I’ll admit Biden isn’t a great public speaker and his age shows in his speech. But he’s mentally sharp af. When he was exiting a press conference and Fox troll Peter Doocy yelled out “What did you and Putin talk about?” he came right back with “You. He sends his best.”
If that had been me,(or most people, I suspect), it would’ve taken me a day to come up with that, and I’d be forever kicking myself for missing it. He’s sharp.
And good for him for actually leading his military instead of letting the Pentagon talk him into doing the opposite of what he wanted to do.
The world is a vast and complex place, and there aren’t any policy decisions that have zero negative consequences for everyone in the world - if there were perfect solutions to everything governing would be easy. And Republicans certainly should be familiar with the concept of acceptable losses, having decided that 200,000 lives* was an acceptable price for some minor mitigation ( at best) of the economic damage wrought by the pandemic.
Yes, the early days of the evacuation were a total bungle, the failure to predict the fall of Kabul was a massive intelligence failure and I really think a serious investigation is in order. The buck may stop with Joe Biden, but the buck goes a lot of places before it gets to him and I’m concerned about the lingering aftereffects of the last four years of maladministration. Many of our government agencies were run by people actively working against the mission of the agency, and Trump probably managed to embed a lot of his people in non-political positions. One criticism that I do have of Biden is that he is trying so hard to not be Trump that he’s left a lot of people in place that I think are corrupted and should be replaced. Chris Wray, for one, but that’s a topic for another post.
- I’m being very fair here, I’m using author Michael Lewis’s estimate of the amount of lives lost due to substandard management of the pandemic - a number he derived by comparing the US loss of live to that of other developed countries. Lewis’s estimate was actually 180,000 but the book was published before the last wave.