It was Trump's withdrawal, and there are arguments for and against leaving Afghanistan. But Trump was a negotiator and he was doing deals with the Taliban. And he listened to professional advice, including military. Biden did none of these things and could not have made more of a mess if he tried. His approval rating in the US on this is 34% Biden's approval rating at home is sinking like a stone too. His record on Coronavirus and the economy is poor, according to CNN. Kamala Harris is even more unpopular. The sooner he goes the better - and I don't want Trump back either.
Biden's overall approval rating has just fallen into a negative - 47.5% against 47.2% How Popular Is Joe Biden? | FiveThirtyEight Trump's rating was consistently highly negative. How Popular Is Donald Trump? | FiveThirtyEight We'll see how Biden progresses, but I suspect that the American public care more about domestic issues than foreign policy.
Latest on Biden's ratings at home from CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/28/politics/biden-afghanistan-polling-analysis/index.html
Wasn't it Biden that said ‘**** That’ when asked about America’s obligations to the Afghans back in 2010 ?
It’s a tallest dwarf battle between Trump and Biden and I don’t really care about the winner. But my Democrat friends in the US tell me that Biden is proving pretty poor all round, and Harris as VP even worse. COVID is just about completely out of control, inflation is rising sharply and hundreds of thousand of immigrants are entering the country illegally (supposedly Harris’ special brief’). Lots of resignations from the core teams, especially Harris’, who is apparently something of a bully and not very talented. As we know, this does not in any way damage her credentials to be the next president. But we should be grateful to Biden, he deflects away from the sharp exposure of the true dimensions of ‘sovereign, independent, world player’ Great Britain and the way we have had to meekly follow nasty Joe’s lead. Seems only a few ex military Tory MPs want to make an issue of our culpability, and I salute them for it. Meanwhile lots of weird empty threats/promises from Johnson and Raab to the Taliban - you’d better not harbour terrorists or……we’ll ask the Yanks to drone attack you? We won’t let you have an embassy in the U.K.? Chinese burn? Flicked with a wet towel? Gang raped by Old Etonians? Raab busy with his usual bollocks this morning. Apparently there are some British citizens left in Afghanistan but ‘only in the low hundreds’. So that’s ok then. Government last week said about 250 citizens and a thousand others who have strong links to the U.K.s activities in the country and are therefore at risk from the Taliban are still there. Other sources, like the agencies that employed these people, put the figure at 7 to 9,000. Dom is still pondering the strategy to get them out, other than asking the Taliban nicely. He also, rather casually, threw the intelligence services under the bus, saying that there was no intel predicting the rapid collapse of the Afghan military. Although others have claimed that Biden simply ignored strong advice that this would happen. So either we don’t share intelligence with the US, or our intelligence was just ****, or Raab is lying. None of which are great options. Finally he had a quick windmill at those who have criticised his and the Foreign Office’s handling of this farce. Much of this criticism has come from within government, notably the Ministry of Defence. Raab reckons that the critics weren’t credible as they only had a ‘peripheral’ role in what was going on. Strange that, I thought the 18 year old soldiers who ended up processing evacuees at the airport worked for the MoD. The Foreign Office had got its staff (you know, the ones who are ‘skilled’ at processing visas) out as quickly as possible, the ambassador apparently had to be told to stay in Kabul. Above all Dom didn’t spend any time on the beach during this episode. Honest.
Quite possibly, his view on American involvement overseas is the same as Trump's. And the majority of American people, I suspect.
It wasn't me that said that. It's true though, inasmuch as he's not a white supremacist neo-fascist like his predecessor.
With respect Strolls, I didn’t say you did. However that was the general feeling being put out by media luvvies. Whereas the fact is, he was always gonna be as big a **** as his predecessor and the one before that. I think, in my opinion, only Sanders ‘might’ have been different…..sadly we’ll never know
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/ Will be interesting to see how fast this falls. There surely isn't any coming back from this. All eyes on the Republican primaries now. Set up perfectly for a Trump comeback, isn't it?
I hold no particular candle for Biden, and think that his abandonment of the Afghan people is pretty reprehensible, but it would have been the same under Trump. I don't think he's anything like as big a **** as his predecessor in pretty much every other respect, though.
I posted that chart earlier. The fall doesn't seem that dramatic to me, and is certainly recoverable. Did you see Trump's chart? After Trump's collusion with the attackers of the Capitol he should be disbarred from standing again.
They are products of the system they exist within, and ours is no better. Complex unwritten frameworks of favours and compromises with the sole purpose of avoiding radical change which alters where power and wealth sits, in exchange for a promise of a vote every few years and some kind of physical ‘security’ which is relative (hey you’re safer than a Syrian aren’t you?) and where values and integrity are just proxy phrases for ‘business as usual’. Trump never understood this, and I suspect Johnson doesn’t either, they believe that they are untouchable forces of nature and can do whatever they like, and they might damage the old status quo seriously and probably not in any intentional way as a result. Might not be a bad thing, as long as they end up personally crushed and humiliated. Having said that whenever I see/hear the smug, arrogant, ‘I did everything right and still know better than you lot’ faces of Blair and Obama, I want to smash them in. And pretty obviously Clinton and Cameron are basically crooks.
Sorry, missed that! I think that fall might just be the start when people realise there are between 100-200 US citizens who wanted to get out but haven't yet. We'll see I guess.
Obama wasn’t that great to be fair…..however I take your point on Trump probably being the worse of a terrible bunch.
I think that's right. What is to come in Afghanistan, could hurt Biden more than anything that has occurred to date.
