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Sept. 1, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:43

For Joe Biden, The Cruelty Is The Point | Ep. 1331

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	President Biden shows the world that his empathy is an act, with a blame-shifting, nasty, vindictive, and bloviating speech championing his Afghanistan withdrawal, and the fallout will be toxic.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	We'll get to all the news in just one moment and plenty of it there is.
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	Alrighty, so remember that time that President Biden was supposed to be the king of empathy?
	This was his entire pitch.
	Sure, he's doddering.
	Sure, he's not coherent.
	Sure, he has nothing but bad ideas.
	And even Barack Obama once said, don't underestimate Joe Biden's capacity to F things up.
	But he's so empathetic.
	I mean, he's just he's grandpa.
	He's the guy that you want in a tragic scenario to put his arm around you and really make you feel better about life.
	That's the guy you need.
	Joe Biden.
	It's bull.
	It's bull.
	Okay?
	And this is becoming increasingly clear.
	Because what true empathy is about, just interpersonally, is when you don't agree with the person that you are empathizing with.
	And when you have to take the brunt of what they are saying and just internalize it.
	Hey, if all your empathy really is, is performative, if all your empathy really is, is calling upon your own wellspring of personal grief in order to project it out to the world so that people will sympathize with you, that is not you acting empathetically, that is you being an actor.
	And Joe Biden is an actor.
	I don't know what else to tell you when it comes to his supposed compassion and his supposed empathy.
	What we have watched over the past several weeks is the stripping away of the veil of empathy from Joe Biden.
	It happened again last night.
	It's been happening consistently over the past several weeks.
	When asked tough questions about the suffering of the people being left behind in Afghanistan.
	When he is asked about the people who are going to be living under the Taliban and the people who are going to be murdered by the Taliban, Joe Biden has shown no empathy.
	When it comes to the American service people who came home in caskets from Afghanistan, Joe Biden has shown little or no empathy.
	The only time Joe Biden ever seems to be able to muster up even an iota of empathy is when he invokes his son, Beau, who died of brain cancer at the age of 46.
	And that has nothing to do with the soldiers who died in Afghanistan, for example.
	It has nothing to do with the suffering of the people under the Taliban or the people who worked with us who will be undoubtedly executed.
	That has nothing to do with anything.
	It turns out that human beings all over the course of history have had personal tragedies in their family.
	Okay, relying on that personal tragedy to suggest that you understand all grief everywhere or that your grief is suddenly akin to the grief of others who are experiencing completely different circumstances is quite foolish and quite empty.
	And yet that's what Joe Biden does on a regular basis.
	And I point this out only because the redeeming feature of Joe Biden, according to his greatest advocates, is this empathy.
	And yet it's been not only not on display over the past several weeks, it is completely absent.
	In fact, it's reversed.
	Joe Biden is not only unempathetic to people who deserve his supposed empathy, he is downright cruel to them.
	I give you a couple of examples to begin today because that's really what his speech was about last night.
	It was about no empathy for the people left behind, no empathy for the people, the 38 million people now living under the predations of the Taliban.
	It was about defensive, bloviating nastiness.
	Which really is what Joe Biden is politically.
	People have known this on Capitol Hill his entire career.
	He's a know-nothing.
	He has spent his entire career being wrong.
	And when challenged, he gets incredibly combative and grumpy and nasty to people.
	And you see it with the press all the time.
	His empathy only extends so far as it is politically useful for it to extend.
	That is the real story of Joe Biden politically.
	And it is the story of him as President of the United States at this point.
	His empathy extends to people who agree with him and who massage him.
	Here's a couple of examples.
	So, you'll recall that the President of the United States went to Dover Air Force Base to greet the incoming caskets of 13 service members who were killed in Kabul.
	In large measure, thanks to his garbage policy of allowing the Taliban to provide security for people trying to get out of the country, and also of not holding Bagram Air Base so he had no actual security buffer, So the parents of many of these members, service members, went to Dover Air Force Base.
	And Biden wanted to meet with them, and so they did.
	Their stories are somewhat chilling on an emotional level.
	Because George W. Bush, during the Afghanistan war, during the Iraq war, he routinely used to call parents of people who had fallen, service members who had fallen, given their lives in service of country.
	He routinely used to go quietly to Dover Air Force Base without press coverage, without the media there snapping his photo.
	He used to do that all the- and he used to take abuse from people.
	He used to take all the understandable emotional rage that parents were directing against him, and he used to just take it.
	Not so Joe Biden.
	So here's the account of Mark Schmitt.
	He's the father of Jared Schmitt, who died in this suicide bombing in Kabul, talking about his encounter with Joe Biden.
	Well, initially I wasn't going to meet with him, but then I felt I owed it to my son to at least have some words with him about how I felt, and it didn't go well.
	He talked a bit more about his own son than he did my son, and that didn't sit well with me.
	According to Schmidt, Joe Biden started talking about Bo, and he said, I'm not really interested in hearing about Bo right now.
	I want to talk about my son, since my son was the one who was just killed in the line of duty.
	And instead of Biden understanding that, Biden actually got angry.
	Instead of Biden saying, I hear you and you're right.
	Instead, Biden got mad at him.
	Same sort of story from Darren Hoover, the father of Marine Staff Sergeant Taylor Hoover, another fallen service member.
	He said that Joe Biden couldn't stop checking his watch over and over and over.
	In reference to the checking of his watch, that didn't happen just once.
	That happened on every single one that came out of that airplane.
	It happened on every single one of them.
	They would release the salute and he looked down at his watch.
	On every last one, all 13, he looked down at his watch.
	Schmitz seconded that motion.
	The other father, he said, I actually leaned into my son's mother's ear and I said, I swear to God, if he checks his watch one more time, and that was only four times in, I couldn't look at him anymore after that, considering especially the time and why we were there, I found it to be the most disrespectful thing I've ever seen.
	Jen Psaki, by the way, dodged when asked about whether Biden was looking at his watch.
	She was asked directly about this yesterday.
	Here was the press secretary of the United States, who essentially has become Joe Biden's night nurse.
	Every evening, Joe Biden does something to crap the bed, and then every morning, Jen Psaki comes in and has to clean it up.
	Here she was trying to dodge the question about whether Joe Biden was checking his watch.
	Let's just remember for a second that if Donald Trump had done this, if he had gone to a ceremony for fallen service members with the caskets coming off the plane, and he had been checking his watch, Can you imagine the outcry and the justified uproar?
	Here's Jen Psaki.
	Is the president looking at his watch and does he have a message to those people who felt that they were offended?
	Well, I would say his message to all of the family members who were there, those who were not even in attendance, is that he is grateful to their sons and daughters, the sacrifice they made to the country,
	Okay, so they're just going to say empty words about all of this.
