Harry S Truman famously had a sign on his desk reading “The Buck Stops Here.” Joe Biden should have a sign on his desk reading “When I Talk Out of Both Sides of My Mouth, Believe Both Versions.”
At yesterday’s press conference on Afghanistan, Biden, who is oblivious to blatant self-contradiction, declared that “history is going to record this was the logical, rational and right decision to make.” But at the very same presser, he also said:
Evacuation of thousands of people from Kabul is going to be hard and painful no matter when it started, when we began. It would have been true if we started a month ago — or a month from now. There’s no way to evacuate this many people without pain and loss of heartbreaking images [sic] you see. It’s just a fact.
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It sounds as though he ran together two separate thoughts in the next-to-the-last sentence, but the sense of it is still clear. Biden is telling the reporters that there’s no way the U.S. could have avoided the current confusion, which has included mixed messages to Americans trapped in Afghanistan. Yet in the same breath he shares his view that the withdrawal proceeded according to plan.
