afghanistan, which occurred soon after our 2001 invasion.

So virtually all that money and all those deaths went toward nation-building.

Just as in Iraq, the United States is great at winning wars against minimal opposition. We're lousy at nation-building, in large part because we believe that it's possible to remake other countries in our own image. 

Trump wisely decided to pull American forces out of Afghanistan. Biden wisely decided to go along with Trump's decision. Yet supporters of a perpetual war in Afghanistan now are criticizing Biden for doing what most Americans support: getting out.

It doesn't make sense to argue that even though the Afghanistan war was a failure, the contributions of the American military were a success. 

Sure, it's human nature to see a glass as half full rather than half empty. But when a war is almost entirely useless, those who fought that war almost entirely were doing something equally useless. 

Obviously almost all of the Americans who served in Afghanistan did so with bravery and honor. However, so did almost all of the Confederate forces who fought in the Civil War. This doesn't make the Confederate cause anything other than what it was: a failed attempt to secede from the Union.

Undoubtedly some good came out of the Civil War, though I'm unsure what that might me. Some technological advances, probably. Some good also resulted from the Afghanistan war.

However, if Americans had been asked in 2001 if they'd be willing to fight a twenty-year war that resulted in Afghan women and girls having considerably more rights, and Afghanistan getting roads, schools, wells, and other infrastructure built, few of our citizens would have said that'd be worth thousands of American lives and several trillion dollars -- especially if the end result was the Taliban returning to power.

The plain fact is that sometimes a lot of effort goes into a cause that results in failure.

Everybody has experienced this in their own life to a greater or lesser extent. Countries experience this also. Witness the United States and the Vietnam War. Witness Germany/Japan and the Second World War. 

Sacrifices frequently are made for a lost cause. This doesn't take away from the nobility of those who made the sacrifices, because it is impossible to know that a cause is lost until that happens. 

Which is the case in Afghanistan.

Veterans of that war are entitled to look for benefits from their service. But history can't be rewritten to make those veterans feel better. For most of those twenty years, the Afghanistan war was a mistake. Our military and political leaders misled the public about how the war was going, just as happened with the Vietnam War.

Now President Biden is telling the truth to the American people. Good for him. That truth about a mostly useless war has been a long time coming.

I'll end by copying in a series of tweets that do a great job of briefly explaining the Afghanistan war and the current uproar over the American pullout. 

Biden critics are ignoring key Afghanistan facts

It's pile-on Biden time. Naturally Republicans are criticizing how the Afghanistan pullout is being handled. That's to be expected.

But many Democrats, along with mainstream media like CNN, MSNBC, and Washington Post/New York Times opinion writers, also are falling all over themselves in their eagerness to roast Biden over the Afghanistan coals.

I find this unfair.

Like I said a few days ago, "Afghanistan is horrible, but Biden is doing right thing." What I've learned since only makes me more confident that while our withdrawal hasn't been perfect -- what in life is? -- there's little evidence that the Biden administration has made a major blunder.

Talking heads on the cable news networks have been blasting Biden for ignoring intelligence that supposedly pointed to a rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban as the August 31 deadline for withdrawing all American forces neared.

Thus, they claimed, Biden should have been getting American civilians and Afghans who helped us out of the country much sooner, given that intelligence.

Only problem is, today General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said something quite different.

The top US general said repeatedly on Wednesday that he had not seen any intelligence assessments suggesting that Afghanistan would collapse as quickly as it did.

"There was nothing that I or anybody else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said at a Pentagon press briefing, his first since the Taliban seized control of Kabul.

He told reporters that "there are not reports that I am aware of that predicted a security force of 300,000 would evaporate in 11 days, from 6 August to 16 August, with the capture of 34 provinces and the capital city of Kabul," explaining that no one saw an army of that size falling apart that fast.

So there goes the basis for criticizing Biden because he failed to heed intelligence reports warning of a very rapid Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. If Biden was told that the country wouldn't fall to the Taliban for many weeks or months, it makes sense that he would wait to get all Americans and Afghan refugees out of Afghanistan.

After all, the Kabul airport would still be in the hands of the Afghan government, as would major cities and highways. 

In an interview today Biden said something that strikes me as probably true: no matter when the American withdrawal happened, there would be chaos.

That's the normal state of affairs in Afghanistan, chaos. It's been that way for the twenty years since we invaded in 2001. It's been that way for a lot longer, also. This is a tribal nation. Afghans don't trust the corrupt central government. They are used to looking out for themselves. Their allegiance is to their tribe, not Afghan leaders.

We Americans tend to look at the world through our own nationalistic eyes. Since we would fight to defend our country, we assume that people in other nations would do the same thing. Bad assumption.

Today the New York Times has a fascinating story, "Collapse and Conquest: The Taliban Strategy That Seized Afghanistan." Basically, the Taliban negotiated terms of surrender with Afghan commanders, working their way up from check points and small towns to provincial capitals. 

When they got Afghan forces to surrender in exchange for money, power, and not being killed, the Taliban acquired valuable military equipment and momentum that made it easier to control more territory. The process ended with the Taliban entering Kabul without having to fight for the Afghan capital.

Who among the Biden critics saw this coming? Probably no one. According to General Milley, the intelligence community didn't. At least, not as a likely scenario, since the rapid collapse of the Afghan military was just one possible outcome among many. 

