The Elephant in the room. Afghanistan

Are you trying to start fights today?  Bringing up a thread that's more than 6 weeks old?

Biden has more empathy than former ever could.  If you supported former or never called him out for his lack of empathy, you certainly don't get to criticize a decent, caring person.  Remember in the beginning of Covid when former was asked what he would say to people who were scared?  He just insulted the reporter.  Except for the Republicans, most reasonable people would agree Biden has a great deal of empathy and Trump is incapable of showing empathy.

And its not just Americans.   Around the world, most people agree former lacked empathy, especially during the covid crisis

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/05/will-americans-forgive-trump

One of the first things Biden did in office was to hold a national memorial service to recognize the more than 400,000 people who had died of covid.

Even former's campaign manager thought he lost the election in part because of his lack of empathy.

www.newsweek.com/ex-trump-campaign-manager-brad-parscale-says-lack-empathy-during-pandemic-cost-him-election-1551640

This was written a year ago, before the election.  We know which side Americans chose.

www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/30/trump-empathy-virtue-signaling/

Trump is running against empathy
To the GOP, caring about anyone except yourself makes you a sucker.

And that carelessness is no accident. It’s the theme of his campaign, his government and his party. Trump is the purest embodiment of an insidious rot in the Republican Party — a belief in the primacy of individual interests even at the expense of the common good. Trump is the human apotheosis of a guiding principle that says every policy decision is a zero-sum transaction where any benefit to someone who is not you is an automatic loss for you. Trump’s presidency boils down to the notion that caring about others or helping others with no expectation of material personal gain is a weakness.

In the presidential campaign that will end in a few days, Joe Biden is an avatar of everything Trump is not in terms of his orientation toward others. His public experience of grief — having lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident, and later his son Beau — have made him particularly sensitive to how Americans are dealing with loss in the middle of a pandemic that has killed at least 228,000 people here. He does not withhold affection, or awkwardly pantomime it as Trump does.

For this, Trump’s followers have heaped disdain on Biden, most notably for having the temerity to care about his surviving son, Hunter, in public. The New York Post published texts apparently sent between the Bidens while Hunter was in rehab, one of which read: “Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love you. Dad.” Around the same time, a photo surfaced where the men are embracing each other and Biden is kissing his son on the cheek, prompting the right-wing commentator John Cardillo to ask, “Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?” Biden’s warmth and emotional generosity, even toward his own children, is viewed as weakness. Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp complained during a televised Biden town hall event that she felt like she was watching an episode of “Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood,” and she meant it as an insult. Being a good neighbor is antithetical to everything Republicans stand for these days.
Trump built a career on magic words. The spell broke at the debate.

This is true in the smallest ways and the largest alike. Being a good neighbor implies a responsibility to others and a duty to look out for them. It implies that it’s immoral to consciously enable harm to the most vulnerable and to perpetuate injustices upon people who are disenfranchised. These values should be nonpartisan; they’re theoretically built into the social contract. But they do not translate into policy or rhetoric on the right. Look at the utter disdain the right has for small gestures of open solidarity. Conservatives today are enraged by things like people who work in entertainment while simultaneously expressing political opinions (exceptions made for Ted Nugent, James Woods, Scott Baio and, well, the former reality TV star in the Oval Office) or expressing support for Black Lives Matter, which they dismiss as “virtue signaling” because they cannot fathom public solidarity as anything but performative unless it expresses support for people who are exactly like them. (Saying that “blue lives matter,” on the other hand, doesn’t count as virtue signaling because it echoes a White conservative view toward law enforcement that denies the existence of systemic racism, which implies they might have some moral obligations to Black people.) Even simple expressions of politeness, like asking someone their preferred pronouns — which takes as much effort as holding a door open for somebody walking behind you — are met with incredulous insistence that no one could possibly be doing it out of basic respect for another person.
And that carelessness is no accident. It’s the theme of his campaign, his government and his party. Trump is the purest embodiment of an insidious rot in the Republican Party — a belief in the primacy of individual interests even at the expense of the common good. Trump is the human apotheosis of a guiding principle that says every policy decision is a zero-sum transaction where any benefit to someone who is not you is an automatic loss for you. Trump’s presidency boils down to the notion that caring about others or helping others with no expectation of material personal gain is a weakness.

This is projection, and it’s particularly disingenuous when it comes from people who often wrap their contempt for people who aren’t White, straight, natural-born citizens in a public Christianity, posting Bible verses to Twitter and implying that a virtuous America is one that is willing to separate immigrant children from their parents, strip women of their own bodily autonomy, punish gay people for being gay and only able to help the poor if they pass some litmus test that shows them to be deserving. This is a perversion of virtue, but it’s a perfect manifestation of a society where any notion of common good and shared responsibility has been eroded by an emphasis on individualism that utterly denies the role that luck plays in anyone’s ability to thrive and succeed and blames people who suffer from systemic injustices for the harms done to them.

