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Aug. 19, 2021 - Jimmy Dore Show
01:11:06
20210819_TJDS_20210818_Podcast
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Hi, this is Jimmy.
Who's this?
Oh, geez.
Hey, bro.
How's it hanging?
Dude, this is Noam Chomsky, American linguist, political activist, and renowned intellectual.
Thanks for calling, Noam.
Hey, Jimmy, remember when I said Donald Trump was the worst criminal in human history?
Yes.
Just an FYI.
I really should have added a few disclaimers to that remark versus, for instance, I was leaving out Hitler and Stalin and a few other really bad dudes.
But why?
Why?
Why were you?
I just want to preface my answer with the acknowledgement that I'm well aware that being in a constant state of Hooner stonation is never a good excuse for leaving out dudes like Hitler and Stalin.
But you know what?
I'm just saying, but you know.
I'm just saying, okay.
Okay, but why?
I think I should probably I could have done a better job explaining exactly what I meant when I said that.
I understand now how some people might have gotten the wrong impression that I was saying Trump is the worst criminal in human history when I said Trump is the worst criminal in human history.
Then what did you mean by it?
stuff.
*laughter*
Stuff?
To tell you the truth, sometimes while I'm talking about things, one part of my mind is working on technical stuff, which is much more interesting than things.
A few days ago, you condemned Joe Biden's climate proposals as too weak to avoid global catastrophe.
Wouldn't that make Biden equally criminal?
Jimmy, do you ever get the weed burps?
Weed burps?
I don't think I ever get weed burps.
Solution, use an organic hamp wick to light your herb to eliminate that irritating butane buzz during your midday extravaganja.
Hey, Jimmy, ask me why, and a renowned cognitive scientist, did I become a vegetarian?
As a renowned cognitive scientist, why did you become a vegetarian?
Because I'm an herbivore.
Herb.
I got it.
Bivor.
Noam, you're one of the world's greatest thinkers.
The world is falling.
Noam, the world is falling apart.
Can't you give any advice to us?
I mean, any words of encouragement, words of hope?
In all seriousness, when I feel worn out at the end of my rope, I bathe in the natural healing waters at my favorite organic spa.
And what is that?
The springs at Saratoka.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Saratoka Springs.
It's like a pun on the word.
Toke.
Jesus.
Noam.
Millions of people are trying to navigate through the lies of Joe Biden.
And all you do is either scold them or talk about weed.
That's because Joe Biden reminds me of that joke about the drunk who was looking under a lamppost for a key that he lost on the other side of the street.
Why?
Because that's where the light is.
Right.
And like that drunk, we have no other choice but to look where the light is.
Where did I lose you?
That's so depressing, Noam.
You bet it is.
That's why I got blazing grays at Dankley, Wagwaza, Cronk Dunk, Banonga.
It's Phantom Rip time.
Wake and bake you later.
Everybody's talking about Afghanistan.
Guess what?
You want to know how Afghanistan got started?
You want to know how the Taliban actually got to be in control of Afghanistan?
Do you want to know?
Because before they weren't.
Where did the Taliban come from?
Well, Hillary Clinton is here to tell us.
Kind of moving in and out of Pakistan.
I mean, let's remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded 20 years ago.
Oh, really?
And we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union.
They invaded Afghanistan.
It's Russia's fault.
It's Russia's fault.
It's always Russia's fault.
Okay, here we go.
Here we go.
And we did not want to see them control Central Asia.
And we went to work.
And it was President Reagan in partnership with the Congress, led by Democrats, who said, you know what?
Sounds like a pretty good idea.
Sounds like a great idea.
What could possibly go wrong with imperialism?
Sounds like a great idea.
Why don't we just start making decisions for other countries and how they should run their thing?
Sounds like a great idea.
What an interesting definition of work, too.
Like, ah, what'd you do today at work?
Well, I gave a bunch of money for weapons to these people so they can kill these other people.
And hopefully it works out.
We'll know more on Tuesday.
Yeah.
Let's get to work.
Get to work?
Let's get to work bombing some of the poorest people in the world.
Let's get to work.
That's great.
Let's get some to come from Saudi Arabia and other places, importing their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.
And guess what?
They retreated.
They lost billions of dollars, and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So there's a very strong argument, which is it wasn't a bad investment to end the Soviet Union, but let's be careful what we sow because we will harvest.
So we then left Pakistan.
So, by the way, she described the war.
She described it's an investment.
We created this terrorist organization called the Taliban, right-wing fundamental crazies.
And what could go wrong?
Put them in charge of a country because we're afraid of Russia?
Anyway, so we've been inventing our enemies forever.
We've been, ever since World War II, we've been inventing our enemies, right?
We went into Iran in 1953, overthrew their government, and that led to the Ayatollah and the government that's in Iran today, right?
look what we did in libya uh we invented the al-Qaeda uh isis got invented uh when we went into iraq we invented taliban al-Qaeda did we We invented Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, because that was Osama bin Laden.
And so he was considered at the time, Osama bin Laden, was considered a freedom fighter.
Do you remember that?
Remember those newspaper headlines around?
You might be too young.
Did you ever see those, though?
I saw them after the fact.
Yeah, I mean, I was too young when they came out, but people have tweeted out those.
I've seen those tweeted out the headlines, Freedom Fighter.
And it's a picture of Osama bin Laden and how he's working with the CIA.
So here's so I just want to remind everybody how this happened, how we got into Afghanistan.
That's how the Taliban got created.
We created them to fight Russia.
