Tuesday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson was critical of President Joe Biden and his administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and how they were proceeding as Americans remain trapped in the Central Asian nation.
Among those in the Biden administration Carlson called out was National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who Carlson mocked for threatening to withhold aid to the Taliban as leverage.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: We’re starting to learn the identities of some of the large, but still own unknown number of Americans in the low hundreds, they’ve assured us, who were abandoned by the U.S. military this week and remain trapped in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. “The Sacramento Bee” has just reported that at least two dozen students enrolled in the San Juan Unified School District in the State of California are stranded somewhere in Afghanistan tonight. No one is certain where they are or how they’re going to get home.
The White House hasn’t bothered to comment despite being asked.
What’s so interesting, the contrast that informs us really is that over the past week, this same administration has overseen the evacuation of tens of thousands of unvetted Afghan nationals, many of whom will now be moved into neighborhoods around the United States and stay permanently. They didn’t seem to encounter any problems in doing this, thanks to meticulous and thoughtful planning Operation Change America Forever came off precisely according to plan. It worked flawlessly.
But a couple of dozen American school kids trapped in Afghanistan? The White House isn’t really interested in what happens to them, so they passed that portfolio to Tony Blinken which tells you how completely unimportant they consider it, quote: “If there’s an American citizen left in Afghanistan,” Joe Biden told us the other day, “We’re going to stay until we get them all out.” Right. He didn’t mean that.
So what’s Tony Blinken’s plan to get them all out? To rescue the American citizens trapped tonight in Afghanistan? Well, as Blinken told us yesterday, the governments of Haiti and the Republic of Congo have sent a strongly worded letter to the Taliban and beware, they mean it. You wouldn’t want to see the Republic of Congo when it’s mad.
That’s the kind of weak it’s been.
Whenever you think we have reached peak insanity, they double down. This afternoon, the supposed President of the United States appeared out of nowhere and decided to speak in public. Did you see it?
How to describe the experience exactly? Weird is just the beginning.
So, first off, for example, Biden announced that the United States is done with Afghanistan forever. We’re gone and we’re not coming back ever. Then Biden angrily announced that we’d quote, “hunt down” something called ISIS- K, which sounds suspiciously like a new line of cosmetics from Kim Kardashian but apparently isn’t. This ISIS-K Biden said may be hiding in Afghanistan, in which case we will hunt them down there in Afghanistan.
So actually, we’re not really leaving Afghanistan, we could be back very soon.
The whole speech was like that. It was disorienting.
At one point, Biden bragged about what a remarkably, really, stunningly and historically successful military and Intelligence operation we have just witnessed, all of us together.
Apparently, Biden is under the impression that the entire United States has lost electrical power and no one has a working internet connection. So, this is what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history with more than 120, 000 people evacuated to safety. That number is more than double what most experts thought were possible.
No nation — no nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and ability to do it and we did it today.
The extraordinary success of this mission was due to the incredible skill, bravery and selfless courage of the United States Military and our diplomats and intelligence professionals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So no nation in history has ever done anything like this. Yes, possible. But he didn’t mean it like that. He is telling us that this was the Berlin airlift, plus D-Day, plus the moon shot, plus the invention of yoga pants. This was a triumph of American brilliance and ingenuity and will.
Fifty years from now, your grandchildren will celebrate Fall of Kabul Day with tears of pride in their eyes. My ancestors did that, they’ll think.
As we said, it was demented, it was literally demented. But over at the White House, they seemed to believe every word of it. They are losing consciousness from huffing their own fumes. Watch Biden continue.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: The bottom line, 90 percent of Americans in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were able to leave.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes. Biden went on to repeat what Tony Blinken told us yesterday, which is that the Taliban will probably allow those remaining 10 percent of Americans to leave at some point, possibly. He didn’t explain why the Taliban would allow this or why we should be certain that they will allow it, in fact he did the opposite.
