Excellent Links

Late Night Open Thread: Proud Boy Chairman’s New Performance Piece, Blazing Jockstrap

by Anne Laurie| September 11, 20211:50 am| 32 Comments

This post is in: domestic terrorists, Excellent Links, Investigations Into Violent Extremist Attacks, Open Threads, Assholes

??Exclusive
‘Felony territory. Not just regular felony, like a serious felony’: What the Proud Boys leader told the group in private https://t.co/v83cIAmoLc @AramRoston reports https://t.co/Mxas8mEb1B

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 10, 2021

I always picture Proud Boy founder & Canadian wannabe-Trump Gavin McInnes as the lead in his own bargain-basement version of Young Frankenstein, and Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio makes an all-too-convincing knockoff of Marty Feldman’s Igor. Abby Normal?

Impossible to better Wonkette Liz Dye’s explanation of Tarrio’s latest fumble:

Crafty Proud Boy Leader Records His Own Witness, Umm, Managementhttps://t.co/EJRkPqbXyC by @5DollarFeminist

— Wonkette (@Wonkette) September 10, 2021

Everyone’s favorite Afro-Cuban white nationalist Aladdin aficionado is back in the news this week with a hilarious scoop from Reuters about Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio. King Derp is currently cooling his heels in a DC jail serving a 155-day sentence for stealing a Black Lives Matter sign off a church on December 12 and coming into the District with an illegal high-capacity magazine. But over the summer, he was flapping his stupid yap to his buddies about presenting a united front against prosecutors seeking to flip Capitol Riot defendants against each other.

Thanks to his legal issues, Tarrio was barred from DC on January 6. But his face-licking Proud Boy pals were out in force, with defendants Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Charles Donohoe, and Zachary Rehl leading a crowd toward the Capitol, according to videotape presented by prosecutors. Which is how those four fine specimens wound up in the hoosegow in July, facing conspiracy charges.

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Late Night Open Thread: Proud Boy Chairman’s New Performance Piece, <em>Blazing Jockstrap</em>Post + Comments (32)

Legal Permanent Residence: ‘This Could Be the Year’

by Anne Laurie| September 8, 20216:36 pm| 166 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Immigration, Proud to Be A Democrat

This could be the year.

“This is the best chance we have,” Schumer told the Post. “We’re fighting every day to make it happen.”

In Schumer’s Brooklyn neighborhood, and in migrant communities across the U.S., hopes that Dems can deliver on immigration https://t.co/4DbjHVucFS

— Maria Sacchetti (@mariasacchetti) September 5, 2021

There’s so much needs to be fixed! From the Washington Post:

… The fates of approximately 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally are in the hands of the U.S. Senate, where Schumer is leading Democrats in a precarious bid to pass a budget that would introduce sweeping changes to health care, the tax code and education. And it would grant “lawful permanent status” to undocumented immigrants, putting them on the path to U.S. citizenship.

Schumer said in an interview that he hopes to cover as many undocumented immigrants as possible in the $3.5 trillion budget plan that Senate Democrats adopted last month. Lawmakers and legislative aides are furiously working to produce drafts of the bill for the caucus to review by Sept. 15.

“This is the best chance we have,” Schumer said. “We’re fighting every day to make it happen.”

The House passed a pair of bills in March that would have legalized millions of immigrants, but those measures had little hope in the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats are divided 50-50 and bills need 60 votes to pass. But the Senate can pass a budget bill with a simple majority, using an arcane legislative procedure called “reconciliation,” which must meet strict standards policed by the Senate parliamentarian and survive the political infighting that has already begun. The vice president breaks the tie.

Passage is far from assured, but Democrats unanimously adopted the budget plan hours after they voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and progressive Democrats say they will not vote for one without the other.