Immediately after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the rationale for invading Afghanistan was clear.
Wipe out al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban government.
No way this could go wrong.
I bet we're in and out in about six months.
Tops.
Even though none of the hijackers or planners were Afghans, the Bush administration categorized Taliban leaders as terrorists because they had given al-Qaeda sanctuary and refused to hand over its ringleader, Osama bin Laden.
They did not refuse to hand over their ringleader.
What the Taliban says was, sure, we'll give you Osama bin Laden, show us the proof that they did it.
United States refused to do that because I think they wanted to go into Afghanistan and they really weren't that interested in getting Osama bin Laden.
Right, Rahron, would you agree with that assessment?
They were interested in going into a lot of places.
Afghanistan was one of them.
Just one of them.
They were interested in launching a whole new American Century project, which is what they did.
Yep.
And they did it.
Within six months, now, this is from the Washington Post.
Within six months, the leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were dead, captured, or in hiding.
All done.
I guess we could pull out.
Oops.
Instead of withdrawing, the United States government started to blur its strategic objective, something that would persist for the next 19 years.
It's almost like we weren't actually there to help anybody.
It's almost like we were there to make sure a stream of cash flowed into the pockets of the people who pulled the strings on our elected leaders, meaning the military-industrial complex and Wall Street.
Isn't that weird?
I think that's weird.
So I just want to let you know that this is new.
And what no one's really ever talked about, even though it was news at the time, the Afghanistan papers, it barely made a blip.
And what did the Afghan paper, what did the Afghan papers show us?
Well, I'm going to show you what the Afghanistan.
So the Afghan paper showed us that this was all a big lie.
So a confidential trove of government documents reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable.
So that was every administration.
That's from George Bush to Barack Obama and Joe Biden to Donald Trump and now Joe Biden.
They've been lying all along, 100% lying.
So you'll get kicked off of Twitter for posting misinformation.
But Joe Biden, Barack Obama, they'll never lose.
Anybody lying about the wars, the Defense Department, they still have their Twitter account and their Facebook pages, although they've been lying, false pronouncements that they knew were false about the war.
So nobody ever has to pay the price.
Again, if you lie at the behest of the establishment, there's never a price to pay.
So just to let you know how bad it was, this last 20-year war, how bad it's been, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.
We didn't know what we were doing, said the three-star army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations.
We were devoid of fundamental understanding.
We didn't know what we were doing.
They didn't know who the enemy was.
Did you know that?
He admitted that too.
We didn't know who our enemies were and who our friends were.
We didn't know.
We didn't know what our mission was.
They didn't know what their mission was because there wasn't one.
He added, what are we trying to do here?
We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction, thousands of lives lost, who will say this was in vain?
It's unbelievable.
There's the guy saying we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.
Didn't matter because they weren't undertaking anything.
What were they undertaking?
They were funneling $2 trillion from the American treasury to the military-industrial complex and Wall Street.
That's what they were doing.
What is the point of these 700 military bases?
What is the point of the eight wars we're in?
What is the point of bombing Somalia and Yemen and Libya and Syria and Afghanistan?
The point is to transfer $2 trillion to the pockets of the military-industrial complex.
And that's a fact.
That is the point of all this.
And to steal resources from poor countries who can't fight back.
That is the point.
We didn't know what we were doing.
We didn't have the foggiest notion.
That's the guy, the three-star general, the three-star general who worked for Bush and Obama.
We didn't have the foggiest idea what we were doing.
That's the world's strongest military in the world, ladies and gentlemen.
Say, we don't know what we're doing.
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops, soldiers, have been deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly.
Of those, 2,300 died and 20,589 were wounded in action.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders, and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
So is Barack Obama going to lose his Twitter account Over that?
Just Trump, right?
Barack Obama's not going to lose his Twitter account.
Joe Biden's not going to lose his Twitter account.
Any of the military commanders and diplomats who assured us year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and that the war was worth fighting, they knew that was a lie.
So they were, again, the biggest dispensers of misinformation is the government.
The second is the establishment media.
It's not YouTubers and random Twitter people or MAGA TikTok accounts.
The biggest disseminators of disinformation and lies is the government and then the establishment media, which is why them banning anybody from Twitter or Facebook is a joke.
Every data point, every data point.
Now, everybody knows this, by the way.
So everybody in the media knows this.
Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.
An Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency advisor to U.S. military commanders told the government interviewers: every data point was altered, meaning we were lying.
We were manipulating every data point to lie to the American people, to keep $2 trillion flowing into the pockets of the military-industrial complex.
We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context.
And successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians.
That's from May 2018.
We don't invade poor countries to make them rich, said U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama.
We don't invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic.
We invade violent countries to make them peaceful, and we clearly failed at Afghanistan.
Let's go drop a bunch of bombs.
Let's drop 26,000 bombs to bring peace.
This is amazing.
It's amazing.
We invade other countries for their natural resources.
That's what we do.
We invade other countries to steal their natural resources and to funnel money to the military-industrial complex.
The president's failed miserably.
The United States has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to build up Afghanistan, more than is spent adjusted for inflation to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan.
We've spent more money in Afghanistan to quote unquote build up their society than we spent to build, rebuild Western Europe after World War II.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
That's nuts.
U.S. officials tried to create from scratch a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington.
It was a foreign concept to the Afghans who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism, and Islamic law.
The money gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.
So we're pumping billions and hundreds of billions of dollars into one of the poorest countries in the world, the most corrupt, and it turns out to be completely corrupted.
They take that money and they steal it.
Isn't that weird?
Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, may be the development of mass corruption, said top U.S. diplomat in Kabul.
Once it gets to the level I saw when I was there, it's unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.
So this was 10 years ago that guy was serving.
He said this.
This is a decade ago.
He said the corruption is unbelievable.
It's mass corruption.
Keep throwing hundreds of billions of dollars there.
But whatever you do, don't relieve student debt loan here.
And whatever you do, don't give people money for homes.
We'll keep them under bridges.
So if you get, there's 600,000 people in the United States who are considered homeless.
That's the number, roughly.
If you gave each of them $1,000 a month for a housing stipend, it would cost $7.2 billion a year.
That's it.
If you want to give 600,000 people $1,000 a month, 12 months, it would cost $7.2 billion.
Do you see the money?
We spent $2 trillion.
They won't even spend a pence of what we send to Afghanistan.
$300 million a day for 20 years we've sent to Afghanistan.
$300 million a day we've sent to Afghanistan for 20 years.
No military trainers express confidence that the Afghan army or police could ever fend off, much less defeat the Taliban on their own.
More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed.
Casualty rates that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.
A national senior council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and the Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working despite hard evidence to the contrary.
Barack Obama wanted to lie to the public, and he did about war.
Did he lose his Twitter account?
So this idea that Donald Trump is the only liar and he's the only dangerous liar.
Again, you're a chump if you believe that.
You're a chump of the highest order.
It was impossible to create good metrics.
We tried using troop numbers, trained, violence levels, control of territory, and none of it paid in an accurate picture.
The metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war.
So your government has been constantly lying at the top of their lungs.
That means Barack Obama and George Bush, Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, they've been lying to you at the top of their lungs about Afghanistan.
Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC officials said the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity.
Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban's desperation that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat.
Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.
Constant lying.
And I just want to, so this idea that the establishment cares about lying or that they cared about Trump lying or that they're afraid that someone might spread misinformation, what they are afraid of is losing the narrative.
And that's why they're using such crude forms of control like censorship, outright censorship now.
And you have shitlibs from coast to coast who are cheering it on.
Keith Oberman wants me censored from all platforms in the name of hating Trump.
So the Afghanistan war was an unmitigated disaster.
It wasn't planned to be anything but the Afghan papers revealed Joe Biden and Barack Obama to be liars and propagandists and war criminals who squandered $2 trillion for nothing.
And so now here's a thread.
So I'm going to show you a thread.
This is from someone who from this Twitter thread did two tours, if we're to believe the Twitter thread, did two tours in Afghanistan.
And the information that they share is quite compelling.
So let me, this is from Laura Jade.
And she said, I know how bad the Taliban is.
I know what they do to women and little boys.
I know what they're going to do to the interpreters and the people who cooperated with us.
It's awful.
It's bad.
But we are leaving, and all I feel is grim relief.
Let me just, here's where she started.
She said, I deployed in Afghanistan twice, once in 2008 and once in 2009 and 2010.
It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant that we left.
And here we are today.
So that confirms what the Afghan paper said.
The Afghan paper said that the Afghan soldiers could not hold off the Taliban.
Nobody thought they would.
And so there you go.
I know how bad the Taliban is.
I know what they do to women and little boys.
I know what they're going to do to the interpreters and the people who cooperated with us.
It's awful.
It's bad.
But we are leaving.
And all I feel is grim relief.
Afghanistan is a dusty, beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not effing want us there.
We called them Hajis and worse.
And they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.
I remember going through the phones of the people we detained and finding clip after clip of Bollywood musicals, women singing in fields of flowers.
Rarely did I find anything incriminating.
I remember finding propaganda footage cut together from the Soviet invasion and our own Operation Enduring Whatever and laughing about how stupid the Afghans were to not know we aren't the Russians.
And then eventually realizing I was the stupid one.
I remember how every year the U.S. would have to decide how to deal with the opium fields.
You could let them alone and then the Taliban would shake the farmers down and use the money to buy weapons.
Or you could carpet bomb the fields and then the farmers would just join the Taliban.
Or you could give the farmers fertilizer as an incentive to grow wheat instead of opium poppy.
And the farmers would sell the fertilizer to the Taliban who used it to make explosives for IEDs that could destroy a million-dollar MRAP and maim everyone inside.
I remember we weren't allowed to throw batteries away because people who worked on base would go through the trash and collect hundreds of dead batteries, wire them together so they had just enough juice for one charge, and use that charge to detonate an IED.
I remember the look on my roommate's face after she got back from cutting the dead bodies of two soldiers out of an MMWV that got blown up by an IED and I have always imagined was made with fertilizer from an opium farmer and detonated with 100 thrown-out batteries.
And now we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening.
The Taliban's surging in and taking it all back.
They have what you can't buy or train.
They have patience and bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.
I am Team Get the F out of Afghanistan, which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban.
It's Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever.
There is no third team.
So I'm sitting here reading these sad effing tweets about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening.
But I can't stop feeling this grim happiness.
Like finally, you fuckers, finally, you have to see it too.
No more blown-up soldiers.
No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped to God knows where.
No more hypocrisy.
No more pretending it meant anything.
It didn't.
It didn't mean a fucking thing.
So there you go.
And there are still people today who want us to stay there.
They want us to occupy the entire world.
There's lots of those people.
Anything you want to add to this, Ron?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of those people because, I mean, first of all, we are such a propagandized nation when it comes to issues of war.
I mean, we are as propagandized as it gets.
