During the 2020 Democratic primary season I made it plain that I believed that there were better choices than Joe Biden. His time was in 2016 when he was still vice president; it was arrogant to assume that Hillary Clinton was “entitled” to the nomination that was being pushed by the Clinton News Network—which, ironically, also acted in ways that insured her defeat. Biden was the apparent “choice” in 2020 of those who wanted a return to quiet “normalcy,” and that is what people have gotten; you can’t abandon him now just because people don’t remember what “normal” is like.
However that is what some people are doing in order to remain “relevant.” Over at CNN, there has been a “nonpartisan” critiquing of Joe Biden, by Chris Cillizza and Brianna Keilar in particular. We know what Fox News is going to say, but why is Cillizza complaining about Sen. Rick Scott calling on the removal of Joe Biden via the 25th Amendment after all the things he has been saying about Biden’s “fitness,” whether in “messaging” about the current surge in Covid-19 cases, or what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan, or on the border—all which is, of course, is just throwing more gas into the fire. CNN executives admitted that they gave Donald Trump’s white nationalist harangues too much air time in 2016, but they haven’t learned any lessons since then.
Cillizza and others on CNN have been attacking Biden’s “blame game” on Afghanistan, but CNN’s “superstars” are not really noted for providing context to current issues of concern like MSNBC or PBS NewsHour do. Sure, context is “boring” and some people already have the minds made up no matter how many facts you try to feed them. But attacks on Biden’s “mishandling” of the Afghanistan pullout are simply misguided because of the lack of context. A report by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations committee in 2009 on the failure of the Tora Bora operation to achieve its goals revealed that because of the initial reluctance of the U.S. Army to send in “boots’ on the ground, and the reliance on Afghani militias of questionable loyalty, allowed Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters to escape into Pakistan to fight another day. In truth, the Afghanistan was already lost by the close of 2001, because the U.S. had no “exit strategy,” and the intent of the Bush administration was to use Afghanistan as a base of military operations for the indefinite future by maintaining the “status quo”—which meant feeding into the corruption of the political system.
It is completely stupid to blame Biden for 20 years of failed policies in Afghanistan when he has only been president for seven months, especially when Trump and Mike Pompeo initiated a “peace” deal with the Taliban that they were not competent to negotiate, as shown by their failed “diplomacy” in North Korea, Syria, Iran and even Iraq. Taliban leadership knew that they were free to infiltrate the countryside and conducts attacks to gain control of the country, because they knew that if things were not progressing enough to provide Trump with a PR “win,” he would simply lose interest.
No one in the Trump administration—let alone the top military brass—felt “secure” or wanted to incur Trump’s insults by telling him the consequences of doing something contrary to his current whim. Retired Col. Doug MacGregor, who served in the Bush administration, told Tucker Carlson flat out that the military has been lying to the American public for years about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, and that all U.S. military intervention in the Middle East has wrought was chaos for no benefit for the American public. Biden can be criticized for being so intent on pulling out Afghanistan that he was too eager to listen to the “rosy” estimates of what could potentially occur when the U.S. pulled out for good. But the reality is that those scenes of airport “chaos” would have just been delayed, not prevented.
Given that Afghans have seemingly been so willing to surrender to the Taliban, who are now claiming to be “reformed,” it is clear that the U.S. military had been serving as a finger in the hole of the dike, because of the pressure of Taliban forces was simply too great to withstand the flood once the finger had been pulled out. There was no loyalty to or trust in Afghanistan’s weak and corrupt leadership, and it isn’t a “shock” that the Afghan security forces—which should have been developed soon after the Taliban’s initial defeat, and was really only a paper tiger at best—quickly collapsed.
As for former CIA analysts condemning Biden, the CIA was MIA in Afghanistan after their initial assessments about the need for troops on the ground were brushed off by the military brass. In fact the U.S. intelligence survey that claimed it would take “months” for Taliban to take control of the country, demonstrated their lack of real “insight” of what was going on in the minds of Afghans. Let’s not forget that for four years the CIA was not an “independent” purveyor of intelligence, but a partisan political arm of the Trump administration downplaying intelligence that Trump didn’t want to hear, especially about Russia; remember that Pompeo was the CIA director for almost two years, and his successor was little better, and not listened to anyways. Did the CIA tell Trump that his one-sided negotiations with the Taliban, in which he was doing all the “giving,” might lead to what we are seeing now? Or was their “intelligence” faulty as well as compromised by politics?
Ultimately, however, because of the lack of “blood” compared to, say, Vietnam, the American public can also be blamed for losing interest. Afghanistan was just “there,” and nothing much seemed to be going on there until recently. Nobody was demanding a resolution one way or the other. When it was “time” to leave, people wondered about the scenes of chaos, not realizing that this is what they “paid” for. But give the public a few weeks, and this will all be forgotten and people will say “good riddance.” When the public doesn’t care, the news media will surely follow if it is a ratings loser.
“Context” is also missing from media reports about Biden’s border “crisis.” There has been a “border crisis” every year for decades now, while the only people who really notice it affecting their lives are those who make it a political, nationalist and xenophobic issue in their paranoid nightmares. The truth is that no matter how many there are who cross the border, they always somehow melt into the crowd doing jobs the “natives” don’t care to do, and if there is no work, they just “melt” back across the border. Consider that every single year over the past 20 years the same estimate of how many illegal aliens are in the country is the same: 11-12 million, with a growing percentage of them being from south and eastern Asia. It is only a “crisis” because the media is calling it one.
