Republicans are guilty of mind-boggling hypocrisy in their attacks on Biden's Afghanistan exit
Republicans finally have an issue on which they can legitimately criticize President Biden. In a new Pew Research Center poll, only 27 percent of Americans say that Biden’s handling of Afghanistan has been good or excellent. Even some Democrats are quite critical of the president. This is a golden opportunity for the GOP to try to reclaim its credibility as a serious party on national security.
And yet it is blowing this chance by falling prey to the same compulsions — carelessness with the truth, cynical opportunism, mindless posturing, excessive outrage, rank prejudice, blatant hypocrisy — that have been its hallmarks in the Trump years.
The fundamental problem for the GOP is that it knows what it’s against — whatever Biden has done — but it has no idea what it’s for. Appearing on Fox Business on Tuesday, former president Donald Trump fulminated about “the level of incompetence on this withdrawal.” But when pressed on how he would have handled Afghanistan, the best he could come up with was: “We should have hit that country years ago, hit it really hard, and then let it rot.” Huh? Trump went on to say “We should have withdrawn in a totally different way” without specifying what that way was.
The problem for Trump and the Trumpkins is that the Biden pullout from Afghanistan is merely a continuation of the Trump pullout. It wasn’t Biden, after all, who set a deadline for withdrawal, had his secretary of state meet with the Taliban or forced the release of 5,000 terrorists. That was Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/01/hawley-cruz-attacks-biden-afghanistan-exit/
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