We have strongly pro-war media, and it's a really easy sell because people want people want to entertain this idea there's always a good guy and a bad guy.
There's always a good guy and a bad guy.
It's a hard sell when you're saying the truth that sometimes there's no good guys.
Sometimes there's only bad guys.
Sometimes it's like, yeah, the Taliban are bad guys, but we're not helping anybody.
We've been there for 20 years.
We weren't there to help anybody.
We're there at the behest of the prophets of the military industrial complex.
And Smedley Butler wrote the book a long, long time ago.
That's right.
War is a racket.
Hello, who is this?
Hey, Jimmy, this is Barack Obama.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, I guess.
How are you doing?
That's not important because I just had my 60th birthday bash.
Odometer party.
The big six-o.
Why didn't you guys come to my 60th birthday bash, huh?
I didn't know we were.
Where were you?
I didn't know we were invited, Barack.
Well, you were, but no one was going to notice.
Plus, the place was packed.
Are you sure that that party was safe as far as COVID?
Of course it was.
We're rich.
And we had tons of fun.
We took all the required and necessary precautions, whatever they were at the moment.
But one thing we were not going to sacrifice, that's the Chris Hayes kissing booth.
America needed hope.
Well, that's reassuring.
And guess where it was?
Go ahead, guess.
At my $12 million Martha Vineyard compound.
It was the Obama pound you could have been at.
You could miss it.
As soon as it's taken the city bank, turn off and park next to the China warehouse full of Netflix cash.
You had 500 guests?
Oh, that's fake news, Jimmy.
Pearl Jam was scheduled as entertainment, so the crowd was clearly much smaller than that.
Don't you think 500 people is a little large for social distancing during a pandemic?
Don't you worry about it.
Michelle hired 200 servants.
I'm confident that those heroic essential workers acted as human buffers between Eric Holders and David Axerod's viral loads.
More importantly, every guest was required to pull up their damn pants.
Okay.
If Donald Trump did something like that, Democrats would be screaming to high heaven.
Why should you get away with this?
Because Obama can't get COVID.
Don't you get it?
COVID can't make Obama sick.
He can't make Obama sick.
I can't even make Obama sick because I'm Barack H. Oh, fucking Obama.
Understand?
I guess so, but there's something about this that just didn't look right, right?
Okay, calm down.
Guests were required.
Demple dams while bobbing for apples.
It was all in the invite.
You didn't get the invite.
Before you go, how do you think Joe Biden is doing now that we're at the end of August?
Joe has exceeded all my expectations, Jimmy.
I thought he'd at least have a stroke by now.
In closing, pull up your damn pants.
Take my viral loan, assholes.
Take my barber alone.
Oh, no, no, no.
The Jimmy Door show is coming to a city near you August 28th.
We're in Las Vegas at the plaza.
And we just added another show in Portland.
We're there in Portland on September 10th and 11th, October 3rd.
We're at Harlow's in Sacramento.
More dates being added.
Go to jimmydoorcomedy.com for a link for all tickets.
See you at a live show.
War is a racket.
So, well, here is so when Donald Trump was threatening to pull our troops out, Dick Cheney's daughter teamed up with Democrats, Crow, I think from Colorado, Crow was from.
And I misspoke on Tucker.
I said it was Crowley.
It was Crow.
And Cheney hooked up, and they created the Crow-Cheney Amendment, which said that Donald Trump could not pull out troops from Afghanistan.
That's basically what it said.
And these are the people the shitlibs are loving because she doesn't like Donald Trump.
This is the, so go on the view, they'll give her a hug and a kiss.
Nancy Pelosi, everybody on MSNBC, they're all, everybody loves her now because she doesn't like Donald Trump.
Here's what she said about Afghanistan.
This disaster certainly began.
And look, the notion.
I like how she doesn't finish that sentence.
She said, yeah, this disaster certainly began.
And then she changes her thought.
It certainly began with your fucking father, with your maniac, homicidal maniac father, Dick Cheney.
That's where this began.
Yeah, you wonder what that sentence would have been had she completed it.
Like, this disaster certainly began because my dad was looking out for the Halliburton stock.
Oh, shit, did I say that out loud?
Yep.
This disaster certainly began.
And look, the notion of we're going to end endless wars, that campaign slogan, what we're watching right now in Afghanistan is what happens when America withdraws from the world.
So everybody.
Not this is what happens when America invades a country and occupies it for 20 years.
Wastes $2 trillion blowing people up.
Killing.
Joe Biden just bombed a clinic and a high school two weeks ago.
Joe Biden just bombed a clinic in a high school, like a week ago, week ago.
So this is what happens when America withdraws from the world.
We have a thousand military bases around the world.
We have a thousand.
You know how many Russia has?
I think two.
We have a thousand military bases.
We don't know how many there are because a lot of them are secret.
So we guess.
And I say a thousand military bases around the world.
We're an empire.
This is how empires end.
And people like Liz Cheney and most of the Democratic Party who love her now and all the shit lives on MSNBC are for us staying.
Here we go.
Let's watch it again.
This disaster certainly began.
And look, the notion of we're going to end endless wars, that campaign slogan, what we're watching right now in Afghanistan is what happens when America withdraws from the world.
So everybody who has been saying America needs to withdraw, America needs to retreat, we are getting a devastating, catastrophic real-time lesson in what that means.
Yeah, no, what that means is that we should have never tried to invade another country in the first place, and we should never have occupied that country for 20 years.
That's what that means.
