 So, since President Joe Biden made the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, he has been blasted by every single mainstream media outlet, nonstop, and there was a part of me that thought, okay, he's gonna succumb to pressure at least minimally, right? He's gonna, at a minimum, move back the withdrawal date because he's getting a lot of pressure and, you know, no president is able to withstand that. There's gonna be a breaking point and there's no way that someone like Joe Biden isn't going to succumb to pressure, but he actually proved me wrong and he defied all of the neocons on television and he's still maintaining the original withdrawal date from Afghanistan, which is pleasantly surprising. So, as Jake Johnson of Common Dreams reports, President Joe Biden reportedly intends to stick with his self-imposed August 31st deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, rejecting calls for an extension from hawkish GOP lawmakers, members of his own party, and European allies. During a Tuesday call, according to the Wall Street Journal, Biden told the leaders of G7 nations that the U.S. is on track to meet the withdrawal deadline and that the Pentagon is developing contingency plans in the case of any delay. The U.S. president's decision to stand by the August 31st deadline provoked immediate howls of outrage from pro-war Republican lawmakers who accused Biden of capitulating to the Taliban's demand for a timely withdrawal even though the Pentagon has recommended adherence to the original deadline, warning that staying longer could pose security risks. On Monday, as Common Dreams reported, Taliban leaders made clear that they would not accept any U.S. effort to push back the withdrawal date and that any extension would provoke a reaction. Despite the pressure from hawks, Biden actually appears to be ending this war. The Daily Posters Walker-Bragman tweeted Tuesday, this is a meaningful foreign policy difference between Joe Biden and his predecessor who didn't pull the trigger on it. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Codepink, said Tuesday that she was glad to hear that Biden is sticking to the August 31st deadline to get out of Afghanistan. So look, he gets credit where it's due. Out of all the presidents so far who have ran on ending the war, Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden is the first one to do that. Now to be fair to Obama, I don't think he actually ran on ending the Afghanistan war, but he did run explicitly on bringing the troops home from Iraq, but he didn't do that. He brought home like a certain number of troops and then claimed that it's over, the war's over, but that wasn't actually the case. Trump ran on pulling out of Afghanistan, pulling out of Iraq, but he didn't actually do it. Joe Biden actually did it and predictably we saw individuals who are part of the Bush era who got us into this mess, defense contractors, the military industrial complex, mainstream media all scream at the top of their lungs, but yet Biden, he held strong and he gets credit for that. Now I think that you can criticize Joe Biden for the way in which he withdrew from Afghanistan. I think that that's fine, but you can't argue with a straight face that withdrawing was a bad decision because if you don't agree with withdrawing then make the case for staying there indefinitely because that's effectively what your position is. Now there's been a lot of lawmakers in both parties who are trying to pressure him to stay longer. So 42 lawmakers signed on to a letter from Democratic lawmaker Tom Malinowski who are basically encouraging Joe Biden to push back the withdrawal date and a surprising person who signed this is Barbara Lee who is the one individual in Congress, the only person who voted against the Afghanistan war to begin with. Now to Barbara Lee's credit, she did actually explicitly say that Biden was correct to withdraw from Afghanistan. So I think that her disagreement with Joe Biden and her advocacy for extending the withdrawal deadline is simply premised on the fact that she cares about getting out all of US citizens and US allies in Afghanistan. But having said that though, I don't necessarily know that extending the deadline is going to do much like it's like a bandit. You have to rip it off and of course you have to get in as many people as possible taken as many refugees as you possibly can. The White House is reporting that they evacuated nearly 60,000 people. So you know, they are making progress and it is really messy and sure, you can criticize Joe Biden. Again, I want to be clear here, you can criticize Joe Biden for the way that he handled this withdrawal, but he absolutely deserves massive credit for withdrawing. He does. He deserves credit. If you're anti-war and you do not give Joe Biden credit for this, then you're just a partisan hack. You're just you're unwilling to give someone who is a Democrat credit for something and I get it. Democrats are bad. I shit on liberals all the time. But when it comes to this, he made a major foreign policy decision that I think is commendable. It's difficult, right? There was no way that there would be a clean withdrawal. So I think that, you know, I don't know how much I would criticize him for the way things transpired. You know, I think that he was a little bit too optimistic to say the least about how quickly the Taliban would take over Afghanistan. He kind of was like in denial altogether, but still he got us out of there. And that's the right decision. And most of the mainstream media has been shooting on him nonstop. And there's only one individual that I've seen or maybe a couple individuals to be fair, but one individual who actually made a powerful case and a concise case as to why this is the right decision. Mehdi Hassan on this program. It's time now for what I call the 62nd rant. Start the clock. One of the most annoying aspects about covering the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan is that the American public support the withdrawal. And those of us who oppose this catastrophic war have been tragically vindicated. And yet you wouldn't know any of that from the debate we're having right now. Our newspaper op-ed pages, our TV screens are filled with people who got it wrong, still trying to lecture the rest of us about what should happen now in Afghanistan. There are the journalists, people in my industry who never covered Afghanistan, never talked about it, helped make it the forgotten war all these years. Now expressing outrage over the ending of it, the top U.S. generals and intelligence officials who falsely told us year after year that we were turning the corner in Afghanistan, that we were winning the war against the Taliban and building an amazing Afghan army and a democratic government. Even now, still insisting we stay just a bit longer, the Bush administration officials who got us into this mess in the first place, the Trump administration officials who signed the damn deal in Doha with the Taliban. Both trying to blame it all on Joe Biden. There's the carping and complaining from politicians on both sides, Democrat and Republican who spent years sending other people's kids to fight and die and what they knew was an unwinnable and unpopular war. So forgive me when I say keep your views on the end of this war to yourself. Personally, I would like a period of silence from all of you if that's all right. And if you do feel the need to comment on the disaster that is Afghanistan, how about starting with the word sorry. He is exactly right. He's the only person that I've seen make this common sense take. Even other progressives who I generally tend to agree with more on mainstream media. Anand Giridharadis, for example, is bringing on individuals who were part of the Bush administration. Nicole Wallace, when these individuals should not be treated as experts when it comes to foreign policy or anything related to Afghanistan. These folks should be shunned and shamed. But that's not what's happening. We have, you know, a media apparatus that takes money from defense contractors. So they don't want to rock the boat too much. And they're kind of not just remaining neutral. They're going in the opposite direction. And they're slamming Joe Biden for this decision because, you know, they want to appease their advertisers or maybe they're all just stupid. I'm not sure it's a distinction without a difference at this point. But the outcome here is good. Biden withdrawing is a good thing. Again, you can criticize it. You can say that he didn't handle this appropriately. You can say that the United States now needs to do a lot to save people who are at risk of being, you know, prosecuted and possibly killed by the Taliban. But still getting out was the only feasible option because staying there indefinitely, that's not something that we can do. So Biden gets credit for that. And I'm glad that he's sticking to his guns here, because it's really difficult when everyone is against you, but he's he's making the right decision.