Headlines Don’t Match Effort In Afghanistan

Politico: “The president and his team have taken it on the chin for the past week. Now, amid a massive evacuation effort, they want kudos too.”

Playbook: “It’s true that until about Tuesday, there was a noticeable gap in coverage between the pace of evacuations at the airport in Kabul and the hair-on-fire headlines — in fact, 10 days, no U.S. casualties and 70,000 people evacuated is an impressive logistical feat. On the other hand, as the reporting of the ‘Afghanistan papers’ revealed, Americans have been lied to about almost every aspect of the U.S. intervention for 20 years, so we can forgive the media for some skepticism about the official story here at the end.”