The Democrats’ budget resolution instructed the Senate Judiciary Committee to write legislation that would create a path to legal residency for “qualified” immigrants. Among those fighting to be included in that category, which has not been defined, are “dreamers,” who arrived in this country as children; immigrants with “temporary protected status” because of wars or disasters in their homelands; farmworkers; and the pandemic’s essential workers. Many have lived here for years, even decades.

“Schumer is the hombre. He’s the guy,” said Erik Villalobos, a communications manager for the National TPS Alliance, which represents thousands of immigrants with temporary protected status who are unable to apply for citizenship. “All this depends on him.”…

Schumer has been trying to pass an immigration bill since he helped to broker the last major amnesty in 1986, when he was a young congressman from Brooklyn sharing a cockroach-infested apartment on the Hill with another negotiator, then-Rep. Leon Panetta (D-Calif.). In part because of Schumer’s skill at reaching a compromise, Republicans and Democrats ultimately voted to grant legal residency to 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants and President Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law…

Legal Permanent Residence: ‘This Could Be the Year’Post + Comments (166)

Labor Day, Every Day: Some Excellent Reads

by Anne Laurie| September 6, 202112:30 pm| 24 Comments

This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links

There are 10 million job openings, yet more than 8.4 million unemployed are still actively looking for work. There’s a big mismatch at the moment between the jobs available and what workers want. https://t.co/9rdIjHaq5A

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 4, 2021

Mysteriously, it turns out that human workers are not interchangeable widgets, little biological lego bricks:

… The job market looks, in some ways, like a boom-time situation. Business owners complain they can’t find enough workers, pay is rising rapidly, and customers are greeted with “please be patient, we’re short-staffed” signs at many stores and restaurants.

But the nation remains in the midst of a deadly pandemic with covid-19 hospitalizations back at their highest rates since January. The surge is weighing on the labor market again, with a mere 235,000 jobs added in August. There are still 5 million fewer jobs compared to before the pandemic, reflecting ongoing problems, including child care as some schools and day cares shut down again from outbreaks…

At heart, there is a massive reallocation underway in the economy that’s triggering a “Great Reassessment” of work in America from both the employer and employee perspectives. Workers are shifting where they want to work — and how. For some, this is a personal choice. The pandemic and all of the anxieties, lockdowns and time at home have changed people. Some want to work remotely forever. Others want to spend more time with family. And others want a more flexible or more meaningful career path. It’s the “you only live once” mentality on steroids. Meanwhile, companies are beefing up automation and redoing entire supply chains and office setups.

The reassessment is playing out in all facets of the labor market this year, as people make very different decisions about work than they did pre-pandemic. Resignations are the highest on record — up 13 percent over pre-pandemic levels. There are 4.9 million more people who aren’t working or looking for work than there were before the pandemic. There’s a surge in retirements with 3.6 million people retiring during the pandemic, or more than 2 million more than expected. And there’s been a boost in entrepreneurship that has caused the biggest jump in years in new business applications…

There is a fundamental mismatch between what industries have the most job openings now and how many unemployed people used to work in that industry pre-pandemic. For example, there are 1.8 million job openings in professional and business services and fewer than 925,000 people whose most recent job was in that sector. Leisure and hospitality, as well as retail and wholesale trade, also have more openings than prior workers, and many workers who lost jobs in those industries have indicated they don’t want to return.

There’s a similar mismatch in education and health services, where there are 1.7 million job openings and only 1.1 million people whose last job was in that sector…

Nationwide, most industries have more job openings than people with prior experience in that sector, Labor Department data show. That’s a very different situation than after the Great Recession, when the number of unemployed far outstripped jobs available in every sector for years. To find enough workers, companies may need to train workers and entice people to switch careers, a process which generally takes longer, especially in fields that require special licenses…

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This thread (read the whole thing!) is… illuminating. And terrifying:

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A brief thread on this, using my own place of employment (a restaurant in a fancy hotel, part of a multi-billion dollar hotel group) as a case study.
Currently we’re only open 4 days a week because we’re short-staffed. Why are we short-staffed? Well… https://t.co/oNrK1NrVX4

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) September 4, 2021

But the policy is good, in theory. In practice, they've chosen to implement it by…forcing the few people who do still live here after a year and a half to *reapply for their jobs and pass a full background check.* Which takes weeks, during which time many people find a new job!