In the same speech that he praised the intelligence community’s extraordinary success, Joe Biden admitted in the same speech that yes, the Intelligence community, the extraordinarily successful intelligence community completely missed the fact that Afghanistan’s government would fall apart in a weekend.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: That assumption that the Afghan government would be able to hold on for a period of time beyond military drawdown turned out not to be accurate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “It turned out not to be accurate.” The President of Afghanistan who is a college professor, hand-picked by the college professors who run our government, the conspiracy of morons running the world, that guy fled the country in an hour without telling anybody including his handlers at the CIA. They had no idea.
But that was an extraordinary success says Joe Biden. Nothing could have been done to avoid the disaster that you have watched, to avoid the images you’re seeing on your screen right now. That would be the Taliban dressed up as American soldiers checking out the helicopters we left for them.
We had no choice but to leave $90 billion of sophisticated military equipment to the Taliban. We armed the Taliban 20 years after we arrived in Afghanistan to beat the Taliban back to the Stone Age, they are now one of the best-armed militaries in the world, and that was a great success. Why didn’t the Biden administration figure out how to take this equipment with us or at least destroy it? No one has answered that question.
But the key thing is, they are not ashamed by it — at all. In fact, now they’re telling us they want to give the Taliban more aid, direct cash payments. It sounds like we’re making this up. Every night we think, will people believe the script? Yes, because it’s real.
Watch the National Security adviser, the Rhode scholar, Jake Sullivan explain it today.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE SULLIVAN, U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: When it comes to our economic and development assistance relationship with the Taliban, that will be about the Taliban’s actions. It will be about whether they follow through on their commitments, their commitments to safe passage for Americans and Afghan allies, their commitment to not allow Afghanistan to be a base from which terrorists can attack the United States or any other country, their commitments with respect to upholding their international obligations.
It’s going to be up to them, and we will wait and see by their actions how we end up responding in terms of the economic and development assistance.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: You’ve got to think the Taliban are sitting around with their teapot gazing up at CNN from their carpets and thinking, that kid is the National Security adviser for the Great Satan? Maybe it’s not so great. You really think they’d take Jake Sullivan seriously?
Those of us who were born in the United States wouldn’t even consider taking Jake Sullivan seriously for a second. You couldn’t count on that kid to get your Starbucks order right, and he is threatening the Taliban we’re not going to give you more aid. We just gave them $90 billion. They have one of the biggest Air Forces in the region. Right?
So, the Biden administration is not going to admit anything, and the key thing they’re not going to admit is that we just left a whole lot of American citizens including school children in a country we turned over to barbarians with a history of killing Americans. No one is going to admit that.
Instead, the geniuses, the Rhode scholars are going to treat the Taliban like the rest of our allies, which means paying them a lot of your money and telling you that they’re doing what we tell them to do when they’re not.
So, what we’re witnessing is a total lack — a total and profound and obvious lack of accountability on the part of the people making decisions that affect your life and that have ended the lives of many Americans.
This bothers people. It doesn’t matter who you voted for in the last election, that’s not an acceptable system and the people who are bothered most not surprisingly are the ones who just lost their sons in Kabul.
Mark Schmitz had a son called Jared who was killed in the Kabul bombing. He has met with Joe Biden. Here is what he said, quote: “I’m not trying to insult the President, but it just didn’t seem that appropriate to spend that much time on his own son when you’re the one responsible for ultimately the way things went down. You kind of feel like that person should own it a little more.” Yes, you think? Lecturing us about his own son who had nothing to do with Afghanistan, with all respect?
Why won’t you stop talking about yourself for a minute and apologize to the people whose sons you got killed?
Last week, we talked to the father of one of the Marines who was killed in the bombing in Kabul, Kareem Nikoui was his name, that Marine’s mother, Shana Chappell just posted a message for Joe Biden on Facebook, it ended this way, quote: “You turned to walk away and I let you know my son’s blood was on your hands.” Okay, she is a grieving mother, her son was just killed.
Facebook in response censored her. Instagram, which Facebook owns deleted her account entirely, and that’s what happens when you contradict the head of the Democratic Party, that elderly man wagging his finger in your face from the White House telling you how to raise your kids.
