The media outlets which sold the wars, and sold Biden’s candidacy too, are now whispering that he’s past it.
Source - Daily Telegraph 23/08/21
Joe Biden’s extended honeymoon with the US media is over. Amid the fiasco of the Afghanistan withdrawal, the fact-checkers have turned on him. There will be no turning back.
Most of the American media were so unhinged by their loathing of Donald Trump, and so excited by the prospect of reviving the Ray-Banned glory days of the Obama administration, that they promoted Biden as the ‘normal’ candidate and protected him from questions about his record and abilities. No longer.
The question is, why? It seems unlikely that the pro-Democratic media have had a momentary fit of reflection, let alone conscience, and suddenly abandoned their posts as self-appointed propagandists as precipitately as the staff of America’s embassy in Kabul made for the helicopters.
The answer may lie closer to home. In withdrawing from Afghanistan, Biden, like Donald Trump before him, has crossed the dangerous forces that America’s leaders have failed to contain ever since the 9/11 attacks. Not the Taliban – the U.S. seems to be getting on surprisingly well these days with them – but an even more intractable foe to liberal democracy: the Blob.
The Afghan and Iraq wars have exposed the folly of the lucrative Washington groupthink that ties together arms manufacturers, bureaucrats, think tanks and the military with the elected officials who have to bring home the pork. Obama’s team called this marriage of imperial vanity and good old-fashioned venality “the Blob”. The Trumpers called it “the Swamp”. The think-tankers, who are part of its machinery, and the academics, who would love to be part of it, call it the “Washington consensus”.
American media love to talk the old speaking-truth-to-power line, but since 9/11 they’ve mostly been in a more comfortable line of work: speaking on behalf of power. The media volunteered as click-happy patriots in the struggle for freedom, and they’re still in the field. In the halcyon early days of George W. Bush’s empire, a career could be built on a bout of embedding, a book deal and retirement on the benches of CNN. And what could be better for the ratings than a permanent emergency and a war without end?
Wars cost even more than welfare states, but the sales pitch for the War on Terror came for free. The media, tamed by a steady drip of tidbits, fake news and mock-exclusives, became an efficient publicist for the panic of the day, and helped America to a slice of Nigerian yellowcake with its cup of morning Joe.
America’s cable shows and papers in recent days feel like a TCM re-run. The talking heads who sold the wars in the early 2000s are back, explaining why withdrawal is strategically mad, and that we’re only a drone strike or two away from victory.
The nuance – withdrawal is overdue by about nineteen years, but Biden’s handling of it has been chronically inept – is lost. The Blob always fights to win, at least on its home turf. Biden might have signed off on the Blob’s foreign adventures, but now he’s on the wrong side – the side of the American people, who are sick of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And so the outlets which sold the wars, and sold Biden’s candidacy too, are now whispering that he’s past it. This is an impressive piece of speaking truth about power while covering your collective posterior, for Biden has been blatantly past it for some time, and the media devoted considerable energy to covering for him.
Meanwhile, Biden’s VP Kamala Harris has gone from boasting that she was the last person in the room when Joe signed off on the flight from Afghanistan to being nowhere to be seen. Actually, that isn’t fair. Kamala Harris has gone from near-total invisibility on the southern border, where the Biden team sent her to deal with the migrant crisis, to high visibility if you happen to be in Vietnam and Singapore, which is where she now is. The second Saigon in Kabul is so embarrassing that it’s safer to be in the first Saigon.
While Harris plays it cool, Biden is getting the heat for Afghanistan. There’s time yet, but the media’s turn against Biden has started the countdown towards that eventuality that no one apart from the Second Husband, the Blob, and the Veep herself are looking forward to: Kamala Harris’s shot at the presidency.
Dominic Green is the deputy editor of The Spectator’s world edition.
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