Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff posts some very interesting paragraphs from Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column where she tries to understand how the withdrawal from Afghanistan got so fouled up. Who knows if she is correct, as an explanation it certainly makes sense. Here is what she thinks happened.
A longtime friend of his once told me Mr. Biden’s weakness is that he always thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. I asked if the rooms are usually small, and the friend didn’t bristle, he laughed.
I suspect Mr. Biden was thinking he was going to be the guy who finally cut through, who stopped the nonsense, admitted reality, who wasn’t like the others driven by fear of looking weak or incompetent. He was going to look with eyes made cool by experience and do what needed doing—cut this cord, end this thing, not another American dead.
History would see what he’d done. It would be his legacy. And for once he’d get his due—he’s not some ice-cream-eating mediocrity, not a mere palate-cleanser after the heavy meal of Trump, not a placeholder while America got its act together. He would finally be seen as what he is—a serious man. Un homme sérieux, as diplomats used to say.
And then, when it turned so bad so quick, his pride and anger shifted in, and the defiant, defensive, self-referential speeches. Do they not see my wisdom?
It is clear that this scenario explains Biden’s reactions, his defensiveness, and his harping on the wisdom of getting out when very few are questioning that choice. It seems he believes that if he hadn’t insisted that we just leave, the sooner the better with essentially no planning, it would never have happened. And of course it turned out to be an awful mess and it ended up in his lap.
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Noonan was a voice of political wisdom for many years, and then Trump came along and she couldn’t abide him. Now that he is elsewhere and, for the time being out of the picture, she may be worth reading once more.
I suspect longtime residents of New York City, which Noonan is, have a different picture of Donald Trump than we out here in flyover country. He was a consequential neighbor, a big fish in their pond, long before we paid him much heed.
They experienced Trump as a blue collar-acting guy with too much money and clout. People with his values and tastes aren’t supposed to be consequential players in NYC society, but he was exactly that. He cast doubt on their preferred view of their own refined tastes and elite status.
