That’s too heavy a topic for the American socio-political discourse in the Year of Our Lord 2021, though. We so desperately want to get back to our politics and culture as spectator sport where the consequences are practically nothing and the emotional highs are invigorating. But thankfully for the folks that don’t want to talk about it anymore, the last C-17 has left Kabul so that the linear thinking narrative hounds have their optically clear ending to segue back to the usually search engine optimized topics and feel they duly covered it. The last American military death, for now, is logged in the stats. The media coverage will swiftly move to the next thing. The social media debates will trend back to what we want to talk about, as opposed to what we must talk about.
I don't think this is wrong exactly. It's the sort of thing that the various talking heads on the cable nets have gone back and forth about. But as a matter of perspective, I think it's exactly backwards.
In particular, it doesn't emphasize enough the unique incompetence of Demo Joe Biden and his Administration. Given our history in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, and given the history of Afghanistan with other powers prior to that, and given all the relevant actions of the prior Administration, it is still the unique particular incompetence of Joe Biden in the months leading up to the withdrawal, and the particular incompetence of Joe Biden since the surrender of various parts of the ANA and the fall of Kabul which created the debacle we've had over the last two weeks.
It is possible to say intelligent things about our poor strategic choices over the last 20 years, and the tendency of Americans toward out of sight, out of mind, and I don't have any particular beefs against the OP. But they are not today's problems, they're just not.
If, in fact, we're out of Afghanistan. Which tbh I don't completely believe. Are we really going to allow the Taliban to kill hundreds or thousands of Americans along with various others who have some sort of meaningful connection to America or its government? Maybe, maybe not.
It is part of the incompetence of the Demo Joe Biden Administration that almost every representation they have made over the last 2-3 months pertaining to Afghanistan has either been wrong or been promptly contradicted by some other organ of the Executive Branch. I suspect that this assertion that "finally we're out" will not be an exception.
She’s not a martyr. She’s a criminal who was shot, while engaged in the commission of her crimes, by a police officer who very reasonably believed that the use of force was needed to defend himself and the people he was charged by law with protecting. We call other police officers who do this “heroes” and both legally and morally justify their actions.
Most of the respectable Right has argued this, it really doesn't hold up. It's possible to be sympathetic that Michael Byrd was in a difficult position, but still realize that his exoneration was a whitewash. I'd feel better if a grand jury came back no true bill, but it didn't even get that far.
For whatever happened on January 6, I think it simply has to be acknowledged that Ashli Babbitt was not an imminent threat to anybody's life or limb at the time she was shot. She and the people she was with were potential threats, but I don't think the police are authorized to use lethal force based on coulda shoulda woulda.
Alternatively, there's "mob law" jurisprudence from the 19th century or whatever that says that if a person is being besieged by a mob, he's entitled to use lethal force against any member of the mob. It seems to me that's the actual logic by which Lt Byrd is being exonerated. But I'm pretty sure that those cases really aren't in force today.
I think Lt Byrd is being sued by Ashli Babbitt's family. Based on what we've seen so far, I hope he loses. He still ends up ahead of Ashli Babbitt.
I have no doubt that draft bills of some sort exist, but not the important ones. They don't exist because they can't exist. They can't exist because nobody relevant has agreed to anything. Not just Sinema and Manchin, though they are probably the most important, nobody.
Or to put it another way, let's say Ed Markey said a month ago, "We will spend $340 billion dollars over the next five years toward electrifying our over-the-road car and truck fleet and other priorities to reduce the threat of climate change against all Americans." I promise you that on Capitol Hill there are at least a hundred different ideas of what such a thing were supposed to mean, _even assuming such a thing were to become law_ which of course is not a lay-in.
"We've already written the bill" No, buullshhiit you have.
Like I wrote before, if you want to know the state of play, read LPDonovan on twitter. He's been the best public domain info on this for four months or so. If they're on schedule to vote for reconciliation anywhere by the end of September he'll tell you first.