It also leads to Marie Antoinette levels of tone-deafness by elites who cannot relate to, and secretly despise, the plight of working people in America. “Find something new,” warbled senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump, who got her jobs in business and government from her father, as millions of Americans lost their own as the pandemic decimated the economy. Research shows that money tends to erode empathy interpersonally, which partially explains but does not mitigate the behavior of the Trump family — and also explains the priorities of the Republican Party, which has gone to great lengths to protect the interests of the 1 percent, giving them generous tax cuts and backstopping the covid-19 losses of large companies while refusing to bail out their actual working-class constituents. And what’s the excuse for such stinginess? Too much federal unemployment aid might lead people to stay home instead of going back to work. If you needed any more evidence that the GOP has no empathy for working people, see their apparent assumption that the working class is inherently lazy and will not be productive citizens unless starvation is the alternative. It’s okay if some of you die, as long as not a single one of you gets something you might not deserve.
This Republican notion of deservingness itself is a failure of empathy. It demands that the poor work 10 times harder than, say, Jared Kushner, to achieve a baseline quality of life, imposing work requirements for benefits on people who want to work and can’t. It says that children can be used to punish their parents, whether it’s denying them services because of unpaid school lunch debt or taking them away from their parents to discourage immigration. It says that money is the best indicator of success, hard work and character, despite the fact that according to a 2017 study, 60 percent of private wealth in this country is inherited (as it was by the Trumps and Kushner), and some portion of the rest is generated through lucrative financialization schemes that add no meaningful value to society but often harm large swaths of the population, as in the 2008 credit crisis. It convinces people on the receiving end of luck — whether it’s the circumstances they were born into, the people they knew, random timing, the color of their skin or their gender, or even the intelligence they have innately — that they deserve these benefits of all of these things, and that conversely, the people with different outcomes deserve what they get instead.
I worked for Jared Kushner. Of course he says his covid-19 failure is a success.
And elites in this regime have no reservations about saying openly that as long as they’re taken care of, their constituents don’t matter. CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked Trump spokesman Hogan Gidley this week whether he was concerned about Vice President Pence’s upcoming rally in Wisconsin, which could prove to be a superspreader event. “Hospitals in Wisconsin are near capacity. Does that give you any pause, or the vice president any pause, about going there and holding a big rally?” she said.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Gidley, apparently thinking of whether Pence might be contagious — since several of his aides recently tested positive for the coronavirus — but not worrying about any rally attendees who could easily infect each other. “The vice president has the best doctors in the world around him, they’ve obviously contact-traced and have come to the conclusion that it’s fine for him to be out on the campaign trail."



Gift Article

Don't watch the video then. That'll certainly turn the video of a man actually looking at his watch into a video of a man gazing lovingly at nonexistent rosary beads and of course prove you right.




The facts have already come to light when his generals (the front seat drivers) testified that they told him to leave some troops in.



His Generals knew. General McKenzie said under oath that his recommendations were based on knowing that "withdrawing those forces would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and, eventually, the Afghan government."
And I guarantee he knew it would happen fast. When you take away the military support, the Afghan troops tend to drop the fight and revert to self preservation mode, knowing they'd be fighting a losing battle. 




Biden SAID "he has turned the page". In the meantime, while Biden's busy "talking" to the very "business-like Taliban" they're beheading their people while our veterans are actually getting our people out already. No thanks to Biden who said it wouldn't turn out like this or that they wouldn't leave anyone behind. 

The fact that you characterize new information, different points of view or facts that didn't get discussed as starting a fight- just shows that it needed to be said. 
Who cares if it's more than 6 weeks old? Do you really think that dismisses facts you don't like?

Comparing apples to oranges again. Another false premise, false comparison and false equivalency.

Maybe a single trip to Hawaii was more expensive than Florida.  However, the money spent overall for secret service to stay at Trump hotels, for a bathroom in DC because Jared & Ivanka refused to allow them to use theirs, the number of days Trump spent golfing and money funneled to his golf courses dwarfs any money spent on the Obamas and Bidens.

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-has-paid-rates-as-high-as-650-a-night-for-rooms-at-trumps-properties/2020/02/06/7f27a7c6-3ec5-11ea-8872-5df698785a4e_story.html

This is my personal favorite.  Theories on why Trump charges $650 a night to the government - probably all of them ring true to a certain extent
He's a penny pinching Cheapo
profiteeering
Defiance
entitlement
he’s not really a billionaire
he's cash poor


www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/why-does-billionaire-charge-secret-service-650-night/606253/

The amount spent on the Obamas during his 8 years in office was roughly the equivalent of what was spent on Trump in just his first year.

www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/when-vacations-cost-millions/2320612/

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/10/secret-service-has-protected-trump-family-members-4000-trips-three-years/

That doesn’t even cover post presidency.  Trump extended secret service protection for his children for 6 months at a huge expense.

www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/05/05/trumps-adult-children-cost-taxpayers-over-140000-in-secret-service-charges-in-1-month-post-presidency-watchdog-finds/

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-secret-service-children-cost-mnuchin/2021/09/16/b9aa6348-156a-11ec-a5e5-ceecb895922f_story.html

