-As the US scrambles to withdraw from Afghanistan
and complete the evacuation, the same Republicans who
supported Donald Trump's deal with the Taliban to withdraw
are now shamelessly piling on and trying to erase history.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
♪♪
In order to claim that what's happening
in Afghanistan right now came out of nowhere,
you have to willfully ignore or erase 20 years of history
in which the Washington elite
repeatedly lied about how the war was going,
which is exactly what so many in the media,
and especially the right-wing ghouls
who got us into this mess --
the Karl Roves and John Boltons of the world
have been doing.
Donald Trump himself, the guy who negotiated the deal
with the Taliban to release prisoners and withdraw by May,
has been on TV claiming
he would have handled the situation better.
And for some reason,
he's going out of his way to compliment the Taliban
on their fighting and negotiating skills.
-Taliban, great negotiators.
Tough fighters, great negotiators.
The Taliban, good fighters.
I will tell you, they're good fighters.
We have to give them credit for that.
-No, you don't.
You don't have to give the Taliban credit for anything.
They're the Taliban.
It's especially insane to call them good negotiators
like they're trying to talk down a used car salesman.
"This car has a lot of miles on it,
but it runs like a champ.
Give it to me for free or I'll murder your family."
"Oh, alright. Tough, but fair, Mr. Taliban.
Let me talk to my manager. And he's dead.
I'm going to get you the keys."
Does Trump think
if he's nice to the Taliban, they'll hang out with him?
"Great fighters, great negotiators
and great, great golfers.
Abdul Ghani Baradar, horrible guy,
but I saw him eagle a par 5 from the rough.
We played in a foursome with Brooks Koepka
and Bryson DeChambeau,
and you want to talk about warring factions.
Those two do not like each other."
I mean, thank God this idiot wasn't the chief of police
in San Francisco during the Zodiac killings.
"Bad guy. Nasty guy.
But you got to give him credit for one thing --
beautiful, beautiful penmanship.
And I love those little puzzles.
Reminds me of the "New York Times" spelling bee.
We love the pangram, don't we, folks?
Don't we love the pangram, Trump voters?"
If you don't know what the pangram is,
you don't want to know.
It'll destroy your life. Just -- is an evil game.
Yesterday, I spent 11 hours on it
and then I finally got Genius, and when I told my kids,
they said, "We haven't eaten yet today."
And then there was Trump's former
White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
Oh, pangram.
Nope. Never mind. I didn't use the F.
Who went on Fox yesterday and made it clear
she's fully inhabiting an alternate reality.
-Look, when President Trump was president,
you didn't see crisis after crisis.
You just didn't see it.
I shudder to think about
what Covid would have been like under Joe Biden.
-Well, she's right about one thing --
you didn't see crisis after crisis
if you were watching Fox.
More than 400,000 Americans died from COVID under Trump.
Also, he got it,
and his rallies and White House parties were superspreaders.
Trump personally helped spread more disease
to more people than a community swimming pool
filled with water from the East River.
"Alright, everybody out of the deep end.
We got another mobster.
Give me the long pole thing with the hook on it.
You kids want to see what happens
when you sing to the feds?"
Trump's entire presidency was crisis after crisis.
His presidency was such a disaster,
when it started, I had an audience,
and now we cut to Wally so often,
he's getting offers to do Scorsese movies.
-Just one thing, Marty. I don't curse.
[ Laughs ] No, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm just [bleep] with you, buddy.
-Take the sunglasses off.
To say Trump didn't cycle through crises after crisis
is to ignore that much of his inner circle got indicted,
his cabinet had, like, half a dozen corruption scandals.
He praised Nazis, kidnapped migrant children,
fired or tried to fire the people investigating them,
got caught paying hush money to a porn star,
incited a violent insurrection to overthrow an election,
helped Saudi Arabia cover up a murder,
single-handedly caused the longest government shutdown
in American history,
and told the Boy Scouts a story
about yachts and New York parties.
-When I was young,
there was a man named William Levitt
and he was a very successful man,
and he went out and bought a big yacht,
and he had a very interesting life.
I won't go any more than that because you're a Boy Scouts,
so I'm not going to tell you what he did.
Should I tell you? Should I tell you?
[ Applause ]
Oh, you're Boy Scouts, but you know life.
You know life.
-That's a thing that happened.
A bunch of 12-year-olds who wanted to learn,
I don't know, about knots,
and he's up there saying,
"I don't know if you give out badges
for having threeways and blowing rails,
but if you did, you would have run out in the '80s.
You're Boy Scouts. You know."
Look, I'm not saying
Joe Biden doesn't screw up or make mistakes.
He does.
Watching him take questions from reporters
can feel like watching the grounds crew
roll out a tarp in a hurricane.
Don't worry. They got it. They got it. Oh! Oh, God!
Ohhh.
The tarp just swallowed Mr. Met.
Of course, based on what's been happening
at Citi Field recently,
I think Mr. Met would happily embrace
the sweet release of death.
"We're going to get you out of there, Mr. Met!"
"Leave me to die."
So, Biden certainly has made mistakes.
It's not like the withdrawal and evacuation have been flawless,
even if it's the right thing to do.
Even if the chaos was inevitable
after 20 years of a failed quagmire
the foreign policy establishment repeatedly lied about.
For one thing, the US should evacuate and grant asylum
to any vulnerable Afghan who wants to come here, period.
A community organizer helping to evacuate vulnerable Afghans
wrote in "The New York Times" yesterday,
"...we're coordinating on different platforms
and languages, often all at once.