That's a complicated question. Just for me, I believe their threats were credible, and to some extent maybe still are.
What is more clear is that the value for libs in making such threats was their ability to use those threats as leverage in advancing the reconciliation bill. The threats are worth much less in terms of their actual intent to kill the bipartisan bill.
And specifically because of that, that's why the libs lost yesterday. The moderates successfully put them in a corner. Free the hostage or shoot the hostage, but either way the bipartisan bill is being decoupled from reconciliation.
No you're getting it, North, on a number of levels.
What was true before is that the House libs believed or were lying to themselves that they were going to get to vote on a reconciliation bill before or at the same time they voted on the bipartisan bill. Whereas at least for now, it appears that the whole scenario they were gaming against is going to happen, ie the bipartisan hostage is going to get released while the libs are left holding a bag of coulda shoulda woulda wrt the reconciliation bill.
I also don't think that you're getting that Schumer and Pelosi have been tactically lying for months wrt the timing of the reconciliation bill, especially Schumer. The reality is the reconciliation bill is 2, 3, 6 months behind the bipartisan bill, and there's no obvious way to make up that time. Those lies represent aspirations and exhortations within the Demo caucus in Congress, and to libs in general outside of Congress, that they're going as fast as they can. They really don't represent reality.
As a consequence, there is no understanding among Democrats, formal, informal or otherwise, that reconciliation will occur before or simultaneous with the bipartisan bill becoming law. That became more clear yesterday. It is definitely true that there is hope and intention to that end from House libs, and maybe even the leadership but there is nothing at all to believe that's actual reality.
Finally, these distinctions and words you're throwing around, nonbinding, binding, formal, informal, legally unenforceable, etc, etc, those things could certainly be relevant in some circumstances but they're not really in play here.
Yeah, that's the vaporware I was talking about in another comment. Libs are invested in believing they have the same leverage they had before. Over the next week or so, I think they'll figure out that they don't and they'll have to decide what to do then.
No North, I don't think you're getting it. It is all of those things but it is not _just_ those things.
And it is the _other_ things which will have an important impact on the timing of things, specifically the most aggressive earliest possible timing of things. In another case, we maybe could ignore that as basically irrelevant, except that libs perception of their own leverage is tied into those timing considerations, specifically wrt a clean vote on the bipartisan bill.
In the most obvious example, if hypothetically everybody agreed to pass a bill, it wouldn't change the fact that there is no bill to pass. Before you can _have_ a bill, you have to _write_ a bill, and writing a bill takes time. And depending on which way the cookie crumbles, libs are going to have to come down on one side or the other for the bipartisan bill while the sausage is still being made for the reconciliation bill.
The hell it is. It is a completely binding resolution, regarding the items it was about, eg the consideration of the bipartisan bill. That's how they passed the rule (and resolution with reconciliation instructions). Without it those things there couldn't be any meaningful reconciliation process.
It _is_ subject to the rules of the House, which has various opportunities for wiggle room that the libs think they can still use to maintain their leverage. But as a practical matter I don't think so. Not only are those sort of magic tricks contrary to the prima facie meaning of the resolution, they are definitely contrary to the _statement_ the Speaker just issued in conjunction with it.
The big item up for next week, imo, is what the libs do once they figure out they don't have the leverage they thought they did.
I also doubt Pelosi traded away any advantage she has in this fight. She’s too cagey for that sort of mistake.
She didn't trade away her advantage, whatever that is. She traded away the libs leverage. Past Sep 27 or whatever, the libs can't hold on to their bipartisan bill hostage. The reconciliation bill will either succeed or fail under its own steam.
The real work is sorting out something the House will accept and that Manchin and Sinema will line up behind.
Not just that, but it's also not clear how much if at all the sausage-making process can be accelerated.
Eg, people have been talking about the reconciliation bill like it's a real thing. Of course, in reality there is no reconciliation bill, we're just talking about hypothetical possibility that sometime in the reasonably near future there will be one. And you can go all the way down the same way. In reality there is no framework agreement to write a reconciliation bill around. In reality there is no negotiations to make a framework agreement to write a bill around, etc, etc.
