Biden's Bungled Retreat

As President Biden's botched withdrawal plan goes from bad to worse, the White House is in full damage control mode. The president who intended to continue his summer vacation was forced to address the nation again over the weekend.

Yet every time Biden speaks, he makes it worse. And administration officials don't even seem to be talking to each other. For example, Biden has repeatedly justified his hasty retreat by claiming that Al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan. He's wrong. 

The Pentagon contradicted Biden's claim Friday afternoon. Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said, "We know that al-Qaeda is a presence, as well as ISIS, in Afghanistan. And we've talked about that for quite some time." 

Over the weekend, after telling Americans to get to the airport as quickly as possible, U.S. officials were forced to tell them to stop going to the airport because of a potential terrorist threat from ISIS. 

In his remarks yesterday, Biden said, "We have a long way to go, and a lot could still go wrong." Well, it looks like it just did. Gunmen reportedly opened fire at the Kabul airport's north gate this morning, killing one Afghan security officer and wounding three others. 

The bottom line is that it's almost impossible to come up with a worse way of getting out of Afghanistan, but Biden keeps digging his heels in. The worse it gets, the more he insists he's right.