Left-wing anchors in the mainstream media turned against President Joe Biden‘s administration this week over the avoidable 11th-hour scramble to evacuate Americans and their allies from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Among the horrifying scenes reported were those of Afghan citizens desperately clustering around outbound planes at the Kabul airport.
Some clung to the wheels and landing gears, and at least four were seen falling from a plane as it ascended. At least seven were reported dead amid the airport chaos.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, and ABC’s Terry Moran all criticized Biden for shifting the blame over the Afghanistan government’s collapse during a less-than-20-minute speech late Monday.
Although the president ostensibly accepted full responsibility for the failure, he proceeded to deflect blame onto the Afghan leadership and former President Donald Trump.
Tapper said Biden–who spent the weekend avoiding scrutiny at Camp David and subsequently resumed his vacation—was “forced to talk about the worsening crisis in Afghanistan, forced to speak to the nation after the calamity of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.”
“The president said that the buck stopped with him but, in fact, this speech was full of finger pointing and blame,” Tapper said on Monday’s edition of The Lead.
He noticed the absurdity in Biden’s contradictory statements that he remains committed to his decision to withdraw every American soldier from Afghanistan, “even though he has, in fact, been forced to send roughly 6,000 back in.”
Tapper also called out Biden’s circular reasoning that “this foreign policy and humanitarian disaster proves to him that he made the right decision.”
He summarized Biden’s speech by saying that the president “did not really get into or accept any blame for the catastrophic exit that we have been watching on television in the last several days.”
Moran listed several of the groups that Biden attempted to scapegoat, while notably omitting the president’s Republican predecessor.
ABC’s Terry Moran on Afghanistan: Biden “did not in any way accept responsibility for the catastrophe that’s unfolding in Kabul” pic.twitter.com/YcRCiWZRyt
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 16, 2021
“He blamed the Afghan government. He blamed Afghan troops. He blamed the Afghan people, who had decided they wanted to wait a while to see if they could get out in an orderly fashion,” Moran said.
“He did not in any way accept responsibility for the catastrophe that’s unfolding in Kabul, and I think [he] missed a moment to demonstrate the kind of leadership to live up to that saying, ‘The buck stops here,'” Moran continued.
Guthrie interviewed National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and resisted his attempts to deflect the Biden administration’s responsibility for the failure in Afghanistan.
“How do you explain getting this so wrong?” Guthrie asked in reference to America’s evacuation and ongoing rescue operations.
She pressed Sullivan on the optics, described by some as “Saigon on steroids,” despite Biden’s past reassurances that the withdrawal would not resemble scenes showing people getting airlifted from Vietnam’s US embassy during the Gerald Ford administration.
“Well, first, Savannah, to be fair, the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years,” Sullivan digressed. “That is how we move people back and forth, so…”
“You know the larger point. It’s not the helicopter. It’s not the mechanism. No, no, it’s the last minute scramble,” Guthrie interjected. “You know that. It’s the last-minute scramble when the assurances from the president himself were this was not what we were going to see.”
Later in the interview, Sullivan characterized the withdrawal as a tactical victory.
“The reason that there were US forces at the airport, effectuating a successful drawdown out of our embassy, securing the airport to be able to get other people out is because the president pre-positioned those forces, thousands of them, in the gulf so they could be moved in rapidly in the event that there was a rapid collapse,” he said.
Even anchors who avoided direct criticism of Democrat leadership were forced to confront the issue by their guests.
During an interview with Matt Zeller, who co-founded the veteran assistance organization No One Left Behind, MSNBC’s Brian Williams tried to claim that Biden “didn’t run from” responsibility.
“He owned it,” Williams said. “He owned his decision.”
“I hope he gets to own their deaths, too,” Zeller respnoded. “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled. There was such a profound, bold-faced lie in that speech: the idea that we planned for every contingency.”
U.S. Army veteran Matt Zeller goes off on MSNBC about Biden’s remarks on Afghanistan:
Zeller: “I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys. I was appalled.” pic.twitter.com/eGC5tMBvy4
— Whitney Robertson (@whitneyleerob) August 16, 2021
“They didn’t plan for the evacuation of our Afghan war-time allies,” he continued. “They’re trying to conduct it now at the 11th hour.”
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
