Far be it for me to carry water for any Presidential candidate (I still hate them all), but some criticism just goes far over the top. Many months ago, Barrack Obama got a lot of heat from the right-o-sphere for pointing out that the high number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan was harming the war effort—a point I quite vigorously defended him on. Several right-ish blogs, including one at National Review Online and even the otherwise-respectable QandO, chimed in by quoting something Obama didn’t say and disproving a point he never made. It was kind of silly.
Something similar seems to have happened again: Barrack Obama made an important point—this time that Iraq has been siphoning people and resources away from Afghanistan—and the right-o-sphere jumped on him like a White House intern. Naturally, none of the criticism makes any sense—as Abu Muqawama notes, ABC’s Jake Trapper does us the courtesy of actually talking to the people involved instead of quoting anonymous sources like NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
But since when have facts stood in the way of partisan hackery?
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust