Seems like a nothingburger to me. The U.S. spun the facts in Afghanistan to make it seem like the war was going better? That's not much of a surprise.
What did I say in my opening post? This fits so comfortably with our default assumptions about our rulers that it doesn't rate at news. But newsworthiness is not synonymous with importance. This is a significant story that deserves a prominent place in how we think about ourselves.
Sure, but it doesn't deserve to be labeled as "bipartisan conspiracy to keep us in Afghanistan forever"
Because it's banal? How else should we describe the interminable lies perpetrated through transitions of both executive and legislative power described in this reporting?
Look at what posters like Kingpoleon and G-Mac are writing. Even in the wake of this article, the delusions enforced by two decades of top-down consensus retain fervent adherents. This is still what many people in Washington prefer that all of us believe.
(To digress a bit with a personal note: Having lived through the post-9/11 hysteria that dominated out politics for the better part of a decade, these shared fictions are much scarier to me than the polarization of reality-optional partisans in our current decade.)
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