	And this is what Joe Biden does all the time.
	Something bad happens and then he talks about what it feels like to be in grief.
	As though, somehow, this is supposed to make him empathetic.
	He's going to talk about his own pain and this makes him empathetic.
	No.
	Talking about somebody else's pain makes you empathetic.
	Talking about your own pain, especially as a politician, makes you selfish, and it makes you unlikable, and it makes you a user.
	Which is what Joe Biden is.
	Let it not be said that his Afghanistan policy is rooted in any sort of empathy.
	It's certainly not rooted in strength or in decency.
	But the pitch, again, is that no matter what, Joe Biden is well-intentioned and empathetic.
	That is just not true.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so...
	This empathetic policy has now resulted in a wide variety of people being left behind in Afghanistan.
	Those people include, apparently, 24 students from Sacramento who are still stranded in Afghanistan, according to the Sacramento Bay, quote, at least 24 Sacramento area students are confirmed to be stranded in Afghanistan as turmoil continues in Kabul, according to school officials.
	San Juan Unified School District staff said 24 students, down from the initial estimate of 150 students, had not returned to campuses since the start of the 2021-2022 school year.
	Apparently, staffers at the Sacramento Congressman Ami Berra's office contacted San Juan Unified and are working with the district to bring the students back safely, but they are still stuck there.
	Meanwhile, it turns out that a three-year-old has been stranded there as well.
	The three-year-old boy was born near Sacramento, according to ABC7 News.
	His passport shows he's a U.S.
	citizen.
	He's going through a harrowing ordeal right now, unable to escape Afghanistan.
	We're hiding his identity and that of his father, a social worker, and other family members who are all U.S.
	permanent residents for fear of them being captured by the Taliban.
	So, as we will learn pretty shortly from Joe Biden himself, probably what happened is that they called the three-year-old and he didn't pick up the phone.
	So really, it's his own fault that he is stuck there.
	Other people who are stuck there include an Afghan interpreter who saved Joe Biden's life, but now is stuck there.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, 13 years ago, Afghan interpreter Mohammed helped rescue then-Senator Joe Biden and two other senators transit in a remote Afghanistan valley after their helicopter was forced to land in a snowstorm.
	Now, Mohammed is asking President Biden to save him.
	Hello, Mr. President.
	Save me and my family.
	Mohammed, who asked not to use his full name while in hiding, told the Wall Street Journal, Don't forget me here.
	Mohammed, his wife, and their four children are hiding from the Taliban after his years-long attempt to get out of Afghanistan got tangled in the bureaucracy.
	They are among the countless Afghan allies who were left behind when the U.S.
	ended its 20-year military campaign in Afghanistan on Monday.
	Asked about this?
	Jen Psaki thanked the interpreter for his service and said the U.S.
	remains committed to getting Afghan allies out of the country.
	Yes, I'm sure.
	I'm sure.
	Meanwhile, the State Department is telling people, you know, just keep a low profile.
	If you're a green card holder and you're still in Afghanistan, yeah, just keep your head down.
	We'll probably be fine.
	According to Jim Garrity reporting for National Review, the U.S.
	Embassy in Kabul suspended operations on August 31, 2021.
	While the U.S.
	government has withdrawn its personnel from Kabul, they say, we will continue to assist U.S.
	citizens and their families in Afghanistan from Doha, Qatar, which is like 600 miles away.
	We will also continue our efforts to help lawful permanent residents.
	They say that U.S.
	citizens and their family members still in country should, quote, keep a low profile and notify a trusted person of your travel and movement plans and make contingency plans to leave when it is safe to do so that do not rely on U.S.
	government assistance.
	So yeah, that we're not leaving people behind at all.
	Such empathy, such dramatic empathy.
	Meanwhile, the Taliban continues to perform reprisals.
	By the way, the U.S.
	government left its own journalist behind in Afghanistan, according to Josh Rogin at the Washington Post.
	The administration was warned early and often about the 600 or so employees, contractors, and family members who work for U.S.-sponsored news organizations under the umbrella of the U.S.
	Agency for Global Media, a federal agency funded by Congress.
	They include journalists working for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe who have worked in Afghanistan for years at great personal risk.
	The Taliban has killed four RFE journalists since 2016 through suicide bomb attacks.
	The company's journalists routinely receive death threats from the extremists.
	Now, the leaders of these organizations say the State Department promised to get everybody out before August 31st, only to later renege on that promise amid the chaos and confusion at the Kabul airport.
	By the way, I'm receiving notes from people who were actually at Kabul airport when all of this was happening, and there were apparently many situations in which the airport was filled with people ready to evacuate, and then they were just emptied out and handed over to the Taliban.
	Senator Ben Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, he says it's disheartening so many professional journalists employed by American-funded news organizations have now been left behind with their families.
	These Afghan allies are among the people most endangered at the present moment for the good work they have done over the course of the last two decades.
	Meanwhile, the Taliban, of course, is going around and killing people.
	According to the BBC, there's growing evidence that the reality on the ground is different than the rhetoric coming from the Taliban.
	No shock.
	Wow, I can't believe it.
	You mean the Taliban has been lying to the international community about how they treat people?
	That's crazy.
	We trust those people.
	They're our friends now.
	Now, sources inside Afghanistan, as well as some who recently fled, have told the BBC Taliban fighters are searching for and allegedly killing people they pledged they would leave in peace.
	Several sources confirmed Taliban fighters last week executed two senior police officials Haj Mullah Akhazqai, the security director of Badghis province, and Ghulam Sak Akhbari, the security director of Farah province, video footage shows Akhazqai was kneeling, blindfolded, his hands tied behind his back before he was shot and murdered.
	So things are going great over there.
	And this is all because of Joe Biden's empathy, you see.
	He's really an empathetic dude.
	So in one second, we're going to get to Joe Biden's speech last night, which was breathtaking in its arrogance, astonishing in its temerity.
	And this is a president who apparently has never made a mistake, ever.
	This whole thing was beautiful.
	It's all Trump's fault, but it was beautiful.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Alright, so, last night, more than 24 hours after we found out that the American military had left, Joe Biden decided to give a speech.
	Joe Biden had basically been hiding in the basement.
	Because the fallout from this is bad.
	It's really bad.
	It turns out that when you leave hundreds of American citizens behind, And then when you leave probably thousands of American green card holders behind, and tens of thousands of SIV holders behind, and a myriad number of Afghan allies who worked with us, and millions of people who actually don't want to live under the predations of the Taliban, it turns out you don't look empathetic.
	It turns out you look like a piece of bleep.
	That's what it turns out you look like.
