Wednesday on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, CNN political commentator David Axelrod correctly noted that President Joe Biden did not get the intelligence right on the military withdrawal from Afghanistan and that he should admit it.
“Obviously, one thing you could have done was get the intelligence right. There were clearly screwups here,” Axelrod noted in an understatement. “They’re not his personal screwups, but they’re on his watch. So as I said the other night when he made his original speech, sometimes you just have to say we screwed up, and we’re going to fix it. We’re going to figure out why this happened, and it’s my responsibility. I think people would respond well to that. For some reason, I thought he was taking another bite at the apple today in this interview and that he’d come back and he’d do the part that he didn’t do the other night. Instead, he dug in more.”
He added, “I do think it’s changed people’s opinions. It’s hurting him. You can see it in polling. The polling averages for the president over the last week have taken a pretty significant drop. I think it would be less bad if he owned up to the fact that, no, this hasn’t gone the way we expected, and we’re going to accelerate what we are doing, and we are going to make up for lost time.”
Axelrod is wrong. Even Biden’s fervent supporters in the sycophantic press now seem unwilling to absolve him of blame for the Afghanistan disaster. In any case, it’s too late for Biden and his worthless military leadership, who have chosen to simply retreat into denial and defensiveness.