You should read the twitter account by Liam Donovan (LPDonovan). The good news for Demos is that he thinks the lib hostage-taking strategy is superfluous. They can get whatever could be gotten without it.
Right. So the House libs (and anybody else for that matter) have five weeks to move the ball forward on the reconciliation bill before they have to decide to shoot their hostage, or let him go.
Except that part of that five weeks is going to be taken by horsing around with appropriations for current government operations. And, I think the debt ceiling is hit sometime around then as well. And other stuff I haven't even mentioned.
There's some online libs who are desperately trying to pretend that Nancy Pelosi didn't trade away the libs leverage on reconciliation in her deal with the Demo moderates, though it's pretty clear for me at least that she did.
That depends on what's been appropriated already by Congress. If the bipartisan bill passes, then the highway money is appropriated and that part of the govt at least is not in shutdown. I don't know if anything else has been appropriated or not. Probably nothing.
In any event, there's going to be some appropriations process, probably CRs, will have to be done before Sep 30 or shortly afterward, and whatever time is required to legislate that won't be available for the reconciliation bill. So the fact there's more functions of government to be funded for the next fiscal year beyond the Department of Transportation just slows down the reconciliation bill that much further.
Btw, the aftermath of this deal with the Demo moderates has just been absurd beyond belief. There's been a few prominent libs who have tried to argue that the commitment to vote on the bipartisan deal isn't really real. And on theory in particular says that Speaker Pelosi could hold up the bipartisan bill _after_ it's been passed by the House and not send it to the President for his signature. I'm sure that's going to get walked back or ignored in a day or two, but tbh I'm kinda hoping it's not. I would absolutely love to see the libs try to pull that one off.
I'm not getting this at all, that the moderates lost or that anyone would perceive them as doing so. It's pretty clear that they rolled the leadership and especially the libs.
The libs can free their hostage at the end of September or even shoot him, but they can't keep holding him (the bipartisan bill).
I've seen some stuff from twitter libs to say that the House libs still have leverage, but what's been circulated so far is vaporware.
So far, the House libs have threatened to vote down the highway bill. As they intended, they have used that as leverage to move the process on the reconciliation bill. Five weeks from now, that will expire. They will have to actually vote down the bipartisan bill, or let it pass.
One thing that I don't think some libs have grokked so far, is that if the libs actually do shoot the hostage, then federal highway funding expires on Sep 30 and we're in at least a partial government shutdown, with all the drama that goes along with that, eg back-and-forth jaw jaw about CRs and such. And no matter if you blame Congress or the President, it's Demos holding the bag all the way. The upshot is, voting down the bipartisan bill forces does not clear the field for reconciliation. It forces Congress' attention on other things, and might sap the momentum away from reconciliation.
The budget _resolution_ was done today (in the House). The budget appropriation will likely take months.
One variable is that there may be a change in which branch leads from here. I had thought that the Senate would lead because Sinema and Manchin are explicitly against the $3.5T number being thrown around, so the House would be hamstrung by not knowing how much money there was to throw around.
Now, there may be a sense of urgency to show the libs that there's progress being made on the actual appropriation.
Hopefully this is true. Certainly I haven't read anything to that effect.
What I did read, maybe 3 or 4 days ago, was that a British officer assigned a squad of UK paratroopers to overwatch the 82nd Airborne or some other American unit, to make sure they didn't leave without notice or to warn their own command if they did.
Hopefully things have changed for the better since then.
we are talking about the same guy who got beautiful love letters from North Korea while they were violating prior agreements left and right?
Yeah, him. Donald Trump dealing with North Korea is a perfect example. Trump's correspondence with Kim Jung Un shows a level of strategic thinking way beyond what anything Biden is capable of. It may yet work, in that North Korea, ie that NK is China's problem not ours. It hasn't yet, but it is heading that way.
I do find it oddly funny that you were not a Trump voter but seem to think he’d have been better at this.
Because Trump could easily imagine the downside risk of what's happened, and as such would have either done the evacuation right, or be outmaneuvered in WH office politics by the brass and keep some troops there, as it happened while he was President.
In no case would we have this public spectacle of abandonment.
I think it’s hard to say what the House and Senate elections will look like this far out. A lot of things aren’t predictable vis a vis the economy and other factors. The next Presidential election is even more uncertain- far too many unknowns; heck, it’s an open question who the candidates will be.
2024 is completely open at this point, but a lot of 2022 is already baked into the cake at this point. Or to put it another way, I think you could think of 1000 different plausible outcomes in 2022, but the GOP wins the House in every one.
As far as what the GOP has put on the board since W, it's basically judges, the tax cut and the sequester. (Btw, the sequester is more important than the tax cut). But we only had the White House for one term, and that was Trump.
Going forward, I expect the GOP to lock in its culture war advantages, because for right now at least the country isn't interested in following the identity politics of the woke Left, and it's the woke Left who have captured the activist base of the Democratic party.
I do, or at least I see at least some significant probability toward that happening.
Basically, there is a good chance the GOP will dominate American politics for the next decade or so, in the most generic way possible.
We're going to keep everything we've gained recently wrt lower middle class white voters w/o college degrees and minority groups (for that matter, prob make further gains w minority groups). And we're going to get back the Romneyite part of the white professional upper middle class that left the GOP over Trump.
It's funny to me reading some of the election commentary from libs and Never Trumpers, with anxiety and complaining about a bunch of different things, when it seems to me this is what they should be worrying about.
You do realize I didn't as much as vote for Trump, right?
Cut the crap Mike, this has nothing to do with Trump, it really doesn't. But what's worse is the idea that if it were about Trump, that would somehow mean some measure of mitigation or vindication for Biden and the Demos.
It doesn't. For all of Trump's faults there is no way we'd be dealing with this level of incompetence if Trump were in office.
Dude, you literally just said your opinion as to who to blame would switch depending solely on which party controlled the White House. You probably don’t want to tip your hand like that too much
I think you're misunderstanding a couple of things. If a similar sort of thing was brewing under Trump, it would have been a fundamentally different circumstance and a fundamentally different event.
Trump would never have forced the brass into the tactical weaknessness Biden did. And if things went sideways, Trump would have tantrumed and gotten us some answers instead of "nothing to see here move along" crap we're getting now.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An American Exercise In Washing Our Hands of Afghanistan”
I don't think this is wrong exactly. It's the sort of thing that the various talking heads on the cable nets have gone back and forth about. But as a matter of perspective, I think it's exactly backwards.
In particular, it doesn't emphasize enough the unique incompetence of Demo Joe Biden and his Administration. Given our history in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, and given the history of Afghanistan with other powers prior to that, and given all the relevant actions of the prior Administration, it is still the unique particular incompetence of Joe Biden in the months leading up to the withdrawal, and the particular incompetence of Joe Biden since the surrender of various parts of the ANA and the fall of Kabul which created the debacle we've had over the last two weeks.
It is possible to say intelligent things about our poor strategic choices over the last 20 years, and the tendency of Americans toward out of sight, out of mind, and I don't have any particular beefs against the OP. But they are not today's problems, they're just not.
"
If, in fact, we're out of Afghanistan. Which tbh I don't completely believe. Are we really going to allow the Taliban to kill hundreds or thousands of Americans along with various others who have some sort of meaningful connection to America or its government? Maybe, maybe not.
It is part of the incompetence of the Demo Joe Biden Administration that almost every representation they have made over the last 2-3 months pertaining to Afghanistan has either been wrong or been promptly contradicted by some other organ of the Executive Branch. I suspect that this assertion that "finally we're out" will not be an exception.
On “Capitol Police Officer Michael Bryd Interviewed About Shooting Death of Ashli Babbitt”
That cop was criminally charged, so it hardly substantiates your point.