	And when you do so in absolutely cowardly fashion, refusing to answer questions from the press, giving mush-mouthed statements every couple of days, lying overtly throughout the entire process, talking about how everybody will get out, talking about how we're going to stay long enough to get everybody out, talking about how every contingency here was planned, it turns out people don't like you.
	It turns out they think that your empathy is merely an act at that point.
	And they are right!
	And you can see this in Joe Biden's poll numbers, which have now sunk into the low 40s.
	And after being dead solid at 50% his entire presidency, he is now down to about 40-41% in a lot of these polls.
	And falling fast.
	Because he is not competent, and he is not capable, and he is not the quote-unquote empathetic grandfather figure that so many people thought they were electing.
	That is the takeaway.
	So Joe Biden goes into hiding yesterday.
	He doesn't come out.
	He has his Secretary of State Tony Blinken give a full ridiculous speech in which he looked like he was delivering a hostage video.
	He's looking slightly off camera at his cue cards.
	You had the CENTCOM commander, Kenneth McKenzie, go out there and humiliate himself by saying a bunch of stuff like the Taliban are now our best friends and we handled this beautifully.
	And finally, Joe Biden emerges after delaying his speech.
	He was supposed to give a speech yesterday about 1.30 Eastern time, and then it was about 2.45 Eastern time he was supposed to speak.
	And then finally, he came out after three o'clock, which is his normal way.
	I don't know what's going on behind the scenes over there, but they have not hit a time for him to, like they're much better about hitting timelines in coordination with the Taliban than they are with actually keeping their schedule with regard to the press.
	They routinely call a time when he's going to speak to the press and then they just kind of blow right through it.
	So finally he emerges and he proceeds to give a 30 minute diatribe.
	And it really was a diatribe.
	He is angry.
	He is grumpy.
	He's pissed off that you've questioned his obviously wonderful strategy.
	He blames every single person but himself.
	He has done everything absolutely perfectly.
	This thin-skinned buffoon.
	Everything he has done here was part of the plan, except when it wasn't part of the plan, and if it wasn't part of the plan, that's everybody else's fault but his.
	Joe Biden has said repeatedly the buck stops with him.
	The American public are holding him to that right now.
	But he doesn't want to be held to that.
	He's lying.
	He wants the buck to stop with Trump.
	He wants the buck to stop with the Afghan military.
	He wants the buck to stop with his own military commanders.
	He's hiding behind everybody for the one decision that he made and only he made, which was pull out right now, damn the consequences.
	Everybody else is to blame.
	Everybody.
	The people who are stuck in Afghanistan are to blame.
	They're the ones.
	They should have just gotten out earlier, obviously.
	The President of the United States is a pathetic spectacle at this point in time.
	And once again, The key to all of this is understanding that it has utterly undercut his image of himself and his image on the world stage.
	Not because everyone thought he was an expert.
	Not because everybody thought that he was fluent in foreign policy.
	That was a creation of the press.
	It was always a myth.
	Joe Biden was never fluent at anything.
	The man's terrible at everything.
	He hasn't made a good foreign policy decision his entire career.
	He's so bad on foreign policy, he opposed the bin Laden raid.
	Now, of course, he uses the bin Laden raid as an excuse to get out of Afghanistan, but he opposed it at the time.
	If you had watched Joe Biden his entire career, no one was under the impression that this guy was any sort of Einstein.
	I mean, the guy wasn't even a sixth grade science student.
	Joe Biden has always been horrific in terms of policy.
	Okay, but the one thing that was said for him, and this was, again, his entire pitch against Donald Trump, his entire pitch.
	It was not, my policy is going to be better than Trump, because his policies were not going to be better than Trump.
	Polls showed Americans actually liked Trump's policies better than Biden's.
	His entire pitch throughout 2020 is, I am a nice person.
	I am an empathetic person.
	I am a person who cares.
	Donald Trump, the cruelty is the point, as Adam Serwer famously said.
	The cruelty is the point with Trump.
	But I, Joe Biden, I am the repository of all good, humane, compassionate feeling.
	That has been completely exploded over the course of the last four weeks.
	He ain't getting that back.
	The impression that Joe Biden is somebody who cares deeply about America, about American citizens, that this is somebody who, you know how many times over the course of his campaign, He tweeted that he's going to build a society where we leave no one behind.
	And now he is physically leaving behind Americans with the worst people on Earth, the Taliban.
	And actually, I should say like the second or third worst people on Earth, because actually the Taliban is not even as bad as Al Qaeda or ISIS, which the Taliban is currently hosting.
	This is a guy who posed as he was going to unify America around solidarity.
	And instead, he has been divisive.
	Instead, he has been awful.
	And again, his compassion only extends as far as the front of his face.
	That is it.
	It extends as far as a mirror.
	Joe Biden is compassionate to one person and one person only, Joe Biden, which is why when he speaks about grief, he doesn't speak about anybody else's grief.
	He speaks about his own personal experiences of suffering and grief.
	He did it again in his speech last night.
	So, take that for what you will.
	But if a politician has one pitch, and a pitch ain't competence, and the pitch is not coherence, the pitch is, I'm a nice person, and then that falls apart, you have to ask yourself, what exactly is his pitch for staying president at this point?
	What is the pitch?
	And the answer is, there is no pitch.
	He proved that last night in Extremis.
	It's pretty amazing.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so as I've mentioned before, when it comes to politicians, I don't think you should look to them for empathy.
	I don't think policy should be rooted in empathy.
	I think it should be rooted in what is the most practical, what is the most practicable, and what is most in America's interest.
	But Joe Biden doesn't believe that.
	Joe Biden believes that policy should be rooted in empathy.
	So if he is unempathetic, he has nothing else to back his policy.
	Because his policy is obviously not pragmatic.
	His policy is obviously not effective.
	It is not useful.
	And so he is left spinning in circles.
	And that's what we saw last night.
	So the president toddles out to the microphone and he proceeds to declare that what he has done is triumphant.
	He's triumphant about all of this.
	And we've been giving you the updates.
	I mean, we gave tens of billions of dollars in American military equipment to the Taliban.
	We've got thousands of Americans and American green card holders who are stranded behind enemy lines.
	We have China and Russia on the move.
	Quick note, yesterday the Taliban were not apparently hanging somebody from a helicopter.
	It was just somebody taking a joyride beneath the helicopter.
	We'll wait for a couple of weeks for them to actually hang people beneath the helicopters.
	In any case, here was Joe Biden yesterday, beginning with a triumphal announcement of what he, Joe Biden, had done.
	Last night in Kabul, The United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history.
	We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety.
	That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible.
	No nation, no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history.
	That's how good this was.
	It was a historic win for the United States to turn over the country back to the people who committed 9-11 or provided cover for those people.
	It's a historic win.
	You know how many people we evacuated from the Titanic here?