Immigrants have been blamed for all manner of societal malfunctions for 200 years in this country, including being carriers of disease, just as millions of Native Americans were wiped out by diseases those other unwanted, uninvited immigrants brought over. In article an article in the Smithsonian magazine Tara Wu discussed how immigrants were frequently blamed for “importing” diseases; the Chinese being accused of such isn’t new:
Wu also observed that while Mexicans were in the past considered “biologically different”—their bodies supposedly able to “withstand 110-degree heat better, and produce more work in the fields” they nonetheless were convenient economic “scapegoats,” and were claimed to be more susceptible to diseases. We should recall that Lou Dobbs was spreading around the myth fostered by his white supremacist guests that “Mexicans” were bringing leprosy into the country. But Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald lambasted the attempts by Republican governors to shift blame for the current surges in Covid cases from their own failed policies to migrants on the border. They had to do this, because “Now that they’ve been proven wrong with their ridiculous claims that President Biden is a Socialist, and that the stock market would collapse, and that the U.S. economy would plummet under Biden’s administration, former President Trump and his right-wing followers are reverting to their original playbook: racism.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ claim that Biden was “facilitating” the spread of the virus by having an allegedly “lax” border policy—far from the truth—is undermined by the fact that DeSantis “is one of the nation’s biggest Covid-19 enablers,” including signing executive orders barring local mask mandates, and even in schools. In fact, Biden has reclaimed the mantel of “Deporter-in-Chief” from his old boss; why hasn’t the media, particularly CNN, noted that more border crossers have been sent directly back across the border without any kind of hearing under Title 42 in the first six months of the Biden administration than under Trump all of last year? Yet if migrants were indeed serial carriers of the virus, then the border areas should be the hotbeds of the virus; but that is simply not the case. Not only are those who are released “thoroughly tested” for the virus, but they don’t go to live and work where they are not wanted—like where maskless, unvaccinated white people are.
In an article by Kenzi Abou-Sabe in The Journal of Social and Cultural Analysis, “Misplaced Blame in U.S.-Mexican Immigration Issue,” it is observed that far from being “parasitic,” the undocumented make significant contributions to the economy, and also because of their legal status, most see no benefit from the taxes they pay—including into Social Security, usually paid through a Tax Identification Number. “Whether or not politicians are aware of statistics like these, reducing the immigrants to a parasitic issue makes for powerful rhetoric.” Like other forms of “vermin”—and unlike other groups whose illegal status tends to be ignored by politicians, the media and the public—“Americans tend to look down on Mexico as poor, brown and backward” and that this “specific brand of xenophobia is “founded in assumptions that are simply not true.”
It is also explained that illegal immigration surged over the past several decades for a reason. It is pointed out that unlike the European Union economic system, while NAFTA “allowed capital to flow freely between the North American states…it made no corresponding relationship for labor migration.” Note that this attitude seems to be peculiar to English-speaking countries, and xenophobia is what largely drove Brexit. Mexican Pres. Salinas believed that a “free market” approach would improve the economy, but all it did was “de-incentivize innovation and propagate low value-added labor. This proved problematic when Mexico couldn’t compete in the low value-added labor category, suffering from Asian manufacturing and the American and Canadian trade competition opened up by NAFTA.”
Furthermore, unlike the richer EU countries did in poorer member states like Greece, “the U.S. and Canada didn’t attempt to prop up Mexican development…borders did not become fluid, but rather staunchly, insultingly defended. In comparison to the success of the EU, many of the U.S. trade policies toward Mexico seemed counterintuitive. NAFTA pushed integration in capital, trade and intelligence, but explicitly prevented integration of labor markets.” Racism was the principle reason for this. “The fact that the former powers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service have been transferred to the Department of Homeland Security portrays a state of affairs where immigrants are not job seekers but security liabilities,” from the book Borders For Whom? by Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Douglas Massey. The result of this is that illegal immigration is actually encouraged, because migrants are more likely to intend to stay in the country because of the lack of fluidity.
“Conversations” about immigration ignore history and “glaze over facts in favor of popular sentiment…The Achilles heel of U.S. immigration policy has been its insistence on viewing immigration as an autonomous process unrelated to other international processes”—meaning people ignore the reasons relating to “why.” Further, a country’s “success” often has to do with its ability to “forget”; this country has “forgotten” why it was prejudiced against Italians, Irish, Germans and eastern Europeans—but it continues to cling to its prejudices against “Mexicans.” Further, according to Saskia Sassen in Globalization and Its Discontents, “America’s convenient memory loss in the case of Mexican immigration disregards the economic manipulation of NAFTA and the ensuing chokehold it placed on Mexico’s working class”—and in particular its farmers, who suffered at the hands of subsidized U.S. produce, which is technically against the concept of “free trade.” Farmers driven off their fields because of competition from American produce could not always find work in the cities, so they had to go wherever the work was.
Again and again and again, it is about “context”—especially in historical terms. Media attacks on Biden—even by CNN, which has been wrongly accused of being “liberal,” when it is in fact merely being “opportunistic”—are severely lacking in context. It is just easily digestible sound bites often accompanied by visuals that inflame but otherwise do not illuminate.
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