"
Most of the respectable Right has argued this, it really doesn't hold up. It's possible to be sympathetic that Michael Byrd was in a difficult position, but still realize that his exoneration was a whitewash. I'd feel better if a grand jury came back no true bill, but it didn't even get that far.
For whatever happened on January 6, I think it simply has to be acknowledged that Ashli Babbitt was not an imminent threat to anybody's life or limb at the time she was shot. She and the people she was with were potential threats, but I don't think the police are authorized to use lethal force based on coulda shoulda woulda.
Alternatively, there's "mob law" jurisprudence from the 19th century or whatever that says that if a person is being besieged by a mob, he's entitled to use lethal force against any member of the mob. It seems to me that's the actual logic by which Lt Byrd is being exonerated. But I'm pretty sure that those cases really aren't in force today.
I think Lt Byrd is being sued by Ashli Babbitt's family. Based on what we've seen so far, I hope he loses. He still ends up ahead of Ashli Babbitt.
On “House Vote Clears Way For $3.5 Trillion Budget Reconciliation”
comment rescue here
"
I have no doubt that draft bills of some sort exist, but not the important ones. They don't exist because they can't exist. They can't exist because nobody relevant has agreed to anything. Not just Sinema and Manchin, though they are probably the most important, nobody.
Or to put it another way, let's say Ed Markey said a month ago, "We will spend $340 billion dollars over the next five years toward electrifying our over-the-road car and truck fleet and other priorities to reduce the threat of climate change against all Americans." I promise you that on Capitol Hill there are at least a hundred different ideas of what such a thing were supposed to mean, _even assuming such a thing were to become law_ which of course is not a lay-in.
"We've already written the bill" No, buullshhiit you have.
"
Like I wrote before, if you want to know the state of play, read LPDonovan on twitter. He's been the best public domain info on this for four months or so. If they're on schedule to vote for reconciliation anywhere by the end of September he'll tell you first.
"
That's a complicated question. Just for me, I believe their threats were credible, and to some extent maybe still are.
What is more clear is that the value for libs in making such threats was their ability to use those threats as leverage in advancing the reconciliation bill. The threats are worth much less in terms of their actual intent to kill the bipartisan bill.
And specifically because of that, that's why the libs lost yesterday. The moderates successfully put them in a corner. Free the hostage or shoot the hostage, but either way the bipartisan bill is being decoupled from reconciliation.
"
No you're getting it, North, on a number of levels.
What was true before is that the House libs believed or were lying to themselves that they were going to get to vote on a reconciliation bill before or at the same time they voted on the bipartisan bill. Whereas at least for now, it appears that the whole scenario they were gaming against is going to happen, ie the bipartisan hostage is going to get released while the libs are left holding a bag of coulda shoulda woulda wrt the reconciliation bill.
I also don't think that you're getting that Schumer and Pelosi have been tactically lying for months wrt the timing of the reconciliation bill, especially Schumer. The reality is the reconciliation bill is 2, 3, 6 months behind the bipartisan bill, and there's no obvious way to make up that time. Those lies represent aspirations and exhortations within the Demo caucus in Congress, and to libs in general outside of Congress, that they're going as fast as they can. They really don't represent reality.
As a consequence, there is no understanding among Democrats, formal, informal or otherwise, that reconciliation will occur before or simultaneous with the bipartisan bill becoming law. That became more clear yesterday. It is definitely true that there is hope and intention to that end from House libs, and maybe even the leadership but there is nothing at all to believe that's actual reality.
Finally, these distinctions and words you're throwing around, nonbinding, binding, formal, informal, legally unenforceable, etc, etc, those things could certainly be relevant in some circumstances but they're not really in play here.
"
Yeah, that's the vaporware I was talking about in another comment. Libs are invested in believing they have the same leverage they had before. Over the next week or so, I think they'll figure out that they don't and they'll have to decide what to do then.
"
No North, I don't think you're getting it. It is all of those things but it is not _just_ those things.