	Man, we are good at evacuating people from the Titanic.
	What a plan.
	What a masterfully conceived plan.
	Well, what about, you might be asking yourself, what about the 13 dead service people because you decided to hand security over to the Taliban?
	Joe Biden has an answer for you.
	They did it facing a crush of enormous crowds seeking to leave the country.
	And they did it knowing ISIS-K terrorists, sworn enemies of the Taliban, were lurking in the midst of those crowds.
	20 service members were wounded in the service of this mission.
	13 heroes gave their lives.
	I was just at Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer.
	Yeah, checking her watch every five seconds and insulting the military parents.
	By the way, does he ever mention here why it was that they were facing a crush of enormous crowds seeking to leave the country?
	And why they had to face down ISIS-K terrorists?
	At no point does he actually mention this.
	The reason this happened is because he gave up Bagram Air Base, which exists outside of Kabul.
	The reason that this happened is because he decided to hand over local security directly to the Taliban, the Washington Post has reported, instead of taking the Taliban's own offer of allowing the United States to maintain control of Kabul at least long enough to evacuate our people.
	At no point is he going to take the blame for that, even though this is, again, a complete Biden policy.
	See, everything was masterfully handled.
	And the military's challenge is, well, those were natural.
	Those are just how things were going to be.
	Okay, then he starts the blame game.
	So remember, Captain Compassion over here, the blame game is, so normally, if you're a compassionate, you normally say, you take the hit, you move on.
	Not Joe Biden.
	This is everybody's fault but his.
	So he starts by ripping into the collapse of the Afghan government and lying about it.
	He says that he had contingency plans for the collapse of that government, and it was sort of foreseen.
	We know that's a lie.
	In July, he was explicitly telling people it would not be like the fall of Saigon, that the Taliban did not have the ability to take over the entire country quickly.
	He himself said that.
	By the way, he was lying at the time.
	He was lying at the time.
	There's another story from the Daily Mail today, July 23rd, that That Biden actually called the now departed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and he saw that the Taliban had been making gains and he asked Ghani to lie about it.
	He asked Ghani to say to everybody that everything is going fine, apparently.
	It's not a great phone call, guys.
	I've noticed that impeachment happens over phone calls these days.
	So that's not a great phone call.
	Biden apparently said to Ghani that he wanted Ghani to lie to people.
	He said, quote, I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan is things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.
	There is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.
	So he knew things were going badly and he told Ghani to lie about it.
	Here is Joe Biden explaining, however, that, you know, we had an assumption about the Afghan military holding.
	It turned out not to be accurate.
	No one could have predicted this, but we had contingency plans.
	Number one, a lot of people did predict it.
	Number two, he knew what was going on.
	And number three, he did not have a good contingency plan.
	That assumption that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown turned out not to be accurate.
	But I still instructed our national security team to prepare for every eventuality.
	Even that one.
	And that's what we did.
	They did.
	They prepared for every eventuality.
	So many eventualities.
	Now, who are you going to believe?
	Joe Biden or your own eyes?
	Clearly, they did not prepare for these eventualities.
	Clearly, he was putting artificial constraints on his own military.
	I mean, Mark Milley said as much.
	He said, we were told that we could have six to seven hundred troops.
	If, by the way, their contingency plans have been so excellent, why did we have to re-insert thousands of troops on the ground in order to effectuate this evacuation?
	And if there were such a great contingency, why are there still literally tens of thousands of people we made promises to still stuck there?
	Okay, so he continues along these lines.
	We made contingency plans.
	This was so incoherent.
	On the one hand, it's the Afghan military's fault.
	On the other hand, we made contingency plans.
	On the one hand, it's Trump's fault.
	On the other hand, I deserve all the credit.
	Like, he was all over the place because when you don't have an actual defense, you just have to throat at the wall.
	And that's what Joe Biden is doing right here.
	Okay, so he continues along these lines.
	So we were ready when the Afghan security forces, after two decades of fighting for their country, And losing thousands of their own did not hold on as long as anyone expected.
	We were ready when they and the people of Afghanistan watched their own government collapse and the president flee amid the corruption and malfeasance, handing over the country to their enemy, the Taliban, and significantly increasing the risk to U.S.
	personnel and our allies.
	Okay, so again, everybody's to blame.
	It was all part of the plan, but the Afghan military completely collapsed, and that's because they're corrupt and terrible.
	So I just have a question for Joe Biden.
	At any point here, are you going to mention the fact that you completely withdrew close air support, as well as all American military contractors from Afghanistan, and destroyed the military from the within, and announced that we were going to leave?
	At any point?
	No, of course not.
	But don't worry.
	According to Joe Biden, there was not only a plan to deal with the complete collapse of the country.
	There was an extra, an excellent plan for the evacuation, which doesn't explain why we have all these people still stuck on the ground over there and no personnel.
	But according to Joe Biden, all part of the plan.
	And you have to be a moron to believe him.
	You really do.
	You have to be a clinically stupid person in order to believe this stuff.
	Here is Joe Biden talking about the wonders of his plan.
	As a result, To safely extract American citizens before August 31st, as well as embassy personnel, allies and partners, and those Afghans who had worked with us and fought alongside of us for 20 years, I had authorized 6,000 troops, American troops, to Kabul to help secure the airport.
	As General McKenzie said, this is the way the mission was designed.
	It was designed to operate under severe stress and attack.
	And that's what it did.
	Okay, so if you designed the mission, then who's to blame for leaving the Taliban in control of security and getting 13 American service members killed?
	Well, it's either your plan or it ain't your plan.
	Which is it?
	Okay, but then this also leaves a question.
	If this was such a well-designed and brilliant plan, why are there so many people left behind enemy lines, right?
	A normal plan, you said you were going to take care of every contingency, a normal plan would have, you know, dealt with the fact that we now have at least hundreds of American citizens behind enemy lines and an unspecified number of green card holders.
	By the way, remember how at the very beginning of this, they were saying there were 10,000 to 15,000 Americans in Kabul?
	Remember how that shrunk all the way down to 6,000?
	You wonder how that happened?
	It's because they started excising anybody who's a green card holder.
	If you're an American green card holder, you no longer count.
	If you're somebody with legal papers, you're no longer counted.
	So they just redefined who got to count as an American for purposes of getting them out, even though green card holders have the same rights from the U.S.
	Embassy as American citizens proper.
	That's how they played the statistical game.
	Anyway, you might be wondering, if it was such a great plan designed by this brilliant piece of human genius, then why are so many people left behind?
	Joe Biden has an answer.
	The collapse of the country was the Afghan military's fault, not his.
	He had a plan.
	And the evacuation, if it was unsuccessful with regard to these people, that is their fault.
