Still Going Through Afghan Withdrawals?

[Milchshake]

Do you miss the Afghanistan Conflict? DO you miss it more than Jake Tapper or Richard Engels?

It's nearly the year anniversary when the US begun the final phase of removing US troops from Afghanistan. Removing the Troops polled high, yet it caused a deep and constant drop in polls for the administration.

Do people secretly miss the occupation?

The mainstream media has played a huge, underappreciated role in President Biden’s declining support over the past year. Its flawed coverage model of politics and government is bad for more than just Biden — it results in a distorted national discourse that weakens our democracy. The media needs to find a different way to cover Washington.

One of the sharpest dips in Biden’s approval rating — which has dropped from 55 percent in January 2021 to less than 39 percent today — happened last August, when it declined almost five points in a single month. There wasn’t a huge surge in gas prices, nor some big legislative failure. What caused Biden’s dip was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — or, rather, the media’s 24/7, highly negative coverage of it.

While BothSidesim is certainly a problem, the problem in this case is the media just being hardwired to support any war that The Blob still supports. And it’s not adequate to say that “well, bad things were happening in Afghanistan, there was going to be negative coverage.” Both the (certainly false) implication that there was some non-“chaotic” way of ending the war, and particular the decision to claim that the immediate collapse of the nominal state and the “chaos” this made inevitable was the fault of current administration rather than the fault of the architects of the war who were still assuring us that the two-decades-long state-building project was actually going great!

But for much of August, the homepages of major newspapers and cable news programs were dominated by Afghanistan coverage, as if the chaotic withdrawal was the only thing happening in the world. Journalists and outlets tore into the president, with Axios calling the withdrawal “Biden’s stain,” NBC News correspondent Richard Engel declaring that “history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States,” and CNN’s Jake Tapper asking an administration official on his show, “Does President Biden not bear the blame for this disastrous exit from Afghanistan?”

Biden’s poll numbers plunged, closely tracking the media hysteria. As The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in December, data analysis showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden that started last August. After the withdrawal, the media lumped other events into its “Biden is struggling” narrative: infighting among Democrats over the party’s agenda, Democrats’ weak performances in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, rising inflation, and the surge of the delta and omicron variants. Biden’s role in these issues was often exaggerated — there are many causes of inflation besides Biden’s policies; presidents can’t stop the emergence of coronavirus variants. This anti-Biden coverage pattern remains in place.

This incident should always and forever discredit the "just do popular things" way of thinking.

[Cthulhu 2020]

We know Republicans love war. We know many Democrats secretly love war.

Or at least, the media has given this impression.

Biden would never find approval among the right, or would only have very slim approval. We live in a polarized time where it's either team red or team blue.

Before we began to pull out of Afghan, both the right and the left were screaming at each other about the continued occupation of the middle east and how "war is bad" blah blah blah. We saw on this very forum people claiming that say Hillary would have started bombing Syria and whatnot. Things dumb people say, but you know, it's what people actually think. Everyone seemed to want out of the middle eastern wars due to how much flak any politician got for supporting the troubles.

But I really find it no surprise that approval would dip. Overall the wars helped the US economy - in general. I realize there were astronomical costs as well, but in general the wars in the ME were always something of a boon to the US economy.

We knew there would be a dip when we pulled out of the middle east. At least those of us who understand the general implications of geopolitical actions upon our home economy. And of course, many of us are not at all surprised that the right is upset that Biden pulled us out of that war. For as much as they cried big crocodile tears about how much Dems loved bombing the middle east, it turns out they were the ones who wanted the war to continue after all.

Overall though, the crusade against Biden has been insane here in the South. There are anti-Biden commercials all the time, there are billboards which point to gas stations displaying their prices saying "Biden did this" (even though we know the president's overall actions have very little effect on the oil prices). It's just been insane to live in the south during the Biden administration. But I'm not surprised. It's on the same level as Obama.


But overall, farther left Dems don't like how milquetoast/liberal Biden is, and Republicans don't like him because their brains are hard wired to hate any Democrat in power.

[uuuhname]

aaaand there it is, the true face of liberalism showing it's face, yet again.

why stop doing imperialism and war crimes when those all mighty polls will go down? It's not like we actually care about the human cost of any of this, fucking idiots.

never mind that regardless of who did the pull out it was always going to be a shit show and the news media that's as addicted to war time coverage as your average junky is to heroin was never going to side with the one who did it.


but yes it's for sure Afghanistan that sank Biden's numbers and not numerous other on going problems, no, it was those terminally online people getting what they want, again.