But he also just kept saying things that made no sense or that were demonstrably untrue.

Biden says he was warning people to get out since March or April. But then he was also saying that he himself couldn’t see the country falling, that “no one” could, so he can’t be blamed for not seeing it. So which is it? In July, of course, he claimed that he hadn’t been told the country might fall. That was a lie, as we found out later, as he was told in June that it was a possibility. We’ve been talking about the possibility since at least May.

He spoke about the Trump May 1 deadline – yelling that the choice was between that and surging far more troops in for more war which no one was talking about. But he himself broke that deadline in April, postponing leaving for four months. So he himself proved that was nonsense. Plus, Trump had a lot of conditions in the deal that the Taliban broke, but Biden didn’t hold them to the deal, which would have kept them in check. //

He says he disagrees with people who say he should have started sooner. Now, leave aside for the moment that his people were telling us in July they were working on getting interpreters out. So they were claiming in July that they were doing what he says now they couldn’t. But he says now – imagine if they brought in thousands of troops to get out people then, in the middle of a civil war? I don’t know Joe, was it better to bring in the thousands after you pulled out all the troops after they took complete control and we were at their mercy because of you?

But the whole point of doing it earlier was so that you didn’t have to do it all at once, so that you could have done it over months, slowly and carefully, fully vetting everyone. So you wouldn’t need “thousands of troops.” Plus, Biden pulled the remaining 2500 troops out, only to have to put 6000 back in. So he himself was “surging” in far more troops than he took out. Everything he claimed he was doing to reduce our involvement, only increased the risk and danger to our people and our Afghan allies. //

It was, to Joe Biden, about proving Joe Biden right about this issue.

There were a lot of sick things in it, but the thing that was sociopathic about it all was using his own dead son’s name/death for emotional blackmail. Some people may not like that I say that, but that’s what it is. He’s done that repeatedly in his rants on Afghanistan. He did it again in Tuesday’s speech, and he did it during his Dover meetings with the families who lost their sons and daughters in Kabul. So, for the record, Joe Biden’s son Beau didn’t die in Afghanistan. He died of cancer. He had previously served in Iraq. The families felt he talked more about his own son than theirs. We see him throw Beau Biden again into this speech. He acts like he was a Gold Star father, and it’s not the same thing. The families know that and they were offended that he made it about himself and not about their loved ones.

But more than that, it’s a cynical use of his son as a defense to being criticized, to make it not about facts, but about his pain, not even about the son. To me, that’s sick and even disrespectful to his own son, to use Beau’s death in that way.