Lederman was hardly the only media sycophant looking for ways to justify the actions of the president he and so many others had taken such pains to put into office.
Like the President himself, she appears to have had no regrets about the Afghan pullout.
He’s like the farmer who, asked for directions to a neighboring farm, replies: “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” Very helpful, that is—at least in absolving Biden of any blame for the fiasco and shifting it onto his predecessors.
And yet the attentive might have noticed that there was also, for the first time since the President became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination 18 months ago, at least an implied note of criticism of him in quite a lot of the media’s coverage of the “pullout”—especially that which comes in the form of broadcast images of obvious human tragedy to which questions of “how we got here” are irrelevant.
He writes that, “on Afghanistan, Joe Biden in effect set out to test how much shameless incompetence and dishonesty the media would accept. The answer? Not nearly enough. The press is blatantly biased and has become even more so over time, repeatedly propagating false narratives that have shredded its credibility. Still, there are limits beyond which even it can’t be pushed.”
Actually, according to Eric, everything in Kabul is hunky-dory just now.
“America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has yet to cost our nation a single casualty,” he wrote—obviously, before Thursday’s bombing at the Kabul airport killed twelve U.S. Marines and a Navy medic among other victims.
“Evacuations of U.S. citizens and allies from Kabul’s airport are proceeding at a faster pace than the White House had promised, or than its critics had deemed possible. Afghanistan’s decades-long civil war has reached a lull, if not an end. On the streets of Kabul, ‘order and quiet’ have replaced ‘rising crime and violence.’ Meanwhile, the Taliban is negotiating with former Afghan president Hamid Karzai over the establishment of ‘an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans’.”
In other words, what’s not to like? In his view, it’s only the nasty, biased, right-wing media that would have you believe that there’s anything “disastrous” or “humiliating” to be seen here.
It’s true that this view of the matter is not a common one in the media. But as a long-time observer of their ways, I’m a bit more cynical than Lowry is about their new-found love of telling truth to (Democratic) power.
The eight reasons, however, really boil down to one: that you can’t spin a military defeat—especially one in which the defeated are visible to news cameras—to make it look like victory.
For more important to the media mandarins even than their pro-Biden sentiments are their anti-American ones—and especially their permanent opposition to anything that looks like American military adventurism against the world’s bad guys.
They may not be overt about it, but in their hearts they delight in American defeats—as they did back in 1975 at the similarly sudden and chaotic American exit from Vietnam. Why? Because America’s military humiliation always equals, in direct proportion, their own vindication, and that of their reflexive anti-war bias. It’s an opportunity for one big I-told-you-so that they will never be able to pass up, even to please a media darling like Joe Biden.
“America’s Afghan War: A Defeat Foretold?” read the headline. “Recent history suggests that it is foolish for Western powers to fight wars in other people’s lands and that the U.S. intervention was almost certainly doomed from the start.” See? We told you so!
I don’t doubt that the media will smooth things over with President Biden in the weeks to come—at least if he isn’t so fatally weakened, politically, by then that they decide to turn on him again and cut him loose, permanently, from their good graces.
They may even come around to Levitz’s view that there was nothing so very bad about a Taliban take-over in Afghanistan after all—particularly if the news cameras are kicked out before the warlords get down to the serious business of reprisals against the remaining American allies and ancillaries.
But the media won’t forget to paste in their scrapbooks yet another demonstration, at least in their own eyes, of their bedrock conviction that America and America’s war-making power can never, ever, be a force for good in the world.
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