It’s not every day a cable news host gets dunked on by his own guest.
But this is exactly what happened this week after MSNBC’s Brian Williams praised President Joe Biden’s pathetic, eleventh-hour address on the White House’s humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
In a brief speech on Monday, Biden, who seemed annoyed to have his vacation interrupted by world events, pushed back against a position few hold, arguing angrily that now is as good a time as any to exit Afghanistan. He conveniently sidestepped the main issue, which is not that the United States is withdrawing from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation but how poorly the withdrawal is being conducted.
The president’s address, which ended abruptly with no questions from the press, also included a lot of finger-pointing, most especially at the U.S.’s Afghan allies, who face imminent death now that the Taliban have essentially conquered the entire country.
Biden essentially claimed that Afghans are cowards, that they won’t fight for themselves, and that they simply don’t have the will to take on the Taliban. To date, an estimated 60,000 Afghan national military and police have died fighting the Taliban since 2001, compared to the 2,448 U.S. service members killed in the same period.
The president also blamed his predecessor, arguing his hands are tied by the withdrawal timetable set by former President Donald Trump. Biden, who until this week has had zero problem overturning his predecessor’s actions, made no mention of the fact his White House already blew through the timetable established by the Trump administration.
Biden also argued there are only two choices in Afghanistan: a completely botched withdrawal with completely inadequate planning or preparation, or another 20 years of occupation.
The president, who, by the way, resumed his vacation following his remarks from the nation’s capital, was angry, defensive, and looking to shift blame for what is happening right now in Afghanistan, including that there are as many as 10,000 U.S. nationals still trapped over there and thousands more Afghans looking to flee the Taliban.
Put bluntly, it was one of the worst presidential addresses in the past 40 years, second only to former President Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech.
MSNBC’s Brian Williams, however, sees it differently.
According to the anchor who has a spot on cable news precisely because he was demoted for having lied about covering active war zones, Biden’s speech was exactly what the U.S. needed to hear. It was the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful speech he had heard in his life.
This is a “consequential speech by the American president,” beamed Williams.
“[Biden] didn’t run from it. He owned it,” the anchor continued. “He owned his decision. He owned the fact that, as he put it, the buck stops with him.”
Williams’s guest, No One Let Behind co-founder and Afghanistan war veteran Matt Zeller, was none too pleased with the host’s characterization of Biden’s pathetic attempts to avoid responsibility for the Afghanistan disaster.
“I hope he gets to own their deaths, too,” said Zeller.
Williams had no response.
“I feel like I watched a different speech than the rest of you guys,” Zeller continued. “I was appalled. There was such a profound, bald-faced lie in that speech. The idea we planned for every contingency? I have been personally trying to tell this administration since it took office. I have been trying to tell our government for years that this was coming. We sent them plan after plan on how to evacuate these people. Nobody listened to us.”
The MSNBC guest continued, saying, “They didn’t plan for the evacuation of our Afghan wartime allies. They’re trying to conduct it now at the eleventh hour. The thing that they were most concerned about were the optics of a chaotic evacuation. Well, they got exactly what they were most concerned of by failing to do what was right when we could have done it. We had all the people and equipment in place to be able to save these people months ago, and we did nothing.”
Again, Williams had no response, no characteristically flowery commentary on what Zeller said or any of the other many reports indicating the Biden administration is clearly making it up as it goes.
But no matter! This was a “consequential” speech in which Biden “owned it.”
Williams may be able to fool himself and some of his viewers, but he can’t fool someone who actually served in Afghanistan or those who understand clearly the magnitude of the disaster created by the Biden administration.