That also doesn’t cover the lifetime of payments to Trump properties that taxpayers will be stuck paying because Trump lives at one.  Taxpayers are paying $400 a night for a room at Maralago and expected to pay $560 a night at Bedminster.  Admittedly, Biden charged for the use of a cottage on his property but that was only $2,200 per month for a total of $171,000, one tenth of what was spent on the Trump children post presidency for 6 months.

www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/since-leaving-office-trump-has-charged-the-secret-service-more-than-40000-to-use-space-at-mar-a-lago/

There is nothing wrong with Biden’s mind. He spoke clearly and intelligently at the UN recently as well as at the CNN town hall meeting last week. The mental acuity of President Biden is something that Fox hosts and Republican supporters of former like to attack because he’s older and they’re looking for weaknesses to attack. If we’re going to disqualify people because of their age, there are many older sitting Republicans like Grassley.
Unlike former who surrounded himself with his idiot children and other inexperienced people who’s only qualification was their loyalty to him, Biden selected a cabinet and White House staff full of intelligent, experienced qualified people. Here’s what Blinken had to say recently

www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/09/22/republicans-attack-joe-biden-over-age-insult-boomer-voters/5802798001/

All I can tell you is … the president very much speaks for himself.”

Risch: “He does speak for himself but what happens when somebody doesn’t want him speaking?”

Blinken: “Senator, I’m telling you based on my own experience with the president over the last 20 years, heh, anyone who tried to stop him from saying what he wanted to say, speaking his mind, would probably not be long for their job.”

Even Republicans who met with Biden over the summer agree there’s nothing wrong with Biden’s mind.

www.politico.com/news/2021/03/26/biden-health-republican-senators-477813

“In the two meetings I was in with the president, he was as sharp as a tack,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said in an interview.

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who joined Capito at a February meeting with Biden on Covid relief, said he didn’t see anything amiss: “I visited with him in the Oval Office, and he seemed well-prepared and well-briefed for the meeting.”

From the first article

The age-related conservative offensive reprises the blatant psychological projection of the Trump era: attributing his worst traits to someone else and weaponizing them. Trump set many hours aside to tweet and watch TV in the residence ("executive time”) and made nearly 300 trips to his own golf clubs and resorts. So Trump and his defenders claim Biden shirks his job and takes long vacations.

Likewise, the attacks on Biden's capacities are rooted in the many questions about Trump's. The former president's disordered speech drew attention from experts who said it reflected cognitive decline. He himself has never stopped marveling at his “amazing” performance on a cognitive test in 2018 (best captured by comedian Sarah Cooper). Trump bragged about the test on the 2020 campaign trail and was still bragging in Texas this summer: “I aced it. And I’d like to see Biden ace it. He won’t ace it.”

It’s a fact that Biden is the oldest newly inaugurated president we’ve ever had. But it’s also a fact that everyone has memory lapses, more often as they age, and that’s not the same as dementia. It's true as well that Biden occasionally goes awkwardly off script, or gets testy, or mangles sentences, but he has been doing all that for decades.

And if you want to talk about mental acuity, let’s talk about former. General Miley was so concerned about former becoming unhinged that he had a conversation with Nancy Pelosi. Former was the threat to national security. His ignorance, stupidity, narcissism and temper were all threats to national security. He didn’t know that Great Britain was a nuclear power. Recently, he thought Thomas Jefferson helped write the US Constitution.

The list of former’s stupid, ignorant comments is a mile long. Here’s just a sampling. The strategy of Fox hosts and Republican supporters of former who remained silent for the last 4 years and are now falsely accusing President Biden of mental decline is unbelievable. Here’s just a sampling of former’s stupid, ignorant comments.

www.politico.eu/article/peak-stupidity-donald-trump-ben-shapiro-edward-cocking/

During his four chaotic years in power, barely a day went by without Trump saying something witless. In 2018, he declared Hurricane Florence, “One of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” In 2019, he suggested that during the American Revolutionary War, Washington’s army had “taken over airports” — a full 128 years before the Wright brothers’ first flight. In a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee that same year, he argued that “the noise [from windmills] gives you cancer.”

Let’s not forget some of his stupid and even dangerous ideas

His solution for forest fires in California was to rake the forests.

He suggested that we should study injecting bleach and using UV rays to kill covid.

If you didn’t call out former’s endless ignorant, stupid, dangerous comments or worse, if you defended them, you don’t get to falsely claim there’s anything wrong with Biden’s mental acuity.
I wish former was irrelevant, but unfortunately, he’s still head of the Republican Party and still making stupid, ignorant, careless, reckless, dangerous statements.

You can keep listing things about Trump, it won't change the things going on with Biden.




That's not really how it works, but never the less, if he said or did something stupid or dangerous I never defended that.

And the things I point out about Biden aren't false. Nothing that I've said that Biden has done or said is false.

The left loves whataboutisms except when it’s used on them.

Joe Speaks clearly, has coherent thoughts? Come on now, lol.