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) September 4, 2021

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I hate to push two paywalled articles in one post, but Maahdy is a good interview:

“We have this unique opportunity to make some major changes in the workforce and come back STRONGER.” 💪

Read this great @WashingtonPost discussion with @SecMartyWalsh on the state of American labor and what the future may hold.https://t.co/kARWKKeQTS

— The Building Trades (@NABTU) September 1, 2021

… You’re leading the Department of Labor at a major inflection point for the country, with people getting back to work after so many lost jobs during the pandemic — and with the way we work potentially reshaped by the experience. What do you see as the opportunities or as your central mandate in this moment?

This is such a huge opportunity to do things right this time. Whatever the number on the infrastructure plan, it can be transformative for working people. So I view it as an opportunity for us to tackle the toughest issues that, quite honestly, maybe we haven’t tackled directly head-on as an administration. To tackle inequity in the workplace. To tackle wage disparity between women and men. To tackle racial inequities in the workplace and create better pathways.

I’m still kind of figuring out: How much I can push and where I can push and how much we can move forward? The beauty is that I have a president and a vice president who really believe in the mission of the Department of Labor. We have this unique opportunity in front of us to make some major changes in the workforce and to come back stronger. I think you get that opportunity once in a political career or once in a generation. And this is the time.

We’re also at a point where income inequity is at its highest. But during the pandemic, there was a huge reliance on essential workers. Do you think that has changed public opinion, making the ground fertile for revaluing labor?

I hope it does. But I don’t think it’s going to happen unless we stay focused on it. People have short attention spans. Throughout the last year, grocery store workers have been essential workers and almost first responders, if you will, in keeping the shelves stocked and the food there. And then you hear stories of some of these larger chain companies around the country subbing out now and getting independent contractors to deliver the food and deliver the service. Like, how do you do that to a group of employees that kept your doors open through the most difficult time, maybe since the beginning of your store? So I think we have to keep a real focus on our workers. I think we should always raise up our essential workers because, at the end of the day, whether it’s a global pandemic or a blizzard or nor’easter or a hurricane, they’re there. They’re there the day before the hurricane, and they’re there the day after hurricane. They’re always there…

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‘Employers’ have promised / threatened us with AUTOMATIC ROBOT WORKERS since, well, about the time the word was introduced to English speakers…

During the pandemic, labor shortages pushed some employers to try out robots in service jobs once considered impossible to automate. They should create more jobs, but could also leave low-skilled workers behind, by @mattoyeah and @paulwisemanAP https://t.co/QG3uXLn1j3

— The Associated Press (@AP) September 5, 2021

Labor Day, Every Day: Some Excellent ReadsPost + Comments (24)

Excellent Advice: Always Shun Nazis

by Anne Laurie| September 5, 20216:13 pm| 55 Comments

This post is in: domestic terrorists, Excellent Links

NY Times: White nationalist Richard Spencer, “organization has dissolved, his wife has divorced him, and he is facing trial next month in Charlottesville, Va., over his role in the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march there, but says he cannot afford a lawyer.”

https://t.co/nduPt0T9tJ pic.twitter.com/DzhDU5G3KZ

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) September 5, 2021

Hardly an all-purpose, feel-good solution, but probably as close to a happy ending as can be expected in these times — “How a Small Town Silenced a Neo-Nazi Hate Campaign”:

WHITEFISH, Mont. — Richard B. Spencer, the most infamous summer resident in this town, once boasted that he stood at the vanguard of a white nationalist movement emboldened by President Donald J. Trump. Things have changed.

“I have bumped into him, and he runs — that’s actually a really good feeling,” said Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent targeted in an antisemitic hate campaign that Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, unleashed in 2016 after Mr. Spencer’s mother made online accusations against Ms. Gersh.

