Vapid and Ghoulish Moral Monsters

however much you hate mainstream political journalists....

The United States fought in Afghanistan for twenty years, at a cost of nearly 2,500 American deaths, over 20,000 Americans injured in combat, and something estimated to be in the neighborhood of 240,000 total deaths. The war cost well over $2 trillion. When the US invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled about half of the country. When the US left the country, the Taliban quickly took over the whole thing.

A normal human being looks at those costs — hundreds of thousands dead, trillions of dollars wasted, an enemy that grew stronger — and feels sorrow and anger. The scum of the earth, on the other hand, frame it like this:

See, it’s about partisan politics. Republicans fixate.

Corpses impede horserace, experts warn. The real shame about a quarter of a million dead is that it might shave off three percent in the toss-up states.

At a legislative hearing on Tuesday, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley acknowledged that Afghans who worked with the US military were killed after a withdrawal that didn’t take our allies and partners with us. Some died horrible deaths, Milley said. So, you know, the torture thing and whatever, that stuff really polls like shit. Here are the second and and third paragraphs of Politico’s story about that day of testimony:

President Joe Biden’s poll numbers tanked three years ago as U.S. forces left Afghanistan, especially after an ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American service members outside Kabul’s airport. Republicans have since tried to make the withdrawal a political albatross to hang around Biden’s neck, leading Democrats to defend him on the committee dais and beyond.

But it’s unclear just how much of a liability the war in Afghanistan will prove for Biden heading into a likely presidential matchup with Donald Trump, who initiated the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban.

See the two things packed into the opposite ends of that first sentence? How does someone write that sentence and not notice what it does?

The bad thing about thirteen American servicemembers being killed by a suicide bomber is that Joe Biden’s polling numbers tanked.

Soulless empty garbage. What’s happening to our country? How on earth do we fix this? We live among people who aren’t really people, and they don’t seem to know what they’ve become.