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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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Trump's underlings lying to him to avoid implementing orders they didn't like is a clear example of insubordination, but the comment I quoted was specifically about the US government lying to the American people.

We can go to two decades if you like, but I don't think it changes much. It became clear within a few years that Bush's claims of Iraqi WMDs were BS. Nothing since really comes close to that.

I'm not sure what parts of the Afghan pullout would be classified as lies. It was handled about as well is it could have been, with 2 exceptions: 1) the Pentagon predicted it would take months for the Afghan government to fall instead of days, and 2) that one suicide bombing that occurred. #1 was pretty clearly not a lie since it's quite hard to gauge peoples' willingness to fight. The Pentagon overestimated it Afghanistan, and then underestimated it in Ukraine a few months later. Putin also misjudged it in that case. It's a tough thing to get right. Importantly, nothing about the big picture in Afghanistan was ever really hidden from the public. Some officials or generals would come out from time to time and make statements claiming "it's getting better, trust us", but anyone could look at the evidence and see it clearly wasn't. The NYT and other news organizations had a slow but steady drumbeat explaining how bad things were.