Biden and the Press Commenter Dale Coberly: I ran across this in Salon newsletter, “Your daily update from Salon” Written by Brett Bachman. Buried deep in President Joe Biden’s Tuesday speech on America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was a line . . . one of those uncanny truth-telling moments that Washington power brokers rarely indulge in: Quote “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” Biden End Quote If Biden can make this stick, it is a major event. A recent AB post by Erik Kramer was asking whether a president should be doing “the right thing” or “the popular thing.” Apparently, Biden was getting beat up in the press for doing
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Biden and the Press
Commenter Dale Coberly: I ran across this in Salon newsletter, “Your daily update from Salon” Written by Brett Bachman.
Buried deep in President Joe Biden’s Tuesday speech on America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was a line . . . one of those uncanny truth-telling moments that Washington power brokers rarely indulge in:
Quote “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” Biden End Quote
If Biden can make this stick, it is a major event.
A recent AB post by Erik Kramer was asking whether a president should be doing “the right thing” or “the popular thing.” Apparently, Biden was getting beat up in the press for doing the right thing by withdrawing from Afghanistan. Even though the AB post was about the surprise that Biden was getting beat up in the press for doing the popular thing, the author seemed to lose track of that in his pursuit of the philosophical argument about “right” versus “popular.”
The author’s confusion doesn’t really matter. Probably no one noticed it… and maybe a few people learned a little about the need for doers of “right” in politics to be concerned about doing “what is popular.”
But, what we might learn from the quote in Salon is a hint why the press beat Biden up for doing what is both right and popular. It would be easy to say the press was just doing what it always does:
Feasting on blood and tragedy . . . “if it bleeds it leads.”
But what I think it shows is that the real rulers of America, the people who own the press, very much do not want the US to end its forever wars. Of course it also shows that the insane Right will lose no opportunity to tell the people that everything Biden does is wrong, stupid, and evil.
But I’d watch that “the real powers like the forever wars” for whatever reason.
And just for the record, even Salon can’t keep track of it’s own story:
Biden was not “truth telling”, he was stating a policy change. And it is not clear that Biden is a “power broker.” He is, to a limited degree, currently “in power,” but that is not the same thing.