What we just saw in Afghanistan was a military triumph. You must agree or we will make you disappear. If you go along with it, you can go on CNN. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEW DOWD, CHIEF STRATEGIST, BUSH-CHENEY 2004 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: He needs to do his job competently and well, which so far I think he has done. It’s proved — I mean, he’s done what nobody thought possible so far on COVID. Obviously, he is faced with a delta variant and trying to make that work better.
I think the Afghanistan thing went way better than most people expected two weeks ago.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: What’s funny is that that guy who has got a track record of failure decades-long is one of the geniuses who put us in Afghanistan in the first place, and then lied to the American public about it for many, many years. His name is Matthew Dowd. He has never apologized for that and said he has doubled down calling anyone who disagrees with anything he or any of the politicians he has worked for, he’s called them unpatriotic.
What makes this all even more nauseating is that the Biden administration appears to agree with it. They are not even self-aware enough to know how badly they have failed. They have no capacity for self-reflection.
As if to prove that, the State Department spokesman just tweeted out a column from Jennifer Rubin, the dumbest person ever to work for “The Washington Post” about what a great job they’re doing. Here is the headline, quote: “The State Department deserves more credit for its effort to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan.”
The column does concede that yes, there are Americans trapped in Afghanistan. Yes, they were abandoned by the U.S. military, which exists to protect them, but it didn’t for some reason, quote: “It is possible some of the 250 might not make it out. Could some Americans face physical abuse? Absolutely.” It’s like Animal House.
Other things we did wrong, sure. But on the flip side, Jen Rubin says, quote: “The herculean effort to extract thousands of Americans after the Taliban seized control of the country should not go unnoticed or unappreciated.” Notice the double negative, the hallmark of the moron.
But it’s not just dumb old Jen Rubin, it’s what the State Department believes. Those are the people The Pentagon now tells us are in charge of rescuing those school kids from Afghanistan.
As Americans wonder how to get home, because they’ve been abandoned, these people are congratulating themselves and that should not surprise us because it’s exactly what The Pentagon has been doing for decades with no repercussions whatsoever.
This is the Secretary of Defense in 2011.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERT GATES, FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: And what you’ve accomplished is extraordinary because over the last year, essentially, you have ejected the Taliban from their — from their home territory. And if we can hold this territory and expand the bubble, then I think — I think by the end of the year, we can turn the corner in this conflict.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, the end of the year would have been, let’s see about well, exactly 10 years ago so, we don’t mean to single out that guy who is probably one of the smarter people to oversee this disaster for the last 20 years, only to point out that this disaster did not start 10 days ago, it started in October of 2001.
“The Taliban was ejected.” If you’re getting the sense that the same people have been reading the same script for two decades, you’re on to something and they’re still doing it right now, today, they’re pretending everything is fine.
Watch as The Pentagon’s top spokesman explains that yes, Americans are trapped in Kabul, but that’s really no different from when American tourists in say the Caribbean lose their passports.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REAR ADMIRAL JOHN KIRBY (RET.) PENTAGON PRESS SECRETARY: It’s not completely unlike the way we do it elsewhere around the world. I mean we have Americans that get stranded in countries all the time and we do everything we can to try to facilitate safe passage.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So let’s say you’re on a water slide in the BVI and somehow you lose passport. It’s kind of like that, if you’re in Kandahar when the Taliban take over. So, you get oily creatures like the one you just saw when institutions are not held accountable for their bad decisions for like let’s say 20 years.
They can say whatever they want, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how absurd and they know there will be no repercussions.
Today, Joe Biden had the opportunity to punish the people who have been responsible for these failures for more than 20 years. Instead, he called the whole thing an extraordinary success. He mentioned his son, Beau, for some reason and after he was done with his prepared remarks, he just walked away.
Enterprising reporters shouted questions and for a moment, it appeared possible that Joe Biden might answer them, he turned back and walked toward the podium then we realized he had just forgotten his little obedience mask, so he grabbed it and walked away.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor