In the wake of the United States’ bungled, hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Kabul, even CNN is forced to admit that President Joe Biden is facing a “crisis of competence.”
CNN.com editor-at-large Chris Cillizza, about as partisan a Democrat as you can get, published a piece Monday calling out the Biden administration for the recent reign of chaos in Afghanistan and on America’s southern border.
“In announcing the end of the American military commitment in Afghanistan just over a month ago, Biden had proclaimed that ‘there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan,’” Cillizza wrote. “Except that over the weekend, images were beamed back to the United States of helicopters airlifting people from the parking lot of the US Embassy in Kabul.”
“The overwhelming message? The situation was totally and completely out of control—and neither Biden nor his top foreign policy advisers could stop it,” he added.
As for the US border with Mexico, Cillizza notes the recent report that foreigners making illegal attempts to cross the border was at a twenty-year high in July. The Biden administration claims it is doing what it can while simultaneously blaming former president Donald Trump for ostensibly leaving the asylum system in shambles, but as Cillizza says, “there’s no question that the Biden administration is nowhere near where it wants or needs to be when it comes to its handling of the border crisis.”
The CNN editor-at-large also briefly discussed the surge of the Delta variant and the White House’s backtracking and ambiguous responses.
“There’s no question that the dominant narrative of the late spring—the Biden administration’s competent management of a nationwide vaccine program and the retreat of the virus—has taken a major hit.”
And guess what? We’re only seven months in. Stay buckled up, because we’re not getting off this ride just yet.