	That three-year-old we talked about earlier, that three-year-old, we told them over and over, you need to come to the airport.
	And the three-year-old just kept crying and watching Elmo.
	Nothing we can do about that.
	Here is Joe Biden blaming the people who got left behind.
	Since March, we reached out 19 times to Americans in Afghanistan.
	What's he so pissed about, by the way?
	With multiple warnings.
	and offers to help them leave Afghanistan all the way back as far as March.
	After we started the evacuation 17 days ago, we did initial outreach and analysis and identified around 5000 Americans who had decided earlier to stay in Afghanistan but now wanted to leave.
	Our Operation Allied Rescue ended up getting more than 5,500 Americans out.
	Okay, so here he says, well, you know, in March we were telling people to leave.
	Yeah, and in July you were saying the country definitely was not going to fall.
	So which is it, dude?
	Okay, so then he gets to the people who are still left.
	And he says, you know what?
	Their fault.
	They wanted to stay probably.
	All these people trying to get out, probably their fault.
	Everybody's fault except for this doddering fool.
	Now we believe that about 100 to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan with some intention to leave.
	Most of those who remain are dual citizens, longtime residents who had earlier decided to stay because of their family roots in Afghanistan.
	The bottom line, 90% of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave.
	And for those remaining Americans, there is no deadline.
	We remain committed to get them out if they want to come out.
	If they want to come out, but they don't want to come out, right?
	It's their fault.
	They're stuck there, obviously.
	I mean, that's clearly what's happening right there.
	By the way, I do love when he uses stats like 90% of Americans, we got them out.
	Now they're saying it's 98% of Americans, right?
	Because they're trying to downgrade the number of Americans who are actually stuck there, even though they still don't have exact numbers.
	90% of Americans.
	Well, you know what's unbelievable?
	Here's an unbelievable stat for you.
	You ready?
	On 9-11, 99.99... 9, I believe.
	99.999% of Americans were not killed by terrorists on 9-11.
	Isn't that amazing?
	Wow, what an amazing success story that was.
	Incredible.
	Like, truly inspiring.
	The President of the United States here.
	Okay, in a second, we'll get to him continuing to make excuses, him continuing with his false binaries and his straw men.
	This is a pathetic spectacle for the United States.
	He's completely destroyed American interests in the Near East and in Central Asia.
	And he has done so while destroying his own reputation, by the way.
	Whatever was left of that is now in tatters.
	We'll get to more of the President of the United States making a fool of himself on national television yesterday.
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	Alrighty, we'll get to more of our doddering president in just one second.
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	All righty, so Joe Biden continues along these lines.
	He has to find more people to blame, right?
	So he's already blamed the Afghan National Army.
	He's blamed the Afghan government.
	He's blamed the Americans themselves for being stuck in Kabul.
	And now he is going to blame everybody who doesn't trust the Taliban.
	We really should trust the Taliban.
	It's very important to trust the Taliban.
	You might be wondering, you know, OK, fine.
	So you're blaming the Americans sort of left behind.
	But what are you going to do about them?
	Joe Biden's answer is we're going to trust the international community and the Taliban.
	What a joke this human being is.
	Just yesterday, The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that sent a clear message about what the international community expects the Taliban to deliver on moving forward.
	Notably, freedom of travel, freedom to leave.
	And together, we are joined by over 100 countries that are determined to make sure the Taliban upholds those commitments.
	Those countries do not include Russia or China, as I have noted, but nobody else seems to care.
	And you're asking yourself now, why would we trust the Taliban?
	Why?
	And Joe Biden says, well, they did make public comments.
	And I mean, there's one thing that's clear.
	The Taliban are people who keep their word.
	They would never lie about anything.
	And if they do lie, man, we will punish them using this fluffy bunny right here.
	We will threaten to withhold this fluffy bunny.
	We have made it with our own American hands.
	This fluffy bunny.
	And we will not give it to them if they do not let the Americans out.
	Or alternatively, we'll just send them bags of cash.
	Here's the President of the United States talking about why we can rely on the Taliban.
	The Taliban has made public commitments broadcast on television and radio across Afghanistan on safe passage for anyone wanting to leave, including those who worked alongside Americans.
	We don't take them by their word alone, but by their actions.
	And we have leverage to make sure those commitments are met.
	The leverage comes in the form of our massive military power we just withdrew, and also the incredible leverage we have over the money that we hold.
	You know, we have capacity to hold their bank accounts, and we can totally withhold those bank accounts if they, oh wait, they have American citizens over there.
	So yeah, we are kind of going to do whatever they want to do.
	Okay, then Joe Biden had to spread the blame around because it turns out that no matter how much horse manure he tries to turn into gold, it's still horse manure.
	So he's got to spread it around, right?
	Everybody's got to get dirty.
	So again, just to recap, the people who are to blame are Americans stuck in Kabul, the Afghan National Army, Let me be clear.
	Leaving August the 31st is not due to an arbitrary deadline.
	It was designed to save American lives.
	his own military commanders. Everyone is to blame except for the only one who made the call this jackass. And so here he was going after going after Donald Trump.
	Let me be clear. Leaving August the 31st is not due to an arbitrary deadline. It was designed to save American lives. My predecessor, the former president, signed an agreement with the Taliban to remove U.S.
	troops by May the 1st, just months after I was inaugurated.
	The previous administration's agreement said that if we stuck to the May 1st deadline that they had signed on to leave by, the Taliban wouldn't attack any American forces.
	But if we stayed, all bets were off.
	He continued along these lines and then he laid out the false binary.
	Either we left in ignominious defeat and left a bunch of Americans behind and rushed out of there.
	Based on a deadline set by only one person, Joe Biden.
	Or we're gonna have to go to total cataclysmic war.
	There's no evidence to suggest this is the case.
	He's just pulling this directly out of his ass.
	This is the same exact sort of logic that was used with regard to Barack Obama's Iran deal, which was, there are only two choices, nuclear annihilation with Iran, or this crappy deal I bring you, right?
	Joe Biden is doing the same thing here.
	Our only two options were not to maintain the status quo with every so often a ratchet up of troops, a ratchet down of troops.
	No, there are only two options, either complete pullout Or, complete, utter warfare.
	Tens of thousands of Americans dead in the streets.
	It's just nonsense.
	It's just nonsense.
	But, again, this is his schtick.
	So we're left with a simple decision.
	Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren't leaving, and commit another tens of thousands more troops going back to war.
	That was the choice.
	The real choice.
	Between leaving or escalating, I was not going to extend this forever war.
	And I was not extending a forever exit.
	Okay, that one is going to come back to bite him.
	I was not extending a forever exit because I promise you we're going to be carrying out operations in Afghanistan for some time to come if he plans on keeping any of his commitments.