What it says to her, who is a true nut, bloodthirsty maniac, what it means to her is that we need to keep murdering poor people who can't fight back in other countries with our 21st century weapons.
That's what it means.
We need to go to other people's countries and slaughter them because we don't like them.
Well, here's what Glenn Greenwald said.
He says, send Liz Cheney and Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the bloodthirsty neocon monsters and their kids to go fight for Kandahar and Kabul.
The U.S. military is a machine built to defend and destroy, not save and transform other people's countries.
Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.
We don't go help people.
We go and destroy people.
Our military is there to murder people and mow down cities.
It's not there to help people.
That's not what we do.
And they keep interviewing people like Liz Cheney, and they keep interviewing people like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton, the architects of this fucking murderous failure.
And Caitlin Johnstone says, could you please stop interviewing Bush administrative war architects like Wolfowitz and Bolton for their opinions on ending the Bush administration wars?
Yes.
Here's what Wolfowitz says to Taliban's advanced in Afghanistan.
Wolfowitz on BBC radio.
The rise of the Taliban is a catastrophic failure for the U.S. Why would you ask these people?
Why would you ask these people?
What?
Why don't you ask Bill Buckner how to field a ground ball in a tight baseball game?
I mean, what are you doing?
These are the people that are still asking their opinions.
These people should be in jail.
So here's more of it.
Here's Bill Kristol.
By the way, loved on MSNBC, and every Democrat now loves him.
If you're a Biden voter, you love Bill Kristol.
Even though Bill Kristol is a bloodthirsty maniac who's tried to wreck the world and this country.
Bill Kristol says, we could have kept 3,500 troops in Afghanistan and kept a decent status quo.
The Biden administration chose withdrawal.
We're seeing a humanitarian catastrophe and geopolitical disaster unfold.
And now, humiliatingly, we have to send 3,000 troops to get the remaining Americans out.
Really, it's not humiliating that we have people sleeping under every bridge in the United States.
One in four children are in poverty in the United States.
That's not humiliating.
What's humiliating is another country is going to take over their country when we leave.
That we spent $2 trillion trying to kill those people instead of $2 trillion trying to fix our own country.
You care about women?
How many women are in poverty in the United States?
How many women can't afford to quit their job because they take care of their kid?
How many women can't afford to take care of their kids who are working?
Bill's wife, I love this.
So everything to Bill Kristol, we need more bombs, right?
Bill Kristol's wife, the roof is leaking.
Bill Kristol, have you tried murdering someone, my dear?
Here's Nancy Pelosi just released a statement about the Afghan women.
You ready?
We are deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban's brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls.
No, you're not.
I'm just going to go ahead and say that Nancy Pelosi doesn't give a shit about women and children in the United States.
So she sure as hell doesn't give a shit about women and children in Afghanistan.
By the way, who Biden just bombed, killed 20 women and children when he bombed a clinic in a high school last week.
So she's pretending that they care about women and children in another country that we just spent 20 years bombing the shit out of.
The U.S., the international community, and the Afghan government must do everything we can to protect women and girls from inhumane treatment by the Taliban.
What about the 20 women and children you just bombed the shit out of last week, Nancy?
Any political settlement, this is Nancy Pelosi speaking.
Any political settlement that the Afghans pursue must include having women at the table.
As we strive to assist women, we must recognize that their voices are important and all must listen to them for solutions, respectful of their culture.
The U.S. government cares so much about women that it doesn't enforce living wage requirements or guaranteed paid maternity leave, thereby forcing millions of mothers to live beneath the crushing weight of poverty.
That's how much Nancy Pelosi gives a shit about women and children.
Nancy Pelosi doesn't give a shit about you.
She doesn't give a shit about your kids.
She doesn't kid about women.
She doesn't give a shit about anybody but her fucking self and her $200 million.
And you're a sucker if you think Nancy Pelosi cares about anybody but herself.
She's been a hundred millionaire for a decade.
You know, they've done studies.
Once you become rich, you can't even pick up emotions on other people's faces.
Nancy Pelosi doesn't give a shit if you die, if you don't have health care, if people get bombed to death in Afghanistan.
She doesn't care.
Women suffer in U.S. allied Wahhabi dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates too.
And yet the U.S. hosts giant military bases there, sells them hundreds of billions of dollars of advanced arms, and lets them fund most of K-Street and top U.S. think tanks.
So fuck you and all the people who are saying we give a shit about women in Afghanistan.
Stop with this delusion that United States boys and girls in uniform sign up to be some rogue crusading force for liberalism across the world.
That's not what the U.S. military is or does.
That's the pretext and propaganda for when they do intervene for the blob's hegemonic interests and designs.
That's right.
So that's the pretext.
The pretext is we're always trying to help people.
We're always going to try to help people.
Just like Venezuela, we got to go help those people.
We got to help the people of Libya.
We got to help the people of Iraq.
We've got to help these people.
We have to help the people of Syria.
And how do you do that?
You turn their country into a fucking wasteland.
And then you put sanctions on them so they can't get medicine.
Like we do to Syria, like we do to Cuba, Venezuela.
That's how much we care.
It's amazing how people think the solution to problems caused by U.S. intervention is more U.S. intervention.
And here's Pol and of course, the news media.
Politico, this got bungled.
Biden's two tragic Afghanistan missteps.
Biden's two tragic Afghanistan missteps.
The only misstep was going into Afghanistan, and the only other second misstep was staying there.
Getting out is not a misstep.
Here's Richard Engel, works for the pro-war NBC, CIA talking points repeating NBC, the biggest Russia gators in the world called Bernie Sanders, a Russian agent, and Tulsi Gabbard.
