What a debate, and wow did blithering idiot Donald J. Trump lose that debate, and also whatever was left of his mind.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT!
So much to discuss, and how about Afghanistan and Donald J. Trump’s role in fucking it up so disgracefully? Trump has been trying to blame the Biden administration for the 13 soldiers killed at the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate (or as JD Vance called it, Abbey Road), on August 26, 2021, during the withdrawal of US forces. The withdrawal happened after Trump made the worst deal of all deals with the Taliban: The US would withdraw all of our forces and equipment, and allow the release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, in exchange for the hope that the Taliban would not murder the 2,500 sitting-duck soldiers that Trump left behind in his hurry to score one single positive achievement from his plague-ridden crapulent presidency. One of those former prisoners, Abdul Rahman al-Logari, in a body-worn IED, blew himself up at the airport in Kabul, killing 13 service members.
Trump has been trying to take credit for leaving Afghanistan while at the same time blaming Biden for those service members’ deaths, which is why he was trampling graves to make a campaign ad about it. His flunkies Justin Caporale and Michel Picard even allegedly shoved a cemetery worker so that he could give a ghoulish thumbs-up on dead soldiers’ graves. Because Trump never gave one crap about the troops, those “suckers” and “losers.”
IT WAS THIS.
But Kamala Harris was not fucking having it! Not that it shut up his loony rambling any.
DAVID MUIR: Thank you. I want to turn to Afghanistan. We witnessed a poignant moment today on Capitol Hill honoring the soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. I do want to ask the vice president, do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I will tell you, I agreed with President Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America's taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war. And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.
But let's understand how we got to where we are. Donald Trump, when he was president, negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine. He calls himself a dealmaker. Even his national security adviser said it was a weak, terrible deal. And here's how it went down. He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.
And get this — no, get this. And the president at the time invited the Taliban to Camp David. A place of storied significance for us as Americans, a place where we honor the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders. And this former president, as president, invited them to Camp David because he does not, again, appreciate the role and responsibility of the President of the United States to be commander in chief with a level of respect. And this gets back to the point of how he has consistently disparaged and demeaned members of our military, fallen soldiers, and the work that we must do to uphold the strength and the respect of the United States of America around the world.
Hold on, $300 million a day, can that be real?! Whip out the calculator, and that is conservative, and does not even include lifetime care for American veterans, the interest on money borrowed to make the war, damage to infrastructure, loss of income from the 243,000 people who died. That was just a conservative estimate of just the price of being there. If Joe Biden single-handedly got us out, well, good for him. And George W. Bush’s cute little paintings will never redeem him from getting us into that disaster. He was a nepo baby Yalie cheerleader, but he was not stupid. Maybe he was Dick Cheney and/or Donald Rumsfeld’s puppet, but he was still a grown-ass man who should have known better.
Unlike the two Bushes, Cheney et al., Donald J. Trump is simply very, very stupid, and racist, and has a limited number of rambling scripts he trots out. He swims like a dull-eyed shark.
DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, thank you. President Trump, your response to her saying that you began the negotiations with the Taliban.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, thank you. So if you take a look at that period of time, the Taliban was killing our soldiers, a lot of them, with snipers. And I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing.
That's the fighting force within Afghanistan. They don't bother doing that because you know, they deal with the wrong people all the time. But I got involved. And Abdul is the head of the Taliban. He is still the head of the Taliban. And I told Abdul don't do it anymore, you do it anymore you're going to have problems. And he said why do you send me a picture of my house? I said you're going to have to figure that out, Abdul. And for 18 months we had nobody killed*. We did have an agreement negotiated by Mike Pompeo. It was a very good agreement. The reason it was good, it was — we were getting out. We would have been out faster than them, but we wouldn't have lost the soldiers. We wouldn't have left many Americans behind. And we wouldn't have left — we wouldn't have left $85 billion worth of brand new beautiful military equipment behind. And just to finish, they blew it. The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn't do it. They didn't do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn't do what they were supposed to do.
Abdul! What Abdul is he talking about? Abdul Salam Hanafi? Abdul Ghani Baradar? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Paula Abdul?
He has no idea. And it’s simply a lie that no one was killed in 18 months in Afghanistan, entirely made up. Sixty-five US service members died under Trump’s watch, double-digits every year of his presidency. If Trump had wanted to withdraw, he could have done it at any time, but he wanted to claim some kind of victory for his plague-ridden presidency, while leaving Biden a booby-trapped mess.
And so his story goes that Trump knew this Taliban “Abdul” violated the agreement, so he invited him and his Taliban pals to Camp David for the anniversary of 9/11 anyway? For what? Some kind of treat for doing all of that killing? Nothing he said makes any fucking sense, other than the guy is just so fucking dumb. If Trump hadn’t been born rich, he’d be selling timeshares in Arizona, and the world would be better off for it.
Abdul!
When active racism combines with profound stupidity, this is what you get. Well, unless it really was Paula Abdul that was giving advice, about not looking cold-hearted snakes in the eye.
Very related:
paulkrugman7
1habout an hour ago
Just a reminder: Trump didn’t have a bad night. This is just who he is, and has been all along, visible to anyone who looked past the sanewashing.
Probably this is also who Harris has been all along, but now she has broken through the negative narratives that have clung to her.
https://www.threads.net/@paulkrugman7/post/C_xwp2wJ2uo