	The only way that the quote unquote forever exit is over is if he really does mean to abandon all of these people.
	Okay, so he wasn't done spreading the blame.
	So it's Trump's fault, even though, again, the Trump deal with the Taliban was conditional.
	And I was not a fan of the Trump deal with the Taliban.
	I thought it was crappy at the time.
	I spoke out about it at the time.
	I think there are a bunch of things that the Trump administration did with the Taliban that were frankly unconscionable.
	I think the release of 5,000 prisoners at the behest of the Taliban was insane and ridiculous and unrooted, unmoored from reality.
	But there's only one person who decided to surrender the country in its totality.
	That's Joe Biden.
	By the way, Joe Biden blaming Trump is kind of amazing considering last week he said himself no matter what Trump had done, he would have done this.
	Once again, Joe Biden speaking out of both sides of his mouth, but that may just be because he has lost all elasticity in his face at this point.
	In any case, Joe Biden then decided it's not enough to blame Trump.
	He's also going to blame his own military advisors.
	If you're blaming me, blame the military too.
	What a man he is, standing for his own strategy and his own plan, standing for his principles this way.
	What a brilliant orator and an incredible leader.
	Here he is just crapping all over his own military advisors.
	The decision to end the military lift operations at Kabul Airport was based on the unanimous recommendation of my civilian and military advisors, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and all the service chiefs and the commanders in the field.
	Nope.
	Maybe based on the artificial conditions you put on them.
	But I love how everybody else advised him to do this, you see.
	It really wasn't his call.
	It was his call, because he's so smart, and because it was such a great move.
	But also, it was Trump's fault, and the Afghan military's fault, and the Americans stuck in Afghanistan's fault, and his commanders told him to do it.
	So really, the buck stops with all of them, unless you like the decision, in which case the buck stops with Biden.
	Captain Empathy over here.
	So empathetic.
	And then, he says, and now, join me in grateful prayer.
	To me, since I'm the one who made the decision.
	For now, I urge all Americans to join me in grateful prayer for our troops and diplomats and intelligence officers who carried out this mission of mercy in Kabul and at tremendous risk with such unparalleled results.
	When he says, I want you to give a prayer for the troops and diplomats and intelligence officers, what he really means, and we all know it, is I wish for you to give a grateful prayer to me.
	I'm the master of this policy.
	I was the creator of this policy, unless you don't like it, in which case it was really everybody else, but it was so brilliant and so well done.
	I mean, it kind of failed, but true.
	He's all over the damn place.
	And the reason he's all over the place is because this is a bad policy and he refuses to own it.
	And it didn't spring from empathy.
	It sprang from bullheaded stupidity.
	Which really should be the name of his next autobiography.
	Bullheaded Stupidity would be an excellent name for an autobiography by the current president of the United States.
	Now, in just a second, we'll get to his actual justification for the decision.
	Not the strategic decision, but the geo-strategic decision.
	Why was it necessary that we pull out of Afghanistan right now?
	Okay, so, Joe Biden's speech.
	Continues, and here he really gets to the meat.
	After he's done blaming everybody else, here he gets to the meat.
	This is why Joe Biden had to make the decision to leave Afghanistan now, when we had 2,500 troops on the ground, zero combat casualties since February of 2020, a foothold to fight terrorists, Al Qaeda and ISIS, to prevent the retaking of the country by the terror-housing Taliban.
	Here is why it was necessary that we pull out, and also how he made no mistakes.
	Right, so first of all, let's just start with this.
	A lot of people were asking, Joe Biden, why didn't you pull people out sooner?
	If you thought that we needed to get out and August 31st was the deadline, why didn't you start the evacuation sooner?
	According to Joe Biden, Joe Biden has never made a mistake.
	That is the answer.
	Compassionate, empathetic Joe Biden.
	He has never made a mistake.
	Here he was.
	I take responsibility for the decision.
	Now, some say we should have started mass evacuation sooner.
	And couldn't this have been done in a more orderly manner?
	I respectfully disagree.
	Imagine if we had begun evacuations in June or July, bringing in thousands of American troops and evacuating more than 120,000 people in the middle of a civil war.
	There still would have been a rush to the airport, a breakdown in confidence and control of the government.
	And it still would have been very difficult and dangerous mission.
	Okay, so now he's gonna rely on counterfactuals.
	What if there had been, like, a massive civil war, and we had evacuated people, there would have been a rush to the- like, he has no proof of any of this.
	Here's what we do know.
	You collapsed the Afghan government from within.
	You collapsed the Afghan military from within.
	You handed over Kabul to the Taliban.
	You allowed the Taliban to control security, and you left a bunch of Americans behind.
	And if you're asking him, could you have done it any better?
	No way, man.
	It was inevitable.
	Inevitable.
	Okay, so here's where he gets to the justification for his grand strategy, his geostrategic thinking.
	And what it really comes down to, his geostrategic thinking is, I wanted to do it, so I did it.
	That is his geostrategic thinking.
	Because all he can pose as an alternative is straw men.
	A giant field of straw men burning to light up the night.
	Here is the President of the United States explaining that there is no way to get out without it being really rough.
	But also, you know, if you wanted to stay for years on end, what would have been enough?
	You know what would have been enough?
	What was going on right then?
	The status quo was a lot better than this.
	Here's Joe Biden.
	The bottom line is there is no evacuation.
	From the end of a war that you can run without the kinds of complexities, challenges, threats we faced, none.
	There are those who would say we should have stayed indefinitely for years on end.
	They ask, why don't we just keep doing what we were doing?
	Why do we have to change anything?
	The fact is, everything had changed.
	My predecessor had made a deal with the Taliban.
	When I came into office, we faced a deadline, May 1.
	The Taliban onslaught was coming.
	Okay, that is not what the intelligence sources were saying.
	That we are on the verge of a giant Taliban Tet offensive?
	Nope!
	Because you know what?
	The Afghan military had been taking 10-15,000 casualties a year.
	They had close American air support.
	So the evidence of this is pretty much non-existent.
	But Joe Biden continues to rely on this in the same way that, again, the Obama administration relied on the lie that there were moderates in Iran who were emboldened by our nuclear deal with them.
	To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask, what is the vital national interest?
	this old man is truly.
	So he says that, you know, our national interest had been fulfilled in Afghanistan.
	Which is frankly a completely insane thing to say.
	Here he was continuing.
	To those asking for a third decade of war in Afghanistan, I ask, what is the vital national interest?
	In my view, we only have one.
	To make sure Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland.
	Thank you.
	Remember why we went to Afghanistan in the first place?
	Because we were attacked by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda on September 11th, 2001.
	And they were based in Afghanistan.
	We delivered justice to bin Laden on May 2nd, 2011, over a decade ago.