And it is the _other_ things which will have an important impact on the timing of things, specifically the most aggressive earliest possible timing of things. In another case, we maybe could ignore that as basically irrelevant, except that libs perception of their own leverage is tied into those timing considerations, specifically wrt a clean vote on the bipartisan bill.
In the most obvious example, if hypothetically everybody agreed to pass a bill, it wouldn't change the fact that there is no bill to pass. Before you can _have_ a bill, you have to _write_ a bill, and writing a bill takes time. And depending on which way the cookie crumbles, libs are going to have to come down on one side or the other for the bipartisan bill while the sausage is still being made for the reconciliation bill.
"
The hell it is. It is a completely binding resolution, regarding the items it was about, eg the consideration of the bipartisan bill. That's how they passed the rule (and resolution with reconciliation instructions). Without it those things there couldn't be any meaningful reconciliation process.
It _is_ subject to the rules of the House, which has various opportunities for wiggle room that the libs think they can still use to maintain their leverage. But as a practical matter I don't think so. Not only are those sort of magic tricks contrary to the prima facie meaning of the resolution, they are definitely contrary to the _statement_ the Speaker just issued in conjunction with it.
The big item up for next week, imo, is what the libs do once they figure out they don't have the leverage they thought they did.
"
She didn't trade away her advantage, whatever that is. She traded away the libs leverage. Past Sep 27 or whatever, the libs can't hold on to their bipartisan bill hostage. The reconciliation bill will either succeed or fail under its own steam.
"
Not just that, but it's also not clear how much if at all the sausage-making process can be accelerated.
Eg, people have been talking about the reconciliation bill like it's a real thing. Of course, in reality there is no reconciliation bill, we're just talking about hypothetical possibility that sometime in the reasonably near future there will be one. And you can go all the way down the same way. In reality there is no framework agreement to write a reconciliation bill around. In reality there is no negotiations to make a framework agreement to write a bill around, etc, etc.
You should read the twitter account by Liam Donovan (LPDonovan). The good news for Demos is that he thinks the lib hostage-taking strategy is superfluous. They can get whatever could be gotten without it.
"
Right. So the House libs (and anybody else for that matter) have five weeks to move the ball forward on the reconciliation bill before they have to decide to shoot their hostage, or let him go.
Except that part of that five weeks is going to be taken by horsing around with appropriations for current government operations. And, I think the debt ceiling is hit sometime around then as well. And other stuff I haven't even mentioned.
There's some online libs who are desperately trying to pretend that Nancy Pelosi didn't trade away the libs leverage on reconciliation in her deal with the Demo moderates, though it's pretty clear for me at least that she did.
"
That depends on what's been appropriated already by Congress. If the bipartisan bill passes, then the highway money is appropriated and that part of the govt at least is not in shutdown. I don't know if anything else has been appropriated or not. Probably nothing.
In any event, there's going to be some appropriations process, probably CRs, will have to be done before Sep 30 or shortly afterward, and whatever time is required to legislate that won't be available for the reconciliation bill. So the fact there's more functions of government to be funded for the next fiscal year beyond the Department of Transportation just slows down the reconciliation bill that much further.
Btw, the aftermath of this deal with the Demo moderates has just been absurd beyond belief. There's been a few prominent libs who have tried to argue that the commitment to vote on the bipartisan deal isn't really real. And on theory in particular says that Speaker Pelosi could hold up the bipartisan bill _after_ it's been passed by the House and not send it to the President for his signature. I'm sure that's going to get walked back or ignored in a day or two, but tbh I'm kinda hoping it's not. I would absolutely love to see the libs try to pull that one off.
"
I'm not getting this at all, that the moderates lost or that anyone would perceive them as doing so. It's pretty clear that they rolled the leadership and especially the libs.
The libs can free their hostage at the end of September or even shoot him, but they can't keep holding him (the bipartisan bill).
I've seen some stuff from twitter libs to say that the House libs still have leverage, but what's been circulated so far is vaporware.
