Scott Dworkin: ‘Stop Blaming Biden for Afghanistan. He’s Cleaning Up Trump’s Mess’

 

 From Newsweek:

The images coming out of Afghanistan have been disturbing. But let’s be clear: The Trump Administration led us straight into this mess. And President Biden is doing everything he can to get us out of it.

In Afghanistan, President Biden got dealt yet another losing hand from the Trump Administration. Their Doha Agreement with the Taliban violated the most basic principles of self-government for the Afghan people. There was no way to enforce it or make sure the Taliban kept its word. There was no denunciation of al-Qaeda terrorists. Worst of all, the deal didn’t mandate the Taliban stop attacks against Afghan security forces.

All of this set the stage for the chaotic scenes we’re seeing on TV today.

Trump’s deal with the Taliban was flawed from the start, which is why Trump’s own officials are now scrambling to distance themselves from it. “To have our Generals say that they are depending on diplomacy with the Taliban is an unbelievable scenario. Negotiating with the Taliban is like dealing with the devil,” tweeted Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, who certainly voiced no such objections while working for Trump. She was not alone. “Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Trump’s former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, told journalist Bari Weiss. “This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn't defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”

 

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John Blake: ‘Democrats are on the verge of repeating a voting-rights blunder that led to the rise of Jim Crow’

From CNN:

 

As I watch some Democrats handle the voting rights issue, I’m seeing a replay of a 19th-century political horror story. It ended with Black voters losing faith in the leaders who were supposed to protect them.

 

President Biden has called voting rights “the single most important” issue and described a wave of voter restriction bills recently passed by Republican legislatures across the US as “Jim Crow on steroids.”

 

Yet he has refused to throw the full weight of the Oval Office behind passing two pending voting rights bills in Congress. He has stopped short of embracing calls to jettison the filibuster — the parliamentary tactic Republicans can use to halt a voting-rights bill — because he says it would “throw the entire Congress into chaos.”

He’s focused instead on passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that could rejuvenate the economy and appeal to a broad swath of voters.

 

But for anyone who knows this country’s shameful voting-rights history, Biden is following a script that once doomed Black voters and made the rise of Jim Crow possible.

 

 

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