Anybody who's against the military imperialism gets called a Russian and smeared by NBC News.
And here's Richard Engel, who works for NBC News, says lots of blame to go around for Afghanistan on the U.S. side.
Trump made a terrible deal with the Taliban, effectively promising them the country and empowering them.
Isn't that weird, Ron?
Isn't that weird?
Trump promised the country to the people who live there.
That's a mistake, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, this whole thing's been so cringe to see.
And especially like statements from Nancy Pelosi, which we've all seen on social media, that, oh, it's about women.
It's about what the Taliban's doing to women.
It's like, we've been there for 20 years.
We have been there for 20 years.
Either what we're doing sure as hell ain't helping, or B, we ain't there to help, or C, both.
I'd say it's both.
I say both.
So Richard Engel's blaming, he's not angry at the fact that we're in Afghanistan.
It doesn't appear from this tweet that he's angry that we're in Afghanistan.
He's angry that Trump gave the country back to the Taliban and then Biden implemented it.
So he's pointing fingers at presidents and assigning blame for them getting us out of Afghanistan.
This is what the U.S. news media does, ladies and gentlemen.
This is what the news media does in the United States.
It shames presidents for ending pointless, murderous wars and makes them seem like failures and derelicts for doing it.
That's what Richard Engel's doing in this tweet.
And look at all the likes.
We got to stay in Afghanistan.
Got to stay in Afghanistan.
Why?
Because he needs a war to report on.
What is he going to do?
That's his beef.
That's his beat.
Mark, is that not remarkable to you that, I mean, I've seen Richard Engel on, I know who this guy is.
And here he is shaming presidents, not for starting wars or for lying about them.
He's shaming them for ending the wars and to stop lying about them.
That's, I mean, yeah, that's how it's always been.
I mean, even, you know, when Trump was in office, the first time he was praised by the corporate media was when he bombed Syria.
That's right.
I mean, it's just, it is cartoonish.
Like, it is absolutely cartoonish.
And yeah, you hit a nail on the head when you said they never bring up, they never shame presidents for starting wars.
You never hear anyone talk about what the Bush administration did that put us in this mess that we're still reeling from.
No one talks about that.
In fact, everybody's been rehabilitated.
They talk to these people on these talk shows.
They give them MSNBC contracts.
They interview them on the corporate media.
They talk to their kids.
It's absolutely like this is a dystopian movie script.
Yes.
I agree.
The buck stops with so-and-so is not rational because that's what Engel says.
The buck stops with Biden.
The buck stops with so-and-so is not rational.
20 years of delusional mission, 20 years of a delusional mission that went on long past public support or comprehension was always going to end ugly.
It was running on fumes at the end.
Here's Max Bootin.
Here's another guy loved by the MSNBC crowd now because he doesn't like Trump.
We need, this is what the, this is how they all think.
This is how Obama and Biden think.
This is how the military-industrial complex thinks.
Okay.
Here it is.
We need to think of these deployments as we thought of our Indian wars, which lasted 300 years, or as the British thought about their deployment on the Northwest frontier, which lasted 100 years.
The United States troops are policing the frontiers of the PAX America.
So what he's saying is that we should occupy Afghanistan and wherever else we need for however long, for 100 years, maybe 300 years.
What's the big deal?
Mike Makes right.
We got the power and we got to keep doing what's right.
And maybe we do a couple of genocides here and there.
So what?
That's a real tweet.
That's a real and the opinion piece that he has printed is why winning and losing are irrelevant in Syria and Afghanistan.
It doesn't matter.
We got to just go stay there.
$2 trillion, people sleeping under every fucking bridge in America.
One in five kids in America is in poverty.
And what he wants to do, we need to start occupying more countries.
Hey, how about America starts occupying America?
How about the United States military invades Los Angeles and brings food and medical aid to the 60,000 homeless people living in Los Angeles?
How about we have a surge of 3,000 Red Cross people?
How about that?
We have a surge into Los Angeles or any city in America because they all have homeless people everywhere.
How about a surge against our roads and bridges and the weapons are tools to repair them?
How about the United States invades the United States and brings some democracy and brings some health care and some education to the people?
Wouldn't that be nice?
I think that would be nice.
Again, if there's 600,000 homeless people in the United States, you gave them all $1,000 every month for a housing stipend.
That would cost $7.
I think $7.2 billion a year.
Someone check my math.
We spend $300 million a day in Afghanistan for 20 years for nothing.
It wasn't a mistake.
They didn't goof up.
This was done on purpose to enrich the people who pull the strings on our elected officials.
And who pulls the strings on our elected officials?
The military industrial complex and Wall Street.
And that's why this happened.
They did it so they could suck $2 trillion out of the U.S. Treasury and put it right in their pockets.
This is exactly what happened.
So this is, and here we go.
Ready?
Listen to the delusion that people talk about.
Ron said it.
We are the most war propagandized country in the world because we do more war than anybody.
So we have to make people think it's good.
And here's how it works.
Here's how, want to hear what propaganda sounds like when it comes out of someone's mouth that after they hear it.
So after they've received the propaganda and they've digested it, then they spit it back out.
And this is what it sounds like.
This person, Nimco Ali, says the stop the war lot on the left.
So people who want to stop the war, the stop the war lot.
I like that.
The stop the war lot on the left are people who will never understand the courage of leaders who step in to save the lives of others halfway across the world and how thankful those being oppressed are.
Western intervention is something millions are praying for right now.