Leaders in Whitefish say Mr. Spencer, who once ran his National Policy Institute from his mother’s $3 million summer house here, is now an outcast in this resort town in the Rocky Mountains, unable to get a table at many of its restaurants. His organization has dissolved. Meanwhile, his wife has divorced him, and he is facing trial next month in Charlottesville, Va., over his role in the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi march there, but says he cannot afford a lawyer.

The turn of events is no accident. Whitefish, a mostly liberal, affluent community nestled in a county that voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, rose up and struck back. Residents who joined with state officials, human rights groups and synagogues say their bipartisan counteroffensive could hold lessons for others in an era of disinformation and intimidation, and in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

“The best way to respond to hate and cyberterrorism in your community is through solidarity,” said Rabbi Francine Green Roston of the Glacier Jewish Community/B’nai Shalom, who now lectures other groups on how to ward off hate campaigns like the one Whitefish endured. “Another big principle is to take threats seriously, and prepare for the worst.”…

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The trouble in Whitefish started after Mr. Trump’s victory in the 2016 election that November. Mr. Spencer, who had called his white nationalist movement a “vanguard” for Mr. Trump, delivered a racially charged speech at his institute’s conference in Washington, his words greeted by Nazi salutes. Video of the address went viral. In Whitefish, residents discussed protesting in front of a downtown commercial building owned by Mr. Spencer’s mother.

Ms. Gersh said Ms. Spencer had called her.

“She flat-out asked me, ‘Tanya, I don’t believe in my son’s ideology,’” Ms. Gersh recalled over coffee in her office downtown. “‘I’m heartbroken that this is hurting Whitefish. What should I do?’”

“I said: ‘Sherry, if this were my son, I would go ahead and sell the building. I would donate some money to something like the Human Rights Network to make a statement, and publish that you don’t believe in the ideologies of your son.’ And she said: ‘Thank you, Tanya. That’s exactly what I should do.’”…

Two weeks later, in December 2016, Ms. Spencer posted an article on the open publishing platform Medium accusing Ms. Gersh of using the threat of protests to blackmail her into selling. Mr. Spencer said on Saturday that he and his former wife had written the article published under his mother’s name. He repeated their claims against Ms. Gersh, adding that she had called his mother, not the other way around. The Spencers’ accusations quickly reverberated among the far right. Mr. Anglin of the Daily Stormer exhorted his “fam” online to “TAKE ACTION” to defend Ms. Spencer…

The Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Secure Community Network, the official safety and security organization of the North American Jewish community, advised residents on what to do.

As a result, Ms. Gersh did not speak publicly about her ordeal at the time. Rabbi Roston kept a low profile, discouraging coverage in the Jewish news media to protect the congregation and avoid giving attackers the attention they craved. The congregation did not cancel its Hanukkah party in December 2016 but moved it from the rabbi’s home to the conference room of a motel, with two armed security guards at the door. On each table, the rabbi placed a pile of supportive letters that had arrived from around the nation.

Volunteers distributed thousands of paper menorahs. “There were menorahs in every window in Whitefish,” Ms. Gersh said. An anti-hate rally drew 600 participants in zero-degree weather. On the eve of the neo-Nazi march, Rabbi Roston organized a chicken and matzo ball soup get-together for 350 people at the middle school in Whitefish, in a demonstration of unity and appreciation.

On Martin Luther King’s Birthday — Monday, Jan. 16 — not a single neo-Nazi turned up to march. “We could say they chickened out,” Rabbi Roston joked…

“Richard Spencer wanted this to be his happy vacation place where he could play and have fun, and people would just live and let live,” Rabbi Roston said. “Then he started suffering social consequences for his hatred.”

Ms. Gersh said that she had been afraid to work again after the hate campaign, but that after Charlottesville, “I knew that I had to go back to work because if I didn’t, they win.”

