The traditional media seems to have a short memory, but no one has a shorter memory than conservative media. Seizing on the decades-long foreign policy disaster that is Afghanistan, conservatives are trying their darndest to blame President Biden’s administration for being the people who finally picked up the corrupt and incompetent can that has been kicked down the road for three administrations now. The issues that the United States and its allies face now that we have withdrawn from our 20-year occupation of Afghanistan are messy. They fall at the feet of President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, “architect” of the Afghanistan invasion Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But regardless of our foreign policy’s pedigree, Joe Biden is the president now. And not unlike the South American caravans of yesteryear, conservative outlets play video of the human suffering and confusion that surrounds Afghanistan’s changing power dynamics and jack their fear and warmongering volume knobs way up. The hope is that the sounds coming from the Middle East and will drown out the wails of thousands of Americans suffering from a pandemic that has continued to rage out of control, due in no small part to conservative policy impotence. Enter Peter Doocy. Like his father Steve Doocy, the Fox News legacy hire’s job consists of coming up with undercooked headline premises and then asking a question of press secretary Jen Psaki, followed up by an even more fact-free Republican-talking point follow up that he will turn into whatever it is he’s going to report back to Fox News.

Press secretary Psaki has made it a practice to pleasantly humiliate Doocy at virtually every press briefing. Monday was no different.

Doocy began by pointing out that the images Fox News, OAN, CNN and others are showing the world right now of the Taliban include them sporting American weaponry and military clothing. Doocy and others have clearly forgotten that this move by the Biden administration is based on the deal Donald Trump cut with the Taliban. The fact that the U.S. withdrawal was very quickly followed by proof that the last 20 years didn’t seem to change anything in regard to regimes is a failure of our military, our intelligence apparatus, the administrations that allowed it to continue, and the traditional media that generates the recent mania. The last group on that list spent most of the past 20 years of our occupation not covering Afghanistan or investigating how poorly we were doing over there for two decades.

And now, after an administration begins to complete the deal the previous Republican administration struck, and after an administration tries to pick up the pieces of a disaster that was started 20 years ago by one of the worst foreign policy initiatives the planet has ever seen, conservatives want to try and pin some kind of trash ‘soft on terrorism’ label to the Biden administration’s lapel.

On Monday, Peter Doocy, doing his continuously pathetic part, attempted to angle his followup to Psaki by saying that the criticisms of President Biden were due to the fact that Americans have been “stranded” in Afghanistan. So far, the administration has estimated that there were somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 U.S. citizens in Afghanistan the day before the Taliban took control of the capital city of Kabul. This number does not include the many more Afghans who allied themselves over the past 20 years with the U.S. forces, many of whom are also trying to leave the country fearing reprisal from the Taliban. The New York Times reported that as of Saturday, U.S. military claim they have evacuated “about 2,500 Americans” The administration says that including allied Afghans, just about 28,000 people have been flown out of the country.

On Monday, officials told NBC news that the number of people evacuated over the weekend brought up the total number to 37,000. Psaki said Doocy’s use of the term “stranded” was “irresponsible,” saying that the Biden administration has no plans to just turn around now and pretend that there aren’t people that still need to leave Afghanistan. It’s an important distinction that applies not only to Peter Doocy and Fox News but to most of the media outlets in our country. Our foreign policy can only be level-headed if we report on it with some factual and critical understanding of what is happening. 

“I am just calling you out for saying we are stranding Americans in Afghanistan when we have been very clear that we are not leaving Americans who want to return home. We are going to bring them home. And I think that’s important for the American public to hear,” Psaki said. You cannot have it both ways. It is fine to criticize the president for seemingly not knowing how quickly the Taliban would take control of the capital. If you want to criticize the last president for making a deal that put an accelerant on the chances for heightened bloodshed if the U.S. didn’t leave the country when Biden did, you can criticize that. If Peter Doocy wants to investigate our military and the trillions of dollars we have spent in Afghanistan setting up a government that seems to have easily been toppled, please go ahead.

But we are not trying to re-invade and occupy Afghanistan right away; and attempting to turn this transition into an instant humanitarian crisis belies not only the facts but jeopardizes countless peoples’ lives on the ground in Afghanistan.