NYT’s Maggie Haberman Retweets Trump Attack Ad Showing Afghans Falling to Their Deaths — Calls it Fair Game for ‘Debate’

Tommy ChristopherAug 18th, 2021, 11:31 am
 

Donald Trump Maggie Haberman 8-18

New York Times Washington correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman disgustingly retweeted a Trump attack ad that features footage of Afghan people falling to their deaths, and falsely claimed President Joe Biden invited comparisons of the Afghanistan with the fall of Saigon.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. posted the attack ad, which showed horrific images of panicked Afghan people falling to their deaths after they clung to a plane that took off from Kabul, with the caption “Worse than Saigon.”

It is one thing for a news website to publish such images, with clear content warnings, after agonizing over the decision. To use them in a political attack ad is disgraceful, if not surprising when it comes to the former First Failson. In that context, the lesser offense of a facile and inaccurate historical analogy barely merits a mention.

What is surprising is that a widely-respected correspondent from the gold standard of print journalism would repost that same video, endorse a “debate” over that fallacious analogy, and falsely assert that it was Biden who “set up the parallel.”

Setting aside, for the moment, the propriety of a reporter retweeting any attack ad, let alone one that exploits footage of actual human beings dying onscreen, and legitimizing it as a topic for “debate” — Haberman’s assertion is false.

President Biden didn’t “set up the parallel,” a reporter did, and literally used those words. From Biden’s July 8 press conference:

Reporter: Mr. President, some Vietnamese veterans see echoes of their experience in this withdrawal in Afghanistan. Do you see any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam, with some people feeling —

Biden: None whatsoever. Zero. What you had is — you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy — six, if I’m not mistaken.

The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.

Haberman seems to know the answer to her puzzler — “whether this moment in the country is actually similar to Vietnam or if the images are what are similar” — because it’s an obvious one to a person with a minimal command of the facts.

Obviously, the images are powerfully and uncomfortably evocative of the scenario Biden ruled out, but Haberman knows there’s a world of difference between the two situations. Don Jr. has no duty to perform that sort of analysis, but it is literally Haberman’s job.

In follow-up tweets, Haberman defended herself, partially on the basis that she had dismissed the comparison earlier on CNN — an odd defense to say the least — but in fact, she only dismissed similarities to conditions in the US.

That’s to say nothing of Haberman’s other duties — to point out how disgusting the ad is and not retweet it, to point out that the dick making the attack literally bragged about how he was guaranteeing that the Taliban would take over immediately and then become terrorist-killing juggernaut, that the operation is still underway and could still result in a safe evacuation of our allies that tragically eluded those in Vietnam.

Haberman is just one example of many journalists who are taking this as an opportunity to show they can jump all over Biden just as well as they did Trump. If Biden erred, it was in not slaking their insatiable thirst for an explicit admission of failure, rather than his vociferous defense of the withdrawal and measured admission that the rapidity of the Aghan government’s collapse took him by surprise.

The images that Haberman wants to “debate” will certainly linger, but ultimately, President Biden will be judged by how well the remainder of this evacuation is carried out, and whether he can make good on the promise to get all or most of our allies to safety. And whatever happens, Trump won’t need Haberman’s help getting his attack ads out, though he’d certainly welcome it.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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