There were a lot of falsehoods, strawmen, and gaslighting in President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan speech on Monday, but there was one part in particular that had even Democrats calling, “BS.”
That was the claim, as Kabul fell and thousands swarmed the airport, that the administration had “planned for every contingency” and that Afghan civilians weren’t evacuated sooner because they “did not want to leave earlier.”
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine who served four tours in Iraq, was outraged. According to Boston.com, the veteran said in a press conference on Tuesday:
“I mean, don’t tell me that Afghans don’t want to leave when there’s been a backlog of Special Immigrant Visa applications for over a decade,” he said. “Don’t tell me they don’t want to leave when they’re literally clinging to airplanes to try to get out of this country. That was the single part of the president’s speech that I not only disagreed with but I thought was just utter BS.”
The entire speech was utter BS, but, still, that says a lot coming from a Massachusetts liberal.
“[T]he president said in his speech that he planned for every contingency. I think it’s pretty obvious they did not plan for this contingency,” he went on, further impugning his Commander-in-Chief.
Rep. Moulton, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, has been sounding the alarm on the need to provide protection for the Afghans who worked with our soldiers and helped craft an evacuation plan in June. He attacked Biden’s leadership, or lack thereof, saying, “I still don’t understand why the administration hasn’t taken us up on that option and, again, why they didn’t do it a long time ago.”
Related: Sen. Kennedy: Biden Should ‘Hide His Head In A Bag’
Similarly, after Monday’s speech, “appalled” Afghanistan War vet and No One Left Behind founder Matt Zeller blasted Biden’s “profound bold-faced lie” on MSNBC. The former Democrat congressional candidate said:
The idea we planned for every contingency? I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office. I have been trying to tell our government for years that this was coming. We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people. Nobody listened to us. …We had all the people and equipment in place to be able to save these people months ago and we did nothing.
Astoundingly, it’s not just our Afghan allies in dire straits, but thousands of Americans are stranded in the country as well, with the Biden administration having no plan to get them out. On Tuesday, Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan refused to commit to bringing back every American.
We're all left watching helplessly, Democrats and Republicans alike, as Biden repeats the same mistakes of the 1970s, but worse. Utter BS doesn't even begin to describe it.