	Al-Qaeda was decimated.
	Okay, there's something that I've noticed in the recent past.
	Al-Qaeda is back, you doof!
	We had the President of the United States saying that the only reason we're there is to prevent terrorists from taking over Afghanistan.
	Hmm!
	Hmm.
	I've noticed the people you just handed Afghanistan to are the exact same people we fought in 2001.
	And I've also noticed that all the terrorists who were there in 2001 are rushing back in.
	That ISIS-K carried out a terror attack on American targets in Kabul in the middle of your garbage evacuation plan.
	I noticed that the Al Qaeda leaders have been re-arriving in Afghanistan.
	By the way, every major defense official understands that we have just reconstituted a terrorist state in Afghanistan.
	Joe Biden's like, yeah, we had to leave because it was over.
	There was no more terrorism problem.
	Now we left and the terrorism problem is back.
	There's a damned shocker.
	And then he just starts pulling non-sequiturs off the trees.
	I mean, this is just bizarre.
	He starts talking about, well, why aren't we in Yemen?
	I mean, we're not in Yemen because we weren't attacked from Yemen.
	And if we had not been attacked from Afghanistan and it had not been a terror haven, we wouldn't have attacked Afghanistan.
	Your answer is, like, so?
	So?
	And?
	Here's Captain Incoherence.
	I respectfully suggest you ask yourself this question.
	If we'd been attacked on September 11, 2001 from Yemen instead of Afghanistan, would we have ever gone to war in Afghanistan?
	Even though the Taliban controlled Afghanistan in the year 2001?
	I believe the honest answer is no.
	We succeeded in what we set out to do in Afghanistan over a decade ago.
	Then we stayed for another decade.
	It was time to end this war.
	Who was president for most of that decade, or a large part of that decade?
	That would have been Barack Obama, was it not?
	By the way, you know who opposed the OBL raid?
	That would have been this guy.
	This idiot.
	Again, I'm spending a lot of time on this because I think this is the only true justification for what Joe Biden just did that we are going to get, which is he has a pig-headed, stubborn, and idiotic view of how world affairs works, and he's going to cram it down, and he does not give a damn who pays a price for that.
	He doesn't care how many Americans will have to die in Afghanistan to make that happen.
	He doesn't care how many Americans will die here if the terrorists come back.
	He doesn't care about any of that.
	He had in his mind that he was going to do this, and that was it.
	It was going to get done.
	We will maintain the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan and other countries.
	We just don't need to fight a ground war to do it.
	The speech is all over the place.
	He actually, in the middle of the speech, he's like, we're out, we're never going back.
	Also, we might go back.
	That was this portion of the speech.
	We will maintain the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan and other countries.
	We just don't need to fight a ground war to do it.
	We have what's called over the horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground, or very few if needed.
	you We've shown that capacity just in the last week.
	We struck ISIS-K remotely days after they murdered 13 of our service members and dozens of innocent Afghans.
	And to ISIS-K, we are not done with you yet.
	So I noticed that one of those really, really great drone strikes may have killed an entire family.
	And that might be because we didn't have eyes on the ground and we were relying on the Taliban to do our spotting for us.
	Maybe that was part of the problem.
	Also, it turns out that launching a drone attack from six hours away in Qatar is not exactly the same as having close air support with Americans on the ground and American contractors on the ground and American allies on the ground.
	Afghanistan is going to turn back into the black box that it was in 2001, and it's going to be Joe Biden's fault.
	But I am enjoying the irony of Joe Biden saying, we've withdrawn.
	It's over.
	And also, we're going to fight you to the ends of the earth, ISIS-K.
	All righty.
	Then he continues and he says, you know what?
	The really important thing is that in withdrawing from Afghanistan, we've done severe damage to China and Russia.
	This may be the most delusional thing in the speech, and this is a speech filled with delusion.
	It's a speech filled with crazy.
	He says, you know, China and Russia, they wanted us to stay in Afghanistan.
	Really?
	Because they seem pretty enthusiastic about us leaving.
	The U.N.
	Security Council resolution calling for free travel was not joined by China and Russia.
	Because they're like, yeah, man, U.S.
	is out.
	Let's make friends with the Taliban.
	Got some rare earth minerals.
	They're providing us another Belt and Road target.
	They humiliated the Americans.
	We're up for this.
	And Joe Biden's like, you know who's really upset today?
	The Russians and the Chinese.
	And Vladimir Putin is sitting up in his Bond villain mansion going, ah ha ha ha.
	Here is Joe Biden.
	Idiot.
	And here's a critical thing to understand.
	The world is changing.
	We're engaged in a serious competition with China.
	And there's nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more, in this competition in the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan.
	Mm. So, yes, that's exactly what China and Russia wanted was for us to stay. Weird, because they're pretty happy that we left. Okay, finally, Joe Biden gets to the sort of Biden doctrine.
	Okay. The problem is that he's lying. So he says that there are only two principles that should guide American foreign policy. And it is difficult to argue with these two principles.
	The problem is that Joe Biden doesn't actually hold by any of these principles. Here we go.
	As we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, We've got to learn from our mistakes.
	Thank you.
	To me, there are two that are paramount.
	First, we must set missions with clear, achievable goals, not ones we'll never reach.
	And second, we must stay clearly focused on the fundamental national security interests of the United States of America.
	Okay, so a couple of things here.
	One, he says we have to set missions with clear, achievable goals.
	Oh, I've noticed that you have been saying that equity should be the guiding principle of all American domestic policy.
	Also, you want to sign on to climate change agreements that have no clear, definable goals, end dates, or actual strategies involved.
	And also, you say that you want to stay clearly focused on the fundamental national security interests of the United States.
	Would that involve handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban and the Chinese, or would it not?
	What do you define as the clear national security interest of the United States?
	The reality is Joe Biden's actual policy is weakness at home and bloated incompetence, well, weakness abroad and bloated incompetence at home.
	That's the actual Biden doctrine.
	Surrender abroad and then get fat and suicidal at home.
	That's the plan for Joe Biden.
	He sets up a couple more straw men here.
	He talks about how we're ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.
	And then he says, don't worry, we're still going to be at war with terrorists.
	So again, it's this incoherent back and forth.
	It's utterly nonsensical.
	And he talks about how, you know, we're going to support the Afghan people through diplomacy, because again, squeaky bunnies are going to make this happen when military force has not.
	But perhaps the most galling line in all of this, he talks about the spending in Afghanistan.
	Understand, this is coming from a president who has proposed 10 to 12 trillion dollars in new spending in the United States.
	To be clear, this year.
	That's what he has proposed.