We're figuring out what Taliban checkpoints to avoid
and what gate at the airport is the most accessible, if any are.
We're raising money, millions of dollars overnight
to charter planes.
We're endlessly compiling spreadsheets with information
about Afghans who are under threat from the Taliban.
We're doing this because the American government isn't.
That's inexcusable."
Shouldn't be on volunteers
and human rights activists alone to figure out
which gates are most accessible in Kabul,
since it's not even an easy task at LaGuardia.
At LaGuardia, there are no gates.
You just walk onto the tarmac
and hail a flight the way you would a cab.
I swear, one time I printed out my boarding pass
for a LaGuardia flight to Los Angeles
and it told me to go to Gate 65 in Terminal Z
near the haunted Cinnabon.
I should note,
we have to get our LaGuardia jokes in while we can,
because they're doing a major renovation
that it looks like it's going to be pretty nice,
which sucks, because LaGuardia is a perfect comedy word.
It's the Kalamazoo of airports.
And yesterday's pangram.
I'm starting to think the crew is not doing the spelling bee.
[ Laughter ]
-Nonetheless, getting out is the right thing to do,
and Americans support it.
In fact, Americans have wanted us
to get out of this war for a long time.
Polls have shown that as many as 73% of Americans
want it to end, 73%.
Part of the problem is, for years,
the media has all but ignored Afghanistan.
But you know who wasn't ignoring the war?
Defense contractors.
The Costs of War Project at Brown University
estimates that since invading Afghanistan in 2001,
the United States has spent $2.313 trillion on the war.
And "The Intercept" calculated that $10,000
invested in defense stocks when the Afghanistan war began
is now worth almost $100,000,
because defense stocks outperformed the stock market
overall by 58% percent during the Afghanistan War.
Now, you don't have to know much about the stock market
to know the defense contractors profit from war,
which is why the Washington elite are freaking out --
the same reason your weed dealer freaked out
when they legalized it.
"What am I supposed to do? Get a job? Sell coke?
Oh, that's it. I'll sell coke."
Also, I should clarify,
I have no idea how the stock market works.
All I know is my broker calls me once a day
and tells me how my portfolio's looking.
[ Cellphone rings ]
Oh, that's him now. Hold on.
Hey, how's it looking?
[ Gasps ] You invested in the Mets? When?
Three weeks ago?
What money did you use?
You sold our LaGuardia stock?
That's about to go sky high!
So the media has ignored Afghanistan for years
and elite Washington has lied to us about it,
as documented by
"The Washington Post's" blockbuster reporting
on what we're known is the Afghanistan Papers,
in which government officials
secretly admitted "we clearly failed in Afghanistan"
and "we didn't know what we were doing."
The US occupation of Afghanistan began 20 years ago,
and for basically that entire period,
our government has shielded us
from the reality of what was happening.
George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
even went so far as to make grandiose predictions
about how the war would be viewed by history,
despite what they really knew was happening behind the scenes.
-The history of military conflict in Afghanistan,
it's been one of initial success
followed by long years of floundering
and ultimate failure.
We're not going to repeat that mistake.
-What has taken place in the last four years in Afghanistan
is an historic achievement.
And the people who've been involved in it
can be enormously proud,
and history will look back on it
as having been an amazing accomplishment,
-I'm honestly not sure if these guys were
ever right about anything, ever.
Like, these guys were so wrong about so many things.
There's a good chance Don Rumsfeld
wasn't even his real name.
It sounds like an alias
Dick Whitman would use to get a job at Raytheon.
Suffice to say, history will not look back on it
as an amazing accomplishment.
If anything, I think it's much more likely that
when they get to the chapter on Afghanistan in future,
textbooks will just say "file not found."
Of course, in the future, there probably won't be textbooks.
You'll just get all your history downloaded in a chip
that you put in your brain.
Okay, activate the chip.
[ Laughs ]
He said what to the Boy Scouts?
Hey, it's one thing to be wrong.
I make mistakes all the time, as anyone who watches
our Emmy-nominated corrections segment will tell you --
voting now open.
But what the Bushes and Rumsfelds
and Boltons and Roves did was so much worse,
because they lied and covered up the truth
while they were cheerleading and making all of those
confident predictions in public,
in private, we now know
they had no idea what the [bleep] they were doing.
Despite declaring the war an amazing accomplishment,
Rumsfeld repeatedly wrote panicked memos
about the situation in Afghanistan.
In 2003, he wrote,
"I have no visibility into who the bad guys are."
In 2002, he ended one memo
by writing the word "Help!" with an exclamation point.
And two months after the US invaded,
Rumsfeld wrote to an aide, "Please give me a piece of paper
showing me the languages spoken in Afghanistan."
Feel like it would have been preferable
to get that information before invading.
That's like an old Western where the marshal
kicks in the door of a Mexican cantina.
"Hey, everyone, throw your guns on the ground.
Oh, right. Hmm. Oh, boy.
Todos...
armas?
It's been awhile, guys."
Elites watched and lied to us for 20 years about the war,
telling us it was historic achievement
and that we were close to victory,
when in reality, they knew
and admitted in private that it was a disaster.
And now the right-wing ghouls who got us into this mess
are opining shamelessly on cable news about
how they would have handled the situation,
and the pro-Trump crowd that negotiated
and celebrated the deal with the Taliban to withdraw
are hypocritically piling on Biden for following through.
But then again, you probably
expected that would happen, because --
-You know life. You know life.
♪♪
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