Forget Afghanistan. Time To Get Serious About 2022.

If the best the GOP noise machine can come up with to make Joe’s decision to cut and run from Afghanistan a political issue that will cost the Democrats some votes in 2022, there’s no way that the blue team will lose control of either the Senate or the House. Talk about a phony and stupid issue that goes far beyond phony and stupid — wow!

Here’s what happened. Evidently a few months ago, Joe had a conversation with the President of Afghanistan, and told him that he needed to do something about the fact that the government’s attempt to prevent a return of the Taliban wasn’t being judged particularly positively anywhere else, and that something needed to be done to ‘change this perception’ around the globe.

Yesterday, Fox News trotted out the opinion editor from The Washington Examiner, a right-wing tabloid that wouldn’t know how to honestly examine any kind of political issue at all, who compared Joe’s statement about his telephone call to how the American government lied about the military situation in Viet Nam. Then, this guy said, “Presidents have been impeached for far less.”

The last time a President was impeached for making a telephone call to the leader of another country was when Donald Trump was impeached for telling the President of Ukraine that he was going to withhold promised military aid unless the Ukrainian government helped Rudy Giuliani dig up some political dirt on Joe. I don’t know what other ‘far less’ phone calls this idiot from The Examiner could have been talking about. Do you?

Following this absurd comment, the guy went on to say something that was even more absurd. He then criticized Joe for saying that the current situation within Afghanistan basically amounted to a ‘civil war,’ which had not ever been previously mentioned by any U.S. President for the past twenty years. So how come Joe was only bringing it up now? How come Joe didn’t say anything about a civil war in Afghanistan when he was in the Senate and voted for Afghan military aid?

Joe first went to D.C. in 1973. So, he’s been there almost 50 years. And whether he was in the Senate or serving Obama as VP, he was always known as a guy who tried to build consensus, even across party lines.

Guess what? He’s now in charge and members of the blue team will have to figure out how to agree with him. As for the red team, nobody’s expecting them to agree with anything said by any Democrat, so Joe can forget them.

I happen to think that Joe’s assertion that what’s going on in Afghanistan is a civil war marks a refreshing, honest and necessary injection of reality into the current narrative about foreign affairs. The fact that he was unable or unwilling to make such a statement previously, is all the more the reason to applaud him for making it now.

And in case you didn’t catch it, the Taliban and the ISIS-K bunch fought a pitched battle last week in the Panjshir River Valley, which happens to be about 50 miles away from Kabul. Both sides, of course, said they won.

As bad and as uncaring as this may sound, I don’t give one rat’s damn about what happens in Afghanistan. What I care about right now is that we are clearly in the 2022 election cycle, and the proof is provided by the incredibly stupid statement made the guy from The Washington Examiner on Fox News.

What this statement really tells me is that if you think the Pentagon and the NSC were surprised by how quickly the pro-American government fell in Kabul, for sure the GOP and its noise-making mouthpieces were even more surprised.

The problem is that the red team will put together some focus groups to figure out some kind of anti-Joe narrative which may snag them a few votes in some contested Congressional districts next year. And that’s a lot bigger threat to the health and welfare of this country than whether what Grandpa would call some ‘chayas’ (read: crazy people) are running around in Kabul.

So, let’s cut to the chase. Want to do what we need to do right now? Go to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) website and make a pledge. And don’t tell me how you can’t spare any money because of Covid-19. There wouldn’t have been a Covid-19 catastrophe if the GOP leadership had gone to the White House and told their President to stop screwing around.

Want that bunch to once again tell the American people that all we need to do is take a mouthful of a horse de-wormer medicine called Ivermectin and we’ll be fine?

Here’s the DCCC link again: Join Our Campaign to Defeat Trump’s Republican Agenda (dccc.org). See where it says ‘donate now’ in the upper, right-hand corner?

What are you waiting for? Do it. Do it now!