She keeps a photo of Ms. Heyer on her desk and bear spray in its drawer.

Excellent Advice: Always Shun NazisPost + Comments (55)

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Leaving Kabul, for Better or Worse

by Anne Laurie| August 25, 202111:45 am| 161 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Our Failed Media Experiment

The objective success of the airlift despite the near-instantaneous Taliban takeover is almost enough to make me think that ostensibly procedural objectives to the withdrawal are really just objections to the withdrawal itself! https://t.co/yI45FVX2C0

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) August 23, 2021

It’s really one of the most irresponsible cases of the press committing itself to a narrative and refusing to be budged by any subsequent developments that I’ve ever seen: https://t.co/9e7Y6unA2P

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) August 23, 2021

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getting the impression these people are going to be legitimately heartbroken if we’re actually able to effect an exit of personnel without the need to dump a dozen battalions in to turn kabul into fallujah https://t.co/5LJpjA3sww

— kilgore trout, terminal hiccups patient (@KT_So_It_Goes) August 25, 2021

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GOP Death Cult:

I mean you cannot convince me they are not actively rooting for the taliban to shoot down a passenger jet of 500 people just so we absolutely have to have an all-out bloodbath for six months

this is what they want, they’re astonished the taliban *are not* blasting planes out of the sky and shelling the runway, and the last opportunity to reboot the whole bloody two decade adventure is slipping away

call me crazy for questioning motives but when your first solution to evacuating americans and civilian allies is immediately inject more americans to fight an all-out street war that will kill an awful lot of americans and civilian allies yeah it seems suspicious

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The GOP Death Cult and the Media Village Idiots, loyal partners:

If there’s one thing we can say for certain about the Trump administration, it’s that they would have definitely used every weapon in the US arsenal to ensure thousands of mostly Muslim refugees could be airlifted to the United States. https://t.co/OtQ2TWhe2Q

— Ken Gude (@KenGude) August 24, 2021

Trump smears the Afghans airlifted out of Kabul. "You can be sure the Taliban, who are now in complete control, didn't allow the best and brightest to board these evacuation flights."

— Christian Vanderbrouk (@UrbanAchievr) August 24, 2021

the "if we had just fought harder on the way out" takes are really just a backdoor to "what if we just kept fighting," an attitude that already got us 20 years of absolutely no results

— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) August 25, 2021

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THREAD: 5 Bad Afghanistan Takes you should Ignore

1. Tragic: ‘What about all we lost there?’

If Afghanistan collapses this fast, there wasn’t actually that much there to lose. If anything, the rapid collapse indicates just how accurate were all those leaks over the last

1

— Robert E Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly) August 19, 2021

Professor of Political Science, Pusan Nat’l Univ.; 부산대학교 정치외교학과 교수; Int’l Relations, Koreas, East Asia; Classical Music; Running; that BBC Dad guy:

decade, including the A Papers*, about how little progress we were making, how corrupt the government was, how soft its military’s independent capabilities were, and so on.

2. Demagogic: ‘Did our soldiers die for nothing?’
That is an emotionally manipulative version of the sunk cost fallacy. We cannot bring back our war dead. If we must stay in an unwinnable conflict to ‘honor their sacrifice,’ then we condemn more to die later. That’s immoral. The logic of this argument means also we can never leave a commitment, no matter misconceived, which leads to imperial overstretch. We’d still be in Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq.

3. Histrionic: ‘America has lost its credibility’
No, relax. This is one small conflict in the wide range of US commitments. It was widely understood to be unwinnable, yet we fought for 20 years anyway. That signals a lot of resolve. Also, not all US commitments are the same. Just because the US withdrew from A does not imply it will abandon Taiwan, S Korea, the Baltics, and so on. When the Russians and the Chinese say this now, that is obviously motivated reasoning you should ignore. Allies just as likely to think Biden was wise to end an unwinnable war.

