The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. SOld, boring, a plagiarist, fond of hair sniffing and grabbing the protruding parts of women, and not whatcha call brilliant... or is that an act?...
and his inner circle were in an ebullient mood.
It was Wednesday morning, Aug. 11, and they were basking in the glow of back-to-back legislative wins...
The mood was dramatically different from the celebratory spirit on display just hours earlier in the dining room. "It was a serious moment," recalled a senior official.
Events were growing so dire that the president ordered Austin and Milley to prepare a plan for deploying additional troops to the region,...
But by Thursday morning in Washington, more population centers were falling to the Taliban by the hour, including the provincial capitals of Ghazni and Badghis.
In the Situation Room, Austin was now recommending that Biden send in troops to evacuate the embassy and protect the main international airport in Kabul. Sullivan asked each Cabinet member in the meeting to weigh in. They unanimously agreed.
That was the "oh, shit" moment, said the U.S. official...
"By Friday afternoon, it was clear to me that we were rapidly losing control of the situation at the capital, in the airport, and that the evacuation operation was in jeopardy," Crow said.
"More seriously, our polling was slipping"