Nobody Cares Who Lost Afghanistan It's not a political liability for Joe Biden - Bill Scher

[JoanofArgh]

Link to tweet

?s=20


Reagan's approval stayed steady after the Lebanon withdrawal

Ford's approval went up after the Fall of Saigon

JFK's approval was stratospheric after Bay of Pigs

Why Biden's fate likely isn't tied to Afghanistan. My
@monthly
latest:



“We did train—and there was no attention paid to this—our army had a unit in there training,” the president said, “and made a very capable military.” But “some units of the army refused to take up arms against some of their same ethnic background, or religious background.” And so “it was agreed that there was no longer any point… and we withdrew.”

That isn’t President Joe Biden in his Monday address about the Afghanistan withdrawal. It’s President Ronald Reagan in his April 1984 press conference after the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon. Seven months later, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide.

The only difference between what Reagan said in April 1984 and what Biden said Monday is that Biden put it even more straightforwardly than the president remembered as the Great Communicator. “The Afghan military collapsed,” Biden said,

It’s a cold political truth that voters don’t punish American presidents for policy failures beyond American borders so long as the failures don’t hurt Americans directly. Even in the 1952 election, when Dwight D. Eisenhower famously echoed Sen. Joe McCarthy’s accusation that the Democrats “lost” China, his knockout blow against Adlai Stevenson wasn’t that half a billion people in a far-off country were now subject to Communist rule. It was that nearly two million U.S. soldiers fought in Korea, and more than 36,000 of them died there. Ike pledged to bring the troops home.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/08/18/nobody-cares-who-lost-afghanistan/

[gratuitous]

1. Is it possible that war isn't as popular as we're told it is?

Would the popular media and the generals lie to us???

[NCDem47]

2. Yes, but....

There was no FOX News, OANN, Newsmax, Internet or literally HUNDREDS of RW radio stations at those times.

[JoanofArgh]

3. True but people who watch those stations aren't ever voting for a Democrat anyway

and some of the stuff I'm seeing on NBC, MSNBC and CBS is every bit as hyberbolic and bad as Fox. We'll see.

[IcyPeas]

4. I agree. heck, CNN didn't even exist until 1980 and how many had cable then?

most of us watched regular local news. they weren't opinion shows like we have now.

[JoanofArgh]

8. NBC Nightly News was every bit as bad when I watched it Tuesday night on Biden and

Afghanistan . The premise of the article is if it doesn't affect Americans directly, they don't care that much.

[Sympthsical]

5. It'll be a bump by 2024

I doubt it'd make much difference either way.

2022 may be a somewhat different story.

We just have to see how it all falls out.

[Treefrog]

9. I agree.

Clinton didn’t suffer from the Somalia fiasco.

This debacle is a damn shame, but it won’t hurt him.

[inwiththenew]

6. None of those Presidents had to contend with the ratings driven 24 hours new channels

That love nothing more than wall to wall coverage of bad news. How big of an issue should Hillary Clinton's emails have been? How big of an issue did the media make them into with their constant coverage of every little thing about them like it was a smoking gun?

[arlyellowdog]

7. If someone is watching FOX or OAN or Newsmax

They don’t like Biden. My millennial kids want out of Afghanistan. The ones who went because of the patriotic fever after 9/11 are disgusted. They worked as soldiers and the Afghanistan soldiers just took and did nothing. The ones who didn’t go thought the war was stupid years ago. Generation Z couldn’t care less about Afghanistan. People care about Covid and jobs here in America.

[Turbineguy]

10. Conservatives are jawboning "INFLATION"

and crashing the markets to change the subject.