So far, the House libs have threatened to vote down the highway bill. As they intended, they have used that as leverage to move the process on the reconciliation bill. Five weeks from now, that will expire. They will have to actually vote down the bipartisan bill, or let it pass.
One thing that I don't think some libs have grokked so far, is that if the libs actually do shoot the hostage, then federal highway funding expires on Sep 30 and we're in at least a partial government shutdown, with all the drama that goes along with that, eg back-and-forth jaw jaw about CRs and such. And no matter if you blame Congress or the President, it's Demos holding the bag all the way. The upshot is, voting down the bipartisan bill forces does not clear the field for reconciliation. It forces Congress' attention on other things, and might sap the momentum away from reconciliation.
"
The budget _resolution_ was done today (in the House). The budget appropriation will likely take months.
One variable is that there may be a change in which branch leads from here. I had thought that the Senate would lead because Sinema and Manchin are explicitly against the $3.5T number being thrown around, so the House would be hamstrung by not knowing how much money there was to throw around.
Now, there may be a sense of urgency to show the libs that there's progress being made on the actual appropriation.
On “The Fall of Saigon and the Afghanistan Moment”
Hopefully this is true. Certainly I haven't read anything to that effect.
What I did read, maybe 3 or 4 days ago, was that a British officer assigned a squad of UK paratroopers to overwatch the 82nd Airborne or some other American unit, to make sure they didn't leave without notice or to warn their own command if they did.
Hopefully things have changed for the better since then.
"
Yeah, him. Donald Trump dealing with North Korea is a perfect example. Trump's correspondence with Kim Jung Un shows a level of strategic thinking way beyond what anything Biden is capable of. It may yet work, in that North Korea, ie that NK is China's problem not ours. It hasn't yet, but it is heading that way.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/13/north-korea-trump-kim-jong-un-love-letters-diplomacy-nuclear-talks/
Biden is just like, "fcuk the airport, get the troops out of Afghanistan, YOLO baby"
"
Because Trump could easily imagine the downside risk of what's happened, and as such would have either done the evacuation right, or be outmaneuvered in WH office politics by the brass and keep some troops there, as it happened while he was President.
In no case would we have this public spectacle of abandonment.
"
2024 is completely open at this point, but a lot of 2022 is already baked into the cake at this point. Or to put it another way, I think you could think of 1000 different plausible outcomes in 2022, but the GOP wins the House in every one.
As far as what the GOP has put on the board since W, it's basically judges, the tax cut and the sequester. (Btw, the sequester is more important than the tax cut). But we only had the White House for one term, and that was Trump.
Going forward, I expect the GOP to lock in its culture war advantages, because for right now at least the country isn't interested in following the identity politics of the woke Left, and it's the woke Left who have captured the activist base of the Democratic party.
"
I do, or at least I see at least some significant probability toward that happening.
Basically, there is a good chance the GOP will dominate American politics for the next decade or so, in the most generic way possible.
We're going to keep everything we've gained recently wrt lower middle class white voters w/o college degrees and minority groups (for that matter, prob make further gains w minority groups). And we're going to get back the Romneyite part of the white professional upper middle class that left the GOP over Trump.
It's funny to me reading some of the election commentary from libs and Never Trumpers, with anxiety and complaining about a bunch of different things, when it seems to me this is what they should be worrying about.
"
You do realize I didn't as much as vote for Trump, right?
Cut the crap Mike, this has nothing to do with Trump, it really doesn't. But what's worse is the idea that if it were about Trump, that would somehow mean some measure of mitigation or vindication for Biden and the Demos.
It doesn't. For all of Trump's faults there is no way we'd be dealing with this level of incompetence if Trump were in office.
"
I think you're misunderstanding a couple of things. If a similar sort of thing was brewing under Trump, it would have been a fundamentally different circumstance and a fundamentally different event.
Trump would never have forced the brass into the tactical weaknessness Biden did. And if things went sideways, Trump would have tantrumed and gotten us some answers instead of "nothing to see here move along" crap we're getting now.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.