It Never Ends: White House Walks Back Biden's Clarification of an Earlier Misstatement

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

On Monday, Old Joe Biden claimed improbably that none of his recent notorious misstatements were really misstatements at all. But the man just can’t help himself — characteristically, in cleaning up one mess he created another. The White House had to issue yet another “clarification,” this time clarifying what Biden meant when he clarified his statements to U.S. troops in Poland.

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It all started when Biden said to the troops: “And you’re gonna see when you’re there, suh- suh- some of you have been there, you’re gonna see, you’re gonna see women, young people standin’, standin’ in the middle, in the front of a damn tank, just sayin’ ‘I’m not leavin’. I’m holdin’ my ground.’ They’re incredible.”

That certainly sounded as if U.S. troops were going to Ukraine, and the White House issued a clarification, stating that they wouldn’t be going.

Peter Doocy