A very insistent fan demanded that I spill some tea (or is it “T”? What are the kids spilling theses days?) about Afghanistan. No one will be surprised to find out that I am all for the withdrawal, which arrives about 19 years later than it should have. In fact, were I the Pope of Chili Town in 2001, not only would America never have occupied that blighted land but we would have repaid the Taliban for 9/11 by… going in and clearing that country of landmines.

Those mines (planted by the Russians and sometimes disguised as children’s toys, just to remind you what unbelievable cunts they are) are why so many of the first generation Taliban leaders were missing legs and arms. America and Russia used Afghanistan as a sandbox for their Cold War games, only to make it a home for scorpions.

I have to hand it to Biden: he just delivered a bigger “fuck you” to the Swamp than Trump ever tried to do. Three previous administrations could have pulled the plug on the Afghanistan fiasco just as easily as Biden did, but they all cringed at the thought of being remembered as the president who “lost” Afghanistan, a country America never wanted to begin with. Instead, they shoveled ten Everest’s worth of cash into the pockets of defense contractors while the public abandoned any hope of success or accountability, until finally Joe Biden, of all fukkin’ people, saw that we were just banging ourselves in the head with a hammer.

It has been hilarious to watch the courtiers of the media, both left and right, try to turn the messy conclusion of this decades-long wasted effort into an albatross to hang around Biden’s neck instead of doing what they ought to, which is baking the guy a cake before collectively disemboweling themselves on camera for their own role in letting this absurd spectacle of imperial overreach go on as long as it did. The shock and horror the news has expressed at the quick collapse of the Afghan government is not, after all, their surprise at some unexpected mass offensive by the Taliban, but just out-and-out embarrassment that our entire endeavor was only ever being held together with bubble gum and rubber bands. The media weren’t horrified that the Taliban prevailed, only that they didn’t have the courtesy to finalize their conquest over a six-month honeymoon period so that our country had a chance to memory hole the entire war and move on. Just as with Trump tearing the rubber mask off the prestige of the Presidency, we have once again been gobsmacked to discover that the Empire has no clothes.

Twenty years of effort undone in a fortnight! Remind me: how many trillions do we pay for this fuck-up?