When something bad has already happened, it's easy for Monday morning quarterbacks to rewind the tape and point to things that supposedly were obvious. However, Afghanistan obviousness is anything but. The Biden critics weren't able to predict what was going to happen there ahead of time, but now they're expert in playing the "what should have been done" game.

Another gripe I have is that I'm not hearing these critics explain how Biden is supposed to make sure that all Americans and refugees under the SIV (special immigrant visas) program get out of Afghanistan. All they do is say, "Biden had better make sure that no one is left behind."

OK. That's a laudable goal. I hope it is achieved. 

But the Taliban control all of Afghanistan other than the Kabul airport. Hopefully the Taliban will allow Americans and the Afghans who helped us during the past 20 years to enter the airport. This is a daunting challenge, though. 

The United States isn't going to send our 6,000 or so soldiers at the airport out in vehicles like military Uber drivers to find people who need to be airlifted out of Afghanistan. As someone I heard interviewed today said, that would risk attacks or ambushes. 

Yes, the folks who are rewinding the tape like to say that if Biden had started the airlift sooner, it would have been much easier for the people who needed to get out to make it to the airport. That's a valid criticism, since there's reason to believe that the Biden administration followed in the footsteps of the Trump administration by slow walking the SIV program. 

Again, though, this problem only became crystal clear in hindsight. If the Afghan government and military hadn't collapsed much quicker than anyone expected, flights out of the country could have occurred over several months rather than several weeks.

What's happening in Afghanistan right now illustrates how limited the human ability to forecast the future is. Biden wasn't referring to chaos theory when he spoke about chaos, but that theory is very much relevant here.

Small changes in initial conditions can have huge nonlinear effects. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can help produce a hurricane many hundreds of miles away in Florida, all the small things happening in Afghanistan prior to Biden announcing his pullout timetable led to unexpected large events months later.

Life is uncertain. We can't control much with any sort of exactitude. So cut Biden some slack, critics. You couldn't have done any better than he did with the Afghanistan pullout. 

63% of Republicans believe Biden won because of voter fraud

Today is the six month anniversary of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol where Trump supporters tried to overturn Biden's free and fair election as president of the United States.

Chris Hayes marked the occasion on his MSNBC show by discussing with guests the upcoming special House committee that will investigate the insurrection, and the continuing Republican inability to recognize a simple truth.

Biden won the election fair and square. 

No reasonable person doubts this. The Trump campaign filed about sixty lawsuits challenging the counting of votes in a number of swing states. They lost all but one, and that one had no bearing on the outcome in Pennsylvania.

Recounts showed no problems. The handful of voter fraud cases that came to light all involved attempts to illegally cast a ballot for Trump. Independent fact checkers agreed that Biden won legitimately.

Yet Hayes shared the results of a June 2021 Monmouth University poll on his show.

Big Lie, for sure. I'd go further and call it the Gigantic Lie. Or the Gigantic Dangerous Lie.

Hayes viewed the 63% of Republicans wrongly believing Biden won because of voter fraud as more disturbing than the fact that 32% of Americans believe this lie.

A third of Americans is a distinct minority. Republicans aren't going to win elections with that level of support.

But since almost two-thirds of Republicans believe the Gigantic Dangerous Lie, and the GOP controls many states, there's a lot of pressure on Republican elected officials to go along with Trump's bogus claim of voter fraud, even though many or most of them must know this is a crock of shit. 

So in the 2022 midterm election and the 2024 presidential election, there's a high likelihood of Republicans not only suppressing votes, which would be bad enough, but going much farther and taking steps to overturn the results of Democratic victories.

That would move the United States much closer to autocracy. We'd become a failed democracy if Republican-controlled states chose a different slate of electors after the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate was declared the winner in those states.

This prospect is beyond scary. It's terrifying.

As was noted on Chris Hayes' show today, overturning an election goes far beyond the usual messing around with voter suppression through gerrymandering, purging voter registrations, limiting voting options, and such.

The United States would be entering full-on authoritarianism if Republicans overturned a Democratic win in the 2024 presidential election because their base wrongly believed that Biden won in 2020 because of voter fraud.

It's crazy that the Monmouth University discussion of the poll results says that this belief among Republicans hasn't changed since the November 2020 election. In other words, they've continued to believe Trump's lie even after courts and election officials confirmed Biden's win in the months after the election.

One-third (32%) of Americans continue to believe that Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was due to voter fraud – a number that has not budged since the November election. At first glance in the crosstabs, it looks like the number of “Republicans” who believe this has been trending down while the number of independents who agree has ticked up.

However, this appears to be a product of a shift in how Republicans identify themselves, with some moving their self-affiliation from being partisan to being an “independent” who leans partisan.

When all Republican identifiers and leaners are combined, the number who believe Biden won only because of voter fraud has been fairly stable (63% now, 64% in March, 69% in January, and 66% in November). Furthermore, 14% of the American public say they will never accept Biden as president, including 3 in 10 (29%) Republicans and Republican leaners.

“The continuing efforts to question the validity of last year’s election is deepening the partisan divide in ways that could have long-term consequences for our Democracy, even if most Americans don’t quite see it that way yet,” said Murray.

Congressional Democrats need to get off their butts (I'm talking you, Senators Manchin and Sinema) and pass strong voting rights legislation ASAP. Saving our democracy is way more important than preserving the filibuster.

Here's a video of today's All In With Chris Hayes show that starts with the segment where Hayes presents the poll results.