The anti-war lot on the left, aka the left.
The left.
I said, hey, want to know what the U.S. military has been doing for the past 20 years in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, etc.
It turns out they've been saving lives.
That's what we did.
Ask anybody in Libya, what the U.S. military do?
They saved lives.
What are we doing in Yemen?
We're saving lives.
Barack Obama ran out of bombs in Syria.
You know how many lives we saved?
Saved lives.
That's a grown-up Person.
Libya now has open-air slave markets and a mass refugee crisis after NATO's intervention.
The country once boasted some of the highest living standards in Africa, and nobody's praying for Western intervention in Libya.
You know it's weird to go to another country and kill the citizens of that country, right?
By the way, for decades, elites told America that we were winning this war.
We were told that we were winning the war.
The United States government and their elites told us we were winning the war.
Later, they told us, they told us while Iraq was wrong, Afghanistan was the war worth fighting.
It was all lies.
Now they say everyday Americans are responsible for 20 years of failed political and military leadership, not them.
This is in the Atlantic by Tom Nichols.
Afghanistan is your fault.
The American public now has what it wanted.
So again, so now they're going to, again, they'll never hold the people who are responsible responsible for anything.
So this guy's just an apologist for the establishment.
And he's writing in an establishment rag run by a war maniac.
Who's the guy who's the editor of that?
It's David Frum, who started the Iraq war.
Spokesperson for war criminals.
What a formula, man.
What a formula.
You designate this totally unwinnable thing, this vague concept of war on terror.
We're trying to do this.
And you just occupy for 20-some years while patting the pockets of the military-industrial complex, which helps fund the corporate media.
And then when you eventually get out of this unwinnable thing that you knew was unwinnable, you get the media to blame the people for you.
Then you rinse and repeat.
This is what an empire looks like.
We are in one.
Caitlin Johnson nails it.
She says a propaganda machine that can make people worry about foreign governments while their own government is destroying lives in their own country and all over the world is a propaganda machine that can make people believe anything.
That's 100% true.
And go to Twitter.
It's living proof.
Go look at the people who you consider smart who want us to stay in Afghanistan so we can help women.
It's craziness, crazy talk.
When it comes to misinformation, the biggest disseminator of misinformation is the government, the State Department, the government, then the establishment media.
But they'll never have their Twitter accounts or their Facebook pages taken down ever.
So the biggest liars in the country are going to be able to be on Facebook and Twitter lying at the top of their lungs all the time.
The Defense Department has a Twitter and Facebook account.
Joe Biden, the White House, they have a Twitter and Facebook account.
And the establishment media.
And they lie all the time about war.
And here's more.
Watch this.
Joe Biden's just going to flat out lie.
Watch this.
Is a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
No, it is not.
So the question is, is the Taliban take over Afghanistan now inevitable?
He said, no, this is not.
This is just, what is this, a month ago?
Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped, as well as equipped as any army in the world, and an Air Force against something like 75,000 Taliban.
It is not inevitable.
Mr. President, thank you very much.
Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
That is not true.
Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?
That is not true.
Did not reach that conclusion.
What is the level of confidence that they have that it will not collapse?
Just lie.
He's just lying.
I thought Trump was the liar.
He's just lying.
The Afghan government, the leadership has to come together.
They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place.
And do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam with some people feeling without the money?
None whatsoever.
Zero.
What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy.
Six, if I'm not mistaken.
The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army.
They're not remotely comparable in terms of capability.
There's going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.
It is not at all comparable.
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.
Now, he knows that's not true.
He's not messing up.
He's not getting it wrong.
He's flat out lying.
Again, that's what they always do.
They always lie about war.
And boy, did that age well, that clip, huh?
That really aged well.
I'd like to think it come back to Hanum, but I know it won't.
No, no, of course not.
So here's on July 7th, Secretary Antony Blinken said, we are not withdrawing.
We are staying.
The embassy is staying.
Our programs are staying.
If there is a significant deterioration in security, I don't think it's going to be something that happens from Friday to Monday.
These are the guys running the war.
I don't think that the fact that our forces are withdrawing, one, we're not withdrawing.
We're staying.
The embassy is staying.
Our programs are staying.
We're working to make sure that other partners stay.
We're building all of that up.
And whatever happens in Afghanistan, if there is a significant deterioration in security, that could well happen.
We've discussed this before.
I don't think it's going to be something that happens from a Friday to a Monday.
The fall of Kabul, a 20-year mission collapse in a single day.
These guys, everything out of their mouth is bullshit.
100%.
These are the people who you elected because you got tired of Trump lying.
So you wanted someone who was nicer to lie to you?
Antony Blinken doesn't tweet too much.
I don't think that.
The fall of Kabul, a 20-year mission, collapses in a single day.
In a single day.
It's almost like the excuses for our imperialism are a complete bunch of bullshit.
Our mission in Afghanistan is successful, says U.S. Secretary of State Blinken.
he said it's successful.
He said that August 15th.
He said we were successful.
It was successful because what was the goal of the Afghan war?
The goal of the Afghan war was to funnel $2 trillion into the pockets of the military-industrial complex.
And it did it.
Here's Joe Biden today.
So what's happened?
Afghanistan political leaders get an opening.
I'm pretty sure that's how he wakes up every day.
Huh?
What happened?
Am I still in the Senate?
What's going on?
What's going on?
Where's Jarack Obama?
So what's happened?
Huh?
Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country.
The Afghan military collapsed sometime without trying to fight.
