Mike Luckovich for August 17, 2021

I expected defeat in Afghanistan ever since War-President Bush decided to start another war in Iraq.

Very slightly true. Truer: The US and UK (and others?) screwed up the exodus. Bureaucrats are bad enough when they are NOT in charge. When they ARE in charge, they can ruin thousands of people’s days. Each.

You also had Q-publican senators and congressmen voting against increasing the number of visas allowed for Afghanis

Rachel Maddow tried like hell to light a fire under the Biden administration to get the interpreters and their families out and and they claimed it was the NSA and the State Department holding things up. Somebody’s heads (beside those left behind) are going to roll.

The real pictures have been worse.

Apocalypse Now Redux Redux

The Afghans are used to Americans abandoning them. We’ve been doing it for the last 30 years.

At least it’s over.

Just another Nam, another stupid mistake of our government trying to police the world and wasting hundreds of thousands of human life’s and trillions of dollars on the same stupid mistake! PLEASE STOP THIS INSANE WASTE! And use these valuable resources HERE!

It’s a cruel, cruel world.

April 30, 1975 I watched a video of the last helicopter out of Vietnam. When I watched video of the first bombing raids in Afghanistan I thought it would turn out just the way it has. Took a lot longer than it should have.

The only connection between the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam is the US belief that our expensive, bloated military can solve everything, everywhere in the world. We have an incredible and largely undeserved hubris when it comes to the idea that armies and bombs can be used to “spread democracy”, resolve long-standing civil wars, and “build” nations. I hope we learn the lesson this time, but I doubt it.

There is plenty of blame to go around.

Business as usual. Ask the Kurds… Montagnards… Hungarian revolutionaries… Vietnamese… and the beat goes on…

There were nowhere near that many Afghani’s that ‘helped’ America.

Allah wills our righteous revenge!

Disgusting isn’t it.. not at all like ICE deporting undocumented that have worked for years in jobs that Americans are too proud to do.

MB, above, wants to “blame Biden.” Okay. But it should be pointed out that President Trump made a deal on February 29, 2020, with the Taliban to remove U.S. forces by May 2021, which was hailed at the time by the Republican National Committee as a “historic peace agreement with the Taliban” on an RNC web page. Oddly, that web page has now been removed with the web address redirecting to a 404 error page featuring the quip: “It looks like you’re as lost as Biden is.” So, Mr. MB, I remind you of the old adage of people living in glass houses. Source: https://www.newsweek.com/gop-removes-webpage-praising-trumps-historic-peace-deal-taliban-1619605

It was Cheetolini’s deal that the QOP wants to deny. So do our trolls.

Seems like I’ve seen this same helicopter today somewhere, but hasn’t taken off yet . . . /S

The usual revisionist crap from the GQP: The Republican National Committee was caught attempting to quietly erase history on Sunday when a page on GOP.com praising former President Donald Trump’s “historic peace agreement with the Taliban” was deleted as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. Worth remembering that some Rump-aligned Republicans argued last fall that Biden was the candidate who’d continue wars in the Middle East and Rump was the withdrawal champion. Furthermore, Team Rump also agreed to the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners, many of whom immediately rejoined the fight. Rump also negotiated the release of Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar from a Pakistan prison three years ago, believing Baradar could help broker peace with the Taliban. Baradar, who posed in pictures with ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just nine months ago, is now poised to be the new leader of Afghanistan. Former Rump press Barbie K McEnany gave her usual BS alternative history lesson on Afghanistan. Barbie parroted the GOP’s recent attempt to memory hole the Rump administration’s role in the destabilizing collapse of Afghanistan, loudly declaring on Monday that the Taliban quickly seizing control of the Afghan capital of Kabul “would have never happened” under President Donald Trump. Remember, It was the Taliban who endorsed Rump for re-election because they felt he would quickly withdraw troops.

Who financed the war in Afghanistan? Americans.

Not just the obvious fact that it was our tax money that paid for the American military presence there, but the carefully unmentioned fact that it was our drug dollars that paid for the other side as well. Yes, that’s right, the good ol’ USA was covering the costs for the whole war, both sides, and has been for the last two decades.

How can that be? Because Afghanistan is home to 85-90% of the world’s opium poppies, the essential ingredient in heroin, with its $50 billion annual market, a huge portion of which flows out of American pockets because nobody can get it legally here.

The misbegotten, insane, expensive, destructive, dehumanizing, counter-productive War on Drug-Using Americans has produced yet another unintended consequence, a disastrous, murderous one, with a massive humanitarian crisis as a side effect.

Repeal Prohibition. Again. For all the same reasons.

We wanted to start getting people out months ago, but the paper President of the place didn’t want to look like he was going to bow to the inevitable so soon that it might interfere with him getting out with his money.

Wasn’t the US presence kind of for nothing?

You know, I was dismissive of the whole Afghanistan thing… with the mindset of “well the American/UK/Canadian etc. militaries shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It isn’t our job to force democracy on the world. It isn’t like Afghanistan is the only non-democratic country out there.”… then I read this comic and feel bad for all the Afghans who are suddenly in trouble because they helped.

I think it’s still a little early for this verdict…we’ll see.

We aren’t out of that one, either.

Sleepy Joe said “Let them eat cake”.

MoanTunaBull just cannot see his way to blame reality.

Odd, the GOPers didn’t complain when Trump threw the Kurds under the bus…

We’ve had 20 years to help the Afghans who helped us. Somehow, streamlining the process still takes 4+ years to get a single individual and their family out of the country. We should just admit we never wanted to help them, at this point.

The usual right-wing noise machine (Carlson, Ingraham, others) are clutching their pearls that Oh, No! The US will take in the Afghan refugees that it created. They might even be moved into Your Neighborhood!

Goyishe kopfs the lot of them.

Never, EVER trust a Democrat.