Has He Lost Jake Tapper?

Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said as the Viet Nam war went south, "If I've lost Walter Cronkite, I've lost the country." Given the statements in the clip from Tapper above, I'm wondering if this isn't now the case with Tapper and Biden.

Tapper is a smooth-running product of the Ivy League assembly line, something I've seen at first hand. He does what he's told; if anything, just a teeny bit extra, but not too much, nothing that would get out of line.

So in going aggressively after Biden (though only in apostrophe, as Biden took no questions) he's doing precisely what his editors have told him to do, or just maybe a teeny bit more to show he's 101% with the program.

This could change at any time. But at the moment, the legacy media is definitely not in Biden's corner.

The internet headlines have had almost no change in the past 24 hours. The most important development is that the Kabul airport has resumed operation.

At least 12 military flights had taken off, a diplomat at the airport said. Planes were due to arrive from countries including Australia and Poland to pick up their nationals and Afghan colleagues.

. . . NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called on the Taliban to allow all those who wanted to leave the country to leave.

Nevertheless, we're talking about at least 80,000 Afghans who will need to be evacuated, and this number is probably wildy optimistic. There's an unknown number of US citizens who've been told to "shelter in place" once it became plain that they wouldn't be able to reach the airport. After three days in hiding, I assume food will quickly become a problem. But that's OK, Jen Psaki has cut short her vacation, and spinning will resume as usual.

One of the more realistic prognostications I saw this morning was from Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a Democrat from Silicon Valley, who said on MSNBC

that relying on negotiations with the Taliban to get people out of the country safely “is the best we can do right now. And you know, we negotiate with our adversaries all the time, and whether we’re willing to define them as adversaries, as certainly, I would, or the new leaders of Afghanistan, our obligation right now is very clear. We need to make sure those people who helped us have a way out. I have constituents that are held up in homes right now, who are American citizens, who were previously interpreters, who have no way to get to the airport right now.”

The problem is that "negotiate" is pretty clearly a nice way of saying "pay the Taliban ransom", which I'm sure they'd agree too, except that getting a firm final price will be a major task, and the result will be further humiliation. According to Josh Rogin in the Washington Post,

“An administration official who was not authorized to speak on the record told me that there are an estimated 10,000 U.S. citizens in the country, with the vast majority in or near Kabul,” Rogin wrote. “Some are residents, journalists, or aid workers who may not want to leave. Most are scrambling to escape. Some are dual nationals or children of Americans who may not have the proper passport or visas, but the State Department has not told them how to fix their paperwork.”

‘The State Department is also dealing with more than 80,000 visa applications for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government or find themselves at risk,” the official told Rogin.

. . . “American citizens’ houses have been ransacked, and they are in hiding because the Taliban are terrorizing and tormenting neighborhoods. That’s happening all over Kabul,” a “senior GOP congressional staffer” told Rogin, noting that their office had been “fielding calls” from desperate Americans left on the ground. “There are a lot of people who are falling through the cracks. [The administration] didn’t have a plan to handle this on a mass scale…For the people in Kabul, they’ve basically said it’s up to them to get to the airport.”

The concern is now that these thousands of Americans could become Taliban hostages.

UPDATE: The UK Daily Mail puts the estimate at 40,000 US citizens in Kabul. In addition,

“We could have done a lot more to help. The administration waited too long,” a military official told Reuters. “Every decision has come too late and in reaction to events that make the subsequent decision obsolete.”

“The source and another U.S. official told Reuters that the administration so badly misjudged the situation that the State Department flew a regular rotation of diplomats into Kabul last Tuesday even as the Taliban advanced toward the capital,” Reuters continued.

As Pentagon spokesman John Kirby put it, the situation is fluid.