And it is important to remember that it was not to honor Trump that that agreement was followed. The Taliban had agreed to stop attacking our forces, as long as we left the country on a certain timetable. Biden extended that time table for a few months as it was, which could be seen as being a bit risky, but worked out.
If Biden had rescinded the deal, as Trump did with many Obama era deals, then it would have real consequences. Our military forces in Afghanistan would be under attack.
Trump hurt out country, our allies, and the world at large when he cancelled deals just out of spite for those who had made them. I am glad that Biden did not cancel the deal, even though it was certainly a pretty one sided deal where Trump handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban, as it would have meant more deaths of our troops.
As I said above, there are things that Biden could have done a lot better with regard to the Afghanistan withdrawal, the current border crisis, etc and things to legitimately criticise him for. But it’s difficult to even have those conversations because we’re too busy dealing with the firehose of excrement the right keep spraying everything with. When 99% of arguments are made in bad faith, it’s hard to muster the energy for the good faith ones.
Democrats and Independents are going to fluctuate in their opinions of Biden over the varying course of events, as is only reasonable, while Republicans are going to perpetually try to paint him as a total disaster merely because he’s a Democrat, as is only Republican.
The difference is that in your camp, the wingnut flank is actually running the camp. (Maybe not quite so much in Canada, except with regard to disastrous Conservative COVID policies which your leaders at least have had the sense to apologize for, but definitely in the US.)
I like to think that I deal with Sam on an fair, rational basis, and vice versa. But then he says something like this:
“Hey, that’s what everyone did with the Mueller results. That investigation was going to bring down Trump and everyone around him. Instead, a couple of flunkies got dinged on process violations, and not much else. This could end up the ssme way.”
It makes me realize there simply is no sane, objective, rational way of dealing with him. His grasp of objective facts, like that 34 guilty verdicts is “a couple”, that the lead foreign policy advisor, a campaign chair, a national security advisor, and his advisor are just “flunkies”, and major financial crimes, lying to investigators, identity theft, witness tampering, and campaign finance laws are just “process violations” is just so twisted by his hatred of liberals that there is no possibility of finding common ground.
Sometimes Sam is able to put aside the sniping and cheap insults and deal with the actual issues, but then you realize he is completely unable to deal with objective facts in a rational way. It’s kinda sad.
I think part of the explanation is that the sources that he relied upon in the past have moved to more and more irrational and outright nutty stuff. They used to be merely biased, but now the sources are just spewing outright garbage.
Sam still relies on these sources and has not noticed that when he repeats what they are telling him, it’s becoming more and more batshit insane.
It’s a bit of confirmation bias - the sites that he gets his info from tend to mirror his own beliefs…
Combined with the frog in the boiling water meme. The sites he gets his info from have slowly… slowly moved into crazy nutbar foaming at the mouth territory so subtly that he thinks that they have stayed the same and everyone else has veered far to the left.
So his sites report stuff that is just not based in reality, but for Sam, THAT IS the reality, and everyone else must simply be in denial, or a communist.
Four-flushing is a poker cheat technique, where you’ll claim to win the pot with a flush, and display your four hearts, showing only enough of your ten of diamonds to demonstrate that, yup, you have five red cards, all right.