If anything, the developments of the past week reinforced that ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan now was the right decision.
American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.
We spent over.
Why aren't they willing to fight it for themselves?
Maybe because they don't want to fight the war.
You ever think about that?
They don't want to fight this war.
Trillion dollars.
We train and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong.
I would say 300,000 weak.
Incredibly well equipped.
A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies.
We gave them every tool they could need.
We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force.
Something the Taliban doesn't have.
Taliban does not have an air force.
I like how he says Taliban like he's singing a freaking Calypso song.
Hey, Mr. Taliban, Taliban forces.
Biden comes on me one go home.
We provided close air support.
We gave them every chance to determine their own future.
Yeah, we gave them every chance to determine their own future.
And they determined it.
They don't want to fight the Taliban.
They don't want to do it.
That's them determining their future, Joe.
When I hosted President Ghani and Chairman Abdullah at the White House in June, and again, when I spoke by phone to Ghani in July, we had very frank conversations.
He asked me if I had a lead at any apartments in Georgetown.
We talked about how Afghanistan should prepare to fight their civil wars after the U.S. military departed to clean up the corruption in government so the government could function for the Afghan people.
We talked extensively about the need for Afghan leaders to unite politically.
They fail to do any of that.
I also urge them to engage in diplomacy.
They didn't do anything.
We keep giving them hundreds of billions of dollars and they're not doing nothing.
It's like they're corrupt or something.
It's like this idea isn't a good one.
To seek a political settlement with the Taliban.
This advice was flatly refused.
Mr. Ghani insisted that the Afghan forces would fight.
But obviously he was wrong.
So I'm left again to ask of those who argue that we should stay.
How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war?
And Afghan troops will not.
Okay, I just want to point out, he keeps saying this, that the Afghan troops will not fight.
I can't send American troops.
Here it is.
Alex Rubenstein picked this up because he kept saying it there too that Biden's unwilling to send troops to fight in a civil war, that Afghanistan would not fight for themselves.
Well, he makes the great point.
Well, if they're not willing to fight in the civil war, then it's not a civil war.
That's a war that we're inflicting on the country.
There's no civil war in Afghanistan.
They're not fighting it.
That, by definition, is not a civil war if the people who are supposed to fight it inside the country aren't willing to fight it.
So this is a war being imposed on them by the imperialistic capitalist military-industrial complex of the West.
That's what's happening.
As Edward Snowden says, we went into Afghanistan with clear goals.
We were not there for nation building.
speech is already not going well.
Very unlike Biden.
Bruno says, summary of Biden's speech, why after 20 years did we plan our withdrawal the night before?
Because Afghans are cowards.
That's what he's saying.
Yes, that's pretty much like the theme throughout his whole thing.
Like, I was waiting for him to be like, I armed WrestleBetty.
He lost.
I beat him.
I challenged the Afghanis to push-ups, fat.
Man, it took $2 trillion on the war in Afghanistan to understand that the American government made horrible decisions stemming from previous involvements during the Soviet era.
That's $300 million a day every day for two decades and four presidencies.
So did the U.S. win the war on terror?
Was it worth it?
Was terrorism defeated?
Are we a safer country 20 years later?
So many died.
So many generations are traumatized.
All the architects and cheerleaders of the war failed upward without accountability or contrition.
And now, hey, by the way, how are you going to pay for health care?
We could pay for $2,300 million a day for 20 years?
Every single day?
Kamala Harris says she had a key role in Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal decision.
So now she wants to have the person who didn't get a single vote, couldn't get a vote.
It's the most unpopular vice president in the history of our country.
Now is trying to take the she wants she wants to have a she wanted to get rewarded for this.
This was in April.
So in April, Kamala Harris says she had a key role in Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal decision.
The vice president confirmed she was the last person in the room before Biden made the decision to move forward with withdrawal.
So she wanted this.
She wants credit.
In April, now, according to Kyle Becker, Harris was reportedly pressed to give an update on Afghanistan to the American people, but refused.
White House source says Kamala Harris could be heard screaming today, they will not pin this shit on me.
So don't worry, our leaders have got this, just like they always have, Ron.
They got it.
Wow.
Wouldn't you like to be like just in one press briefing, just one time where Biden's just up there going, yeah, the Taliban, they're not going to do anything.
They got nothing.
They got nothing, believe me.
And they're just like, oh, okay, Replico, guy, black t-shirt.
So why were we there for 20 years again?
Why were we over there for 20 years?
You could take it off record.
Why were we there for 20 years?
Then later he's just like, you know, they just, they don't want to fight this war.
They don't want to like Replico dude in black t-shirt again.
So since war around the world doesn't work and it is horrible on every level, are we going to maybe try something else as a society?
We're going to maybe try something different for a change?
That sounds like targeted harassment of an elected official, Ron.
Right.
I forgot.
David Axelrod's on the phone.
Hello.
This is David Axelrod, author, believer, and host of the Axe Files Political Podcast, which has no awards or anything resembling critical acclaim or praise from any of my peers.
Hey, you know, there's a lot more to that phone call, but we don't have time in today's podcast.
How do you hear the entire phone call?
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Today's show is written by Ron Placone, Mark Van Landuit, Steph Zamarano, Jim Earl, Mike McRae, and Roger Rittenhouse.
All the voices performed today by the one and the only of the inimitable, Mike McRae, who can be found at MikeMcRae.com.
That's it for this week.
you be the best you can be and I'll keep being me.
Don't freak out.
I'm not kidding.
Don't freak out.
Do not freak.
Do not freak out.
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