Boy, that infamous July 8 press conference on Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal is so bad, I have a feeling the White House might go back and selectively edit it, if not just memory hole the entire thing. In addition to asserting that there would be no Saigon-like evacuation of the US embassy in Kabul, Biden also repeatedly said that he does not trust the Taliban.
I mentioned the other day that I downloaded the transcripts from both his April 14 speech and his July 8 speech. So I’ll just put the relevant portion of the transcript here:
Q: Do you trust the Taliban, Mr. President? Do you trust the Taliban, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: You — is that a serious question?
Q: It is absolutely a serious question. Do you trust the Taliban?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I do not.
Q: Do you trust handing over the country to the Taliban?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I do not trust the Taliban.
Q: So why are you handing the country over?
Q: Mr. President, is the U.S. responsible for the deaths of Afghans after you leave the country?
Q: Mr. President, will you amplify that question, please? Will you amplify your answer, please — why you don’t trust the Taliban?
THE PRESIDENT: It’s a — it’s a silly question. Do I trust the Taliban? No. But I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.
Oh, my aching head.
And yet this guy who repeatedly assured reporters that he doesn’t trust the Taliban just admitted on Friday that he is relying on the Taliban to give Americans safe passage to the airport.
Wow. Leaving the absolute dishonest claim aside, President “It’s a Silly Question” is acknowledging here that safe passage to the airport depends on the word of the people he doesn’t trust.
Actually, let’s not leave the dishonest claim aside.
Is the State Department keeping things from Joe?
Because the State Department itself is instructing Americans caught in the Taliban’s net not to try and make it to the airport.
A message alert at the website for the US embassy in Afghanistan says the following:
Because of potential security threats outside the gates at the Kabul airport, we are advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time unless you receive individual instructions from a U.S. government representative to do so.
How is President Biden not aware of this?
There are a few possible explanations.
1. Biden is lying
2. Biden was told but the information got lost in that soup he calls a brain
3. Biden is being kept out of the loop
None of these explanations is particularly reassuring.
Okay, back to Biden relying on the Taliban to give Americans safe passage.
How naïve is Joe Biden to think that the Taliban are rational actors who embrace diplomacy?
CBS News foreign correspondent Ian Pannell made short order of Biden’s claim that the Taliban would keep Americans safe because it is in their best interest to do so.
Pannell pointed out that even Americans who are showing their US passports are getting beaten by Taliban in the street.
Going back to the comparison I made in my column “Ivy League Faculty Lounge Academics and the MIA President,” Biden is like that naïve scientist who thought he could reason with the gigantic space alien in the movie “The Thing from Another Planet.”
And the fact that Biden put the fate of American citizens in the hands of tenth century savages who don’t hesitate to slaughter people is absolutely reprehensible.
Throughout this entire debacle, Joe Biden has proven that he places his trust in those he shouldn’t.
In that same July 8 press conference, Biden repeatedly expressed confidence in the Afghan military forces.
Like here:
So the question now is, where do they go from here? That — the jury is still out. But the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
And here:
Relative to the training and capacity of the ANSF and the training of the federal police, they’re [the Taliban] not even close in terms of their capacity.
Now that the Afghan forces have fallen and the civilian government is gone, Biden has shifted his trust to the Taliban.
On the one hand, what choice does he have? The Taliban control Kabul. And since moving US forces into the city to retrieve American citizens has been taken off the table, Biden has placed the fate of these Americans into the hands of the very people he dismissed as no match for the Afghan forces.
At this point, I really think Biden’s decision to go into hiding was the better one. Because if the goal with these press conferences was to do damage control, it ain’t working. In fact with every press conference Joe is only creating further damage – a point New York Post columnist Michael Godwin made last night:
Biden didn’t just fail. He made everything worse. His lies, contradictions and occasional incoherence must be ringing alarm bells across the United States and among our allies around the world.
For our adversaries, Biden is a gift that keeps on giving.
This was his third speech in the last five days on the unfolding crisis in Kabul, and the president should bring a shovel to the next one. It would be an appropriate prop for a man who is determined to dig himself deeper into the hole every time he opens his mouth.
I said to my brother yesterday afternoon that I’m beginning to suspect that the administration has collectively decided to let Biden twist in the wind, making misstatement after misstatement, telling lie after lie, then while he’s twisting, turning the knife into his back by debunking every lie he told.
Is it only ass-covering? Did the powers that be decide Biden is the expendable one in this scenario?
Something weird is going on, and whatever game they’re playing includes using Americans stuck in Afghanistan as pawns.
Tucker Carlson asked something similar during his opening monologue last night. Give it a watch.