(Illustration: ‘The Three Amigos‘ — Dick Cheney, GW Bush, Donald Rumsfeld — found here).

Afghanistan continues to flame the news cycle into the afternoon — and the shit in the airwaves is poor. History and context play a huge part in this horrid, miserable story.
Joe Biden on the clusterfuck of a mess:

“Here’s what I believe to my core: It is wrong to order American troops to step up when Afghanistan’s own armed forces would not … How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war? I will not repeat the mistakes we made in the past … I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take that criticism than pass this on to a fifth president … I am the president of the United States, the buck stops with me.”

However, the buck started 20 years ago and the original culprits have skipped the docket. Those ‘Three Amigos’ in that pix above are the malefactors of a terrible crime perpetrated upon a shitload of people, especially the thousands upon thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those three assholes are the original source of a way-shitty post-9/11 world.
Even at the time, I figured the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was somewhat required, so traumatic was the World Trade Center attack, but I (and just everybody else) didn’t know the nefarious shit going on inside the GW Bush administration. They so fucked Afghanistan.

And apparently, the MSM is falling down the memory hole or doesn’t want to call up old shit that doesn’t look good and disappearing GW and his boys into a fade of historic nonsense.
Media columnist Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post this afternoon tried to correct the MSM line — high notes:

The situation is tragic, no doubt, and the images of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul on Sunday are stunningly memorable, but the blame has to be spread much more evenly. Biden has been in office for just over seven months; the always untenable Afghan war — and its sure-to-be-terrible ending — has been a disaster for decades.
It cuts across political parties: begun by a Republican, George W. Bush, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and presided over by two Obama terms and four years of Trump.

Throughout, the American government has lied to the American people about how well things were going in America’s longest war, as The Washington Post’s important 2019 project, “The Afghanistan Papers,” made abundantly clear.
Sometimes compared to the Pentagon Papers that chronicled a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it relied on 2,000 pages of previously unpublished documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits to drive home its conclusion.

“Senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

Yet Joe takes the blame:

You can chalk that up to sheer partisanship, of course, but so far there’s not enough thoughtful, context-rich news coverage to counter it. And so a false idea can take root:

That a war that cost trillions over two decades, killed many thousands, and was destined to failure from the start is the sole fault of the president who — hamstrung by all that came before him — was the one to end it.

As always, the media moves too quickly to the blame game, allowing the most extreme punditry to carry the day. When history is in the making, as it surely is here, that’s far from the best approach.

And here we are, again…