Remember how cheap and good coke was in the 80's (or so I've heard).

Bush!

Coca Cola or cocaine? Cocaine had to be the only product in which the price hasn’t increased since the 80s.

But overall quality down.

I don't know about cocaine, but that New Coke experiment in the 80's was terrible.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/05/polit...ort/index.html

Yea, never saw this coming. Maybe someone should wake up Joe and let him know that Americans are now hostages in Afghanistan.

The Taliban is claiming that they just need to be recognized by the US gov't per some pre existing agreement.

What the **** are you talking about and who the **** would negotiate an agreement with the Taliban?

I'm talking about what the Taliban's claim is regarding the hold-up of those planes obviously.

And obviously things have been negotiated with the Taliban-- by the US gov't even.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...out/ar-AAO7hjL

But Eric Montalvo, a former U.S. Marine Corps officer and attorney heading coordination for three of the charter planes in Mazar-e Sharif, told The Washington Post that it’s not the Taliban that’s barring the planes from flying.

“This has nothing to do with the Taliban,” he said. “It has to do with the State Department.”

A group of independent donors and organizations chartered three flights for at-risk Afghans and dozens of U.S. citizens, he said, and cleared the flight manifests with the State Department. Qatar issued the flights’ diplomatic clearance, and the U.S. military granted the flights permission to land at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

“However, according to a preexisting agreement, it is the U.S. State Department that must tell the Taliban that the flights are authorized. To date, this has not happened,” Montalvo said in a statement. Montalvo insists that “the immediate departure of the planes is now entirely within the State Department’s control.”

Whether the is true I obviously have no idea. But you're definitely wrong if you think that there haven't been negotiations with them.

White House officials have openly described negotiations and agreements with the Taliban. I really don't know what that is even in dispute.

In case you’re serious and want to know

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...vacuate-506957


We made a deal with the Taliban for security at the airport in exchange for leaving

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...478_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/u...rtnership.html

It sounds weird, but it's not that rare that enemies are forced to cooperate. You can have common interest, even if you ultimately want the other side to be defeated. Realpolitik is a strange beast.

I predicted recognition and negotiation in the Afghanistan thread. I'm not going to say it was a prediction I had full certainty in, but it wasn't that hard to see some common interest. The US had an interest in avoiding battle to reduce casualties, make evacuation feasible and avoid an even worse public relation disaster, the Taliban had an interest in maintaining a semblance of order in order to appease future strategic and diplomatic partners and keep public support. At least until the cameras were turned off.

Of course, as these things go, it would have been a shaky deal and it is a sign of how hairy things were that this is what the situation hinged on. I think we discussed briefly in the Afghanistan thread that the Taliban isn't "one thing", but a collection of councils, some competing. That means deal-making will always be a gamble.

After-the-fact it would seem it worked out well. However, it would be a mistake to judge it on that alone.

TD I was wrong about the head Taliban guy apparently he’s very much alive and will make a public speech soon. If that never happens then the virus definitely got him

It would seem you could make a Kardashian-style reality drama about these figures.

But if we extrapolate, we get two scenarios. One that there is intelligence and nobody is leaking, two is that we are largely clueless about inner workings of the Taliban leadership and their partners. I fear the latter is the reality.

Once the Trump regime cut out the Afghan gov't and began exclusive negotiations with the Taliban they locked in the US on that path and set the seeds for the dissolution of the Afghan gov't by recognizing the Taliban as the true power in the region.

What we’ve seen unfold over the past few weeks in Afghanistan is the legacy of the Trump cabinet and particularly Pompeo. Probably haven’t seen such an incompetent and corrupt administration since maybe Harding or as far back as Grant.

Seems like the brits are angry at Biden

https://www.yahoo.com/news/british-m...011700078.html

Aside from that article I saw some others early in the week bashing biden

The Trump admin locked Biden in on this calamitous path and knew and bragged about it.

For Biden to try and undue it and then for the Taliban to react with more US killings would have been perceived and spun as 100% on Biden. 'All they had to do was honour the deal' would have been the refrain.

The only real path Biden Admin had was to foresee better the pitfall Trumps Admin left in the road and defuse some of them. On that they failed. Trump left them on a path with many bombs set to blow up and they did not find them all and some serious bombs went off.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/08/terr...overnment.html

Thanks Joe….

We probably need our experts on right-wing propaganda to weigh in on this one.

Don’t need any propaganda here, just common sense. World leaders agree that Joe has made the world a more unsafe place.

They are welcome to take their limey asses right back in there if they want to play empire again.

I think Grover is Joe6pack

Their "limey asses" were only in there because your country invoked the NATO treaty. Pretty sure that if you tried that today, every NATO member would tell you to gfy.

We've been there for 20 years.

If we haven't defeated the threat by now, we aren't going to.

Period.

God, you guys love to watch that war on TV but it's an expensive habit.

Media is super right wing warmongering so ofc they will go after Joe for literally the only good thing he's done. And ofc right wing bootlickers will lap it up.