[imagesource: Newsmax]

There’s very little middle ground when it comes to American cable news coverage.

The likes of CNN and MSNBC clearly lean left, and then you have Fox News which is, at times, totally divorced from reality.

If you keep going to the right – way, way right – you get ‘news’ outlets like One America News (OAN) and Newsmax.

The latter regularly touted lies about the US presidential election, telling viewers that there had been widespread voter fraud when no such evidence existed.

It still doesn’t.

Newsmax does draw the line at the rantings of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, but their coverage of all things Trump-related remains comical.

Take for example this exchange from last week, when Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield was interviewing Iraq War veteran Joe Saboe.

Saboe has been working to help people flee Afghanistan following the Taliban’s takeover of the country.

There’s no denying that the withdrawal of US troops from the country has been a disaster, and President Joe Biden must shoulder some of that blame for that.

To set the clip up, here’s The Wrap:

Stinchfield said, “I can tell you, this didn’t happen under President Trump… He wanted out of Afghanistan real bad. He was real frustrated not being able to get out but he didn’t pull out because he knew this would happen.”

…Saboe didn’t quite agree, saying the situation in Afghanistan predated Trump’s time in the White House and veterans “followed this closely from multiple administrations.”

“We know that Trump’s administration’s efforts here were fairly weak, that they were trying to limit the number of people that would get out and so there was coordination,” he said before Stinchfield cut him off abruptly, citing being “low on time.”

It’s pretty bizarre viewing, with Stinchfield really losing the plot from around the 45-second mark:

Watch Newsmax host cut the feed and scream at a veteran guest for offering a mild critique of Trump pic.twitter.com/xozk1f5kzH

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) September 16, 2021

Doesn’t have the time to let Saboe finish, but somehow finds the time to go off on his own rant.

Stinchfield must have missed the part where Trump struck a deal with the Taliban in February 2020, under which the United States agreed to withdraw in return for Taliban promises not to harbour terrorists.

Consider this, via The New York Times:

Some former senior Trump officials now call that agreement fatally flawed, saying it did little more than provide cover for a pullout that Mr. Trump was impatient to begin before his re-election bid. They also say it laid the groundwork for the chaos unfolding now in Kabul.

“Our secretary of state signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban,” Mr. Trump’s second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said…

“This collapse goes back to the capitulation agreement of 2020. The Taliban didn’t defeat us. We defeated ourselves.”

Ultimately, from George W. Bush onwards, every single US president (Biden and Barack Obama included) has failed dismally with regards to the war in Afghanistan.

The Netflix docuseries Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror does a good job of explaining why this 20-year ‘war on terror’ that has been a catastrophic failure from the start:

[sources:thewrap&nytimes]