	He's seeking to pass a $3.5 trillion budget right now, on top of a $1.1 trillion infrastructure plan, on top of a $2 trillion stimulus plan earlier this year.
	But he's really upset about spending, guys.
	This guy is a fiscal hawk, Joe Biden.
	After more than $2 trillion spent in Afghanistan, costs that researchers at Brown University estimated would be over $300 million a day for 20 years in Afghanistan, for two decades.
	Yes.
	The American people should hear this.
	$300 million a day for two decades.
	You take the number of $1 trillion, as many say, that's still $150 million a day for two decades.
	What have we lost as a consequence in terms of opportunities?
	I mean, that's an enormous amount of spending, you know, like $300 million a day for two decades, that $2 trillion spent over the course of 20 years.
	That's a lot of money.
	And it is a lot of money.
	It also happens to be a fraction of what he has proposed to spend this year alone Fiscal hawk Joe Biden coming in from the sidelines here.
	Okay, he concludes his little speech, of course, with a reference to Boe.
	Because after all, it's all about the empathy, guy.
	Everybody else is to blame.
	We're leaving people behind.
	People can get slaughtered in the streets.
	It's about the empathy.
	And how do you know he's empathetic?
	Because his son died.
	That's how you know that Joe Biden is empathetic.
	Because how many times can he lean on a tragic story, and it is a tragic story, in order to show that he's empathetic?
	At a certain point, when you just keep invoking your dead child in order to get past political hurdles, it seems opportunistic and gross.
	We passed that point long ago with Joe Biden.
	A long time ago.
	Here he was invoking Beau Biden, who did not die in combat.
	Beau Biden, who died at the age of 46, tragically, from brain cancer.
	And Joe Biden's had plenty of tragedy in his life, right?
	He lost his first wife and his baby daughter in a car crash.
	There's no question.
	But what does that have to do, as they say, with the price of tea in China?
	It has nothing to do with anything.
	When in doubt, Joe Biden goes to the, my son died of brain cancer, and so you should feel bad for me.
	Well, guess what?
	I don't feel bad for the president of the United States.
	He's the decision maker.
	His decision making is garbage.
	He deserves all of the blame.
	He deserves all of the blowback.
	And inevitably, the consequences of this will be felt for decades.
	As those consequences become clear, he ain't gonna be able to rely on the fact that people feel bad for him because of what happened to his son to get him out of it.
	Here is Joe Biden invoking Beau, cynically, I mean just cynically.
	We've been a nation too long at war.
	If you're 20 years old today, you've never known an America at peace.
	So when I hear that we could've, should've, Continue the so called low grade effort in Afghanistan at low risk to our service members at low cost.
	I don't think enough people understand how much we have asked of the 1% of this country who put that uniform on, willing to put their lives on the line in defense of our nation.
	Maybe it's because my deceased son, Bo, served in Iraq for a full year.
	Oh, he's gonna bring out Beau here.
	I'll just note here, there have been 35,000 calls to Veterans Affairs about suicidal veterans since the beginning of this pullout.
	If you talk to veterans of the Afghan war, you're gonna be hard-pressed to find any of them who agree with Joe Biden's policy here or think it's good or are going to be sympathetic to Joe Biden because his son served in Iraq and then died years later of brain cancer.
	It's so opportunistic, it's so cynical, and it's so unempathetic.
	It's fundamentally off-putting.
	And then, of course, Joe Biden left without taking any questions.
	Because that's what this man does.
	He will not take questions.
	He will not answer questions.
	You have challenged him.
	He got angry at you.
	The old man yelled at you and the clouds and blamed everybody but himself.
	And in the end, the media will end up kissing his feet because this is what they do.
	They're lapdogs.
	They'll come back.
	Don't worry.
	Here is Joe Biden leaving.
	Thank you and may God bless you all.
	And may God protect our troops.
	Troops, by the way, that he refused to protect.
	You think he's going to come back and answer questions?
	Nope.
	He forgot his mask.
	He forgot his mask.
	So he came back for that.
	What a grand and glorious president we have right now.
	Well, the media is already rushing to Joe Biden's defense.
	I already have some members of the media who are doing it.
	Naturally.
	You have people like Chris Cuomo, who's tweeting out in defense.
	I mean, he can't find a despicable human being he won't defend, Chris Cuomo.
	He tweeted out, Trump handed the keys to a bunch of barbarians.
	Biden extended months from this original date.
	Biden didn't play cards well enough, but he was given a bad hand from Trump.
	None of these angry patriots on the right were as bothered then as they are now.
	You wonder why?
	Well, because this hadn't materialized then.
	Some of us were not happy with the Taliban negotiations, right?
	I was pretty clear about that at the time.
	Go back and listen.
	Here's a disastrous withdrawal.
	coming out in strong defense of Biden is the most predictable move of the day. Meanwhile, MSNBC's Rick Stengel was out there defending the president along the most bizarre lines.
	Here was Rick Stengel defending Joe Biden.
	Here's a disastrous withdrawal. When the British left Afghanistan in 1842, 4,500 troops left Kabul and one Englishman 11 days later arrived in Jalalabad.
	That was a disastrous evacuation.
	Here's another one.
	When the British left India in 1947-1948, just pulled out, over the next few years, 2 million people died as that country was divided in half.
	And?
	And so the idea is here that this was a big success.
	By the way, the British withdrawal from Afghanistan that ended with that disastrous withdrawal was 1842.
	Don't remember a lot of airplanes in 1842.
	These are the geniuses in the media coming to the defense of Joe Biden, like the good little lapdogs they are.
	NBC News doing it too.
	They tweeted out earlier today.
	That, you know, the real problem here is, of course, you wait for it, Republicans weaponizing it.
	It's that Republicans have kept weaponizing this thing.
	NBC News actually had the temerity to tweet that out, quote, And here's the reality.
	wielding the issue as a political weapon against President Biden in the hope it will damage the Democratic Party and help them recapture control of Congress.
	But will Afghanistan matter to voters?
	Experts doubt it.
	Well, you know, if you quote a couple of experts, then probably it won't matter at all.
	And here's the reality.
	Maybe Joe Biden's right.
	Maybe it won't matter at all.
	But if it doesn't matter to Americans that Joe Biden abandoned, abandoned human beings to the Taliban for no reason other than his own pride and vanity, then we deserve whatever we get.
	All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show today.
	He discusses the story of the GOP congressman missing in Afghanistan.
	You can hear more details about that over on Michael's show that is available right now.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Elliot Feld.
	Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
	Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
	Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky.
	Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
	Host Producer Justin Barber.
	The show is edited by Adam Sajovic.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Cristina.
	Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
	The United States proposes foreign aid for the Taliban.
	A judge takes a child from his mother until she gets vaxxed, and a teacher flies the Antifa flag in the classroom.

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