Clips of Joe Biden angrily defending himself to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos regarding the crisis in Afghanistan have already begun to make the rounds. Nothing in them says anything good about the current Commander in Chief. That includes his insistence that there was nothing that could have been handled better about the meltdown of an evacuation we are witnessing play out.
Yet, there was one Q and A that was so terrible and dementia-ridden that ABC News decided to cut it out completely. The transcript of it is now spreading like wildfire on social media.
Special credit to @politicalsock for pointing out the many issues on display here in his thread on Twitter.
There’s so much wrong here that you almost have to go word by word in analyzing it or you might miss some bit of incoherence.
The setup is Stephanopoulos asking about a soldier who served seven combat tours and was shot twice (for accuracy’s sake, some of his tours may have been in Iraq) with that soldier’s assertion being that we didn’t leave Afghanistan with honor. Note that at no point does the soldier in question indicate we should stay in Afghanistan. Rather, his critique is with the strategy of the disastrous withdrawal that is currently playing out.
Yet, Biden apparently didn’t even comprehend what he was being asked by Stephanopoulos. Instead of speaking to the strategic failures at hand, the president brings up his deceased son Beau and things just go downhill from there.
For example, the war in Kosovo was already over when Beau got there. He was a lawyer sent to train prosecutors, not a combat soldier. Biden then goes on to not only mistake what branch his son served in and his rank, but also what other country he was deployed to later in his career, mixing up Afghanistan for Iraq.
As @politicalsock also notes, Biden’s mention of Beau having regrets is nonsensical. We still have troops in Iraq to this day, and there were a lot more of them there when Beau was still alive. So what withdrawal would Biden’s son have felt regrets about at the time? The answer to that question obviously can’t be Afghanistan either.
After stammering a bit about what alternatives we had, Biden then says “the alternative is why are we staying in Afghanistan?” That doesn’t even make sense on a grammatical level, much less a logical one. I suppose he meant to say “the question is” instead of “alternative?” That’s the best I can come up with.
Lastly, we see the president jump off the rails into a mention of China and Russia. He was likely trying to repeat the ridiculous line that those countries wanted us to stay in Afghanistan. Yet, Biden just stops mid-thought and doesn’t even get there.
The entire exchange is just incredibly bizarre, and you can see exactly why ABC News canned it. Hopefully, the video will make its way out eventually because it’s important that the American people see exactly who is president right now.