4. Declinist: ‘How did a superpower get defeated by a bunch of medieval hillbillies?’
This is not how counterinsurgency works. The conflict was not a stand-up comparison of military capabilities – insurgents rarely fight openly in the field – and the US cannot just ‘bomb the hell of out ‘em’ to win. The point is to win hearts and minds of course, and in that we needed a reasonably non-corrupt and competent local partner. We had that neither in Vietnam, Iraq, nor Afghanistan. Other powerful states have lost insurgencies and retrenched without a wider unravelling. Think Rome and Scotland/Germany/the Middle East; or Britain withdrawing east of Suez. This is not the end of American power.

5. Hypocritical (Trump/GOP): ‘Biden is an incompetent overseeing a failure greater than Saigon’
Gimme a break. GOP takes are wholly in bad faith. A GOP president started and then ignored this war. Another GOP president, who claimed to want to leave, was too weak-minded and conflict-averse to fight the blob to push through a withdrawal. Until a week ago, the GOP also wanted to get out of Afghanistan. All this sudden concern for our credibility or Afghan human rights is entirely situational and exploitative. Fox caring about Muslims? Are you kidding me?

The rapidity of the collapse strongly suggests Biden was right to withdrawal. If Afghanistan fell apart this fast, then it almost certainly would have done so too in another 5 or 10 years. Even America makes mistakes. Don’t let American exceptionalism blind you. Sometimes we don’t win; sometimes we make errors. And sometimes it’s wise to cut our losses and retrench. That’s all this is. There is no greater lesson to be drawn, and once this is off TV in a week or so, a lot of this hysteria about a US ‘fiasco’ will fade.

* The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War

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we're now Day 13 of Kabul Airport crisis coverage. (0 US fatalities)

When 4 US soldiers were killed in Niger ambush, Trump ignored the deaths for a week, then proceeded to insult one of the mothers of the fallen.

it was a 2-3 day story, at best.

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 24, 2021

it's hard to even image how much more frenzied and hysterical the Afghanistan coverage would be if 4 US soldiers had died the first day at airport.

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) August 24, 2021

We Benghazi here before…

— BreviLOCAcious ???? (@KSfirefly24) August 24, 2021

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Leaving Kabul, for Better or WorsePost + Comments (161)

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Land War in Asia & Our ‘Savvy’ Pundits

by Anne Laurie| August 24, 202112:03 pm| 202 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Our Failed Media Experiment

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

The media are devoted to the catastrophe headline they hatched in the first moments of the US pulling out. Nothing will change that narrative. https://t.co/mtrXBOWwij

— Janet Johnson (@JJohnsonLaw) August 22, 2021

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Journalists with any independence of mind should right now be observing that the main political imperative of American presidents in Afghanistan since 2005 or so has been not to be the guy who was going to get tagged with the mindless headlines about America losing. 11/

— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 15, 2021

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Some sucker was always going to get stuck with the bill. Biden frankly could have kept on spending lives and resources to keep on being the guy who said we were winning while we were losing just so the next guy or the next guy or the next guy got the headlines. He didn't. 13/

— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 15, 2021

Nothing is more hopeless than thinking the press might stop sleepwalking into the headlines they were always going to have written. Whatever the opposite of a hot take is, that's what this is. A slow take from a slow uptake. Compliant, unobservant, predictable.

— Timothy Burke (@swarthmoreburke) August 15, 2021

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Cato Insitute dude has his opinion:

Don’t believe this. I was talking with folks on Capitol Hill about 6 months ago about getting Biden ready for parole+airlift. It would have been a lot easier if they’d started flying out 1,500 a day starting in February.

And there were many more telling them the same. https://t.co/tRYHjIi78M

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) August 22, 2021

‘Former USAF aircraft/munitions maintenance officer’ responds:

Precipitating the collapse of the Afghan govt when DoD was still in denial that Biden actually meant it when he said we were leaving would have gone swimmingly, I'm sure https://t.co/cExOi5ANFM

— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 22, 2021

I know we've been there so long we think it's the 51st State but prior to a couple weeks ago (and certainly in Feb!) there was a sovereign entity with an ability to make life difficult if we did something against their wishes, it kind of is their countryhttps://t.co/ROMVKkd6Li

— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 22, 2021

"I would have simply flown out 5 777s of people a day without anyone noticing and against the express desires of the govt of the nation I was flying them out of, there are absolutely no flaws or problems with this proposal"

— Mike Black (@MikeBlack114) August 22, 2021

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and here's the piece https://t.co/XzSgL0LSlO

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2021

… Some claim that there is a great appetite in the press to beat up on Joe Biden to demonstrate that all the criticism of Donald Trump wasn’t bias, just solid reporting. That’s a significant factor but I don’t think the most important. Will Bunch points out a real and very human factor: many reporters at national news outlets know at least the kinds of people endangered by the Taliban rout and in many cases particular people. Your news organization worked with interpreters and handlers. You embedded with military formations and met military interpreters or members of the Afghan Army. This is human and real, even righteous. But again, I think this is only a part and not the biggest part of what we’ve seen play out over recent days…

… Both parties’ foreign policy establishments opposed leaving Afghanistan. Since Sunday, many on the center-right have argued that the collapse shows that withdrawal was a mistake. The US can maintain a few thousand troops in a mostly advisory role indefinitely and it’s really not a problem. But this hasn’t been the premise of most news commentary. It’s rather been that, yes, it was probably time to leave Afghanistan, but, yes, “there has to have been a better way.”

Was there?

Certainly the way it’s played out has been messy, chaotic, mortifying. Many armchair quarterbacks have the idea that the US could have evacuated everyone who had worked with us in advance of withdrawal. But as I and many other have argued that’s a basic misunderstanding of the situation. If you evacuate everyone who might be endangered by the fall of the government in advance, you are basically signing the regime’s death warrant. You are saying you don’t expect the regime to last and that the fall will come fast. That message is a self-fulfilling prophecy…

My point here isn’t that there’s nothing the Biden administration could have done differently or better. At a minimum they could have been processing exit paperwork more rapidly in advance for interpreters and others who worked for the US and had clearer contingency planning for evacuations of personnel outside of Kabul for a rapid collapse scenario. My point is simply that to a great extent what we are seeing today was baked into the US mission in Afghanistan all along. It is ugly. And a lot of people are going to suffer. It is mortifying on various levels – some trivial and shallow and others profound – for the United States. But it was always baked in. And what is critical to understand is that the fact that it was always baked in, and no one was ready to grab that kryptonite or make that reckoning, is precisely why we have been there for almost twenty years.

What is being imagined and demanded is an hermetic, clean and painless end to a failed military mission. That’s not responsibility but rather denial…

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. “There had to have been a better way” is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos, all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Land War in Asia & Our ‘Savvy’ PunditsPost + Comments (202)

Why Can’t Leaving A Twenty-Year War Be Easy?

by Anne Laurie| August 23, 202111:05 am| 82 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs

It's not that I oppose opening the door, it's that I oppose the *way* we opened the door. I would simply have gotten all of the bowls out beforehand. pic.twitter.com/Zd99yCj1Vb

— Trevor (@trevorjtweets) August 22, 2021

What’s happening is that leaving is popular, but it’s unpopular with natsec elites and their allies in the media.

So to punish Biden and send a message to future presidents they’ve cooked up this fake middle ground position that you are now espousing. https://t.co/IvwSQKd4Om

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 22, 2021

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The magic of the situation is the alchemy through which the Blob has transformed the unexpectedly rapid collapse of Afghan forces — i.e. the fact that they, themselves, failed more egregiously than we knew — into a political embarrassment for Biden rather than for themselves.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 22, 2021

These people spent twenty years and hundreds of billions of dollars building up anti-Taliban forces that were *weaker* than the ones in the field on September 12, 2001.

How does that happen?

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 22, 2021

Sarah Chayes speaks Pashtu, lives in Kandahar, and advised military leaders & Joint Chiefs of Staff from #Afghanistan . So her perspective is extremely well-informed. This is her take on US withdrawal.https://t.co/KVN0VdcabC

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) August 19, 2021

… I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime. Descending the last great hill into the desert city, I saw a dusty ghost town. Pickup trucks with rocket-launchers strapped to the struts patrolled the streets. People pulled on my militia friends’ sleeves, telling them where to find a Taliban weapons cache, or a last hold-out. But most remained indoors.

It was Ramadan. A few days later, at the holiday ending the month-long fast, the pent-up joy erupted. Kites took to the air. Horsemen on gorgeous, caparisoned chargers tore across a dusty common in sprint after sprint, with a festive audience cheering them on. This was Kandahar, the Taliban heartland. There was no panicked rush for the airport.

I reported for a month or so, then passed off to Steve Inskeep, now Morning Edition host. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (You can read about that time, and its lessons, in my first two books, The Punishment of Virtue and Thieves of State.)

From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco…

Self-Delusion. How many times did you read stories about the Afghan security forces’ steady progress? How often, over the past two decades, did you hear some U.S. official proclaim that the Taliban’s eye-catching attacks in urban settings were signs of their “desperation” and their “inability to control territory?” How many heart-warming accounts did you hear about all the good we were doing, especially for women and girls?

Who were we deluding? Ourselves?

What else are we deluding ourselves about?…

Jennifer Rubin: “the story that the media resisted telling was less visible and far more positive — inspiring, even. It was the story of men and women running into the fray to save as many as possible from death and misery that a lost war entails.”https://t.co/lndiRJ3wzZ

— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) August 22, 2021

… This is what losing a war looks like. The decision to end a “forever war” meant we inevitably could not rescue everyone, including all the women and girls of Afghanistan. If we wanted to avoid the chaos and misery, including the plight of those women and girls, we should have stayed; but of course, Americans didn’t want that, either (though many speculated we could construct an ongoing, small and low-risk contingent of U.S. forces in the country).

But the story that the media resisted telling was less visible and far more positive — inspiring, even. It was the story of men and women running into the fray to save as many as possible from death and misery that a lost war entails…

By midweek, thousands of people — mostly non-Americans — were flying out of Kabul’s airport in what is fast becoming one of the most challenging airlifts ever attempted. State Department workers at the airport, in concert with colleagues back home and around the world, were forced to use every ounce of experience, creativity and ingenuity to handle a once-in-a-career emergency for the sake of Americans and thousands of Afghans. The accusation that we did not care about the latter is a grotesque insult to those who risked their lives to deliver Afghans to safety. By Friday, we had evacuated 13,000 people, mostly Afghans since the airlift began. By Saturday the number was up to 17,000. (The story of how the Trump administration decimated the visa system to rescue Afghans is now coming to light.)…

None of this negates the responsibility of higher-ups for the failures, large and small, of judgment and strategy. They must be held accountable for 20 years of a largely fruitless war and the decision not to bulk up forces and push out our deadline (putting our troops at greater risk) to minimize inevitable suffering. (The intelligence community’s inability to anticipate the speed of the Afghan government’s collapse may rank among its worst failures, along with the conviction that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.)

But the work of Americans charged with executing the evacuation is noble, selfless and deeply patriotic. Often reviled by an ignorant public, smeared as the “deep state” by right-wing conspiracy theorists and ignored by an arrogant media, these public servants saved untold lives and alleviated a good deal of human suffering last week…

Why Can’t Leaving A Twenty-Year War Be <em>Easy</em>?Post + Comments (82)

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

This really is a full service blog.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Everybody saw this coming.

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

They are all Michael Cohen now.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Infrastructure week. at last.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

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Why Can’t Leaving A Twenty-Year War Be Easy?