Well, things are changing fast now.

At this point, there is nothing to be gained by any president blaming any other president (there are four of them that bear blame) and each side using the situation to further their own agenda. We dearly wish Biden hadn’t said anything about his predecessor because Obama is one of his predecessors, too.

But everything has changed now. Trump is gloating, and that means Junior’s gloating, it took Eric until this morning to retweet Liz Harrington’s tweet, which is just a papered-over tweet of Trump’s statement. It is all deeply offensive when one hears reports from the ground in Afghanistan from CNN’s Clarissa Ward. From Mediaite:

Ward’s report covered several areas of the city, but one of her first shots was with a group of Taliban fighters gathered outside the evacuated U.S. Embassy. Ward said that the Taliban appears to be trying to portray itself as a non-threatening force trying to establish order, though she noted the major disparity between that and the chaos while hordes of citizens are trying to flee the country.

“People come up to them to pose for photographs,” Ward explained. “They’re just chanting ‘Death to America,’ but they seem friendly at the same time. It’s utterly bizarre.”

If you want to talk about utterly bizarre and cruel (the same reason no one should be playing politics with it here), Ward had to don a hijab to accommodate the new dress code, which tells one all one needs to know to understand who the real losers in this situation will be – women:

After speaking to a number of citizens outside of the Taliban-occupied presidential palace, Ward reminded New Day that loads of people around the city are sheltering in place and refusing to speak out of fear for the Taliban’s new regime. She pointed out that this is especially true for Afghan women who think they’ll be targeted for working as journalists or holding other kinds of high-profile jobs.

The story today is about the people who aren’t out on the streets, who don’t feel safe, who are petrified, who are wondering what the future will bring, who are hiding out. There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them across this city. We can’t see them and they’re not speaking because they’re so concerned, their voices are largely silent. but still when you think of those images at the airport, you have to keep those in your mind. That is the other side of the coin here, the dark reality of the absolute, bitter fear that is consuming so many Afghans in this new, bizarre world.

These women cannot speak, and thus we wish our politicians wouldn’t speak to each other about anything without respectfully taking their situation into account.

Ward led her report for CNN’s New Day by emphasizing how much has changed for the city in just 24 hours. “Certainly the dress code for me has changed,” she said, pointing out the fact that she was wearing a hijab.

What the women wear will be the least of their issues. American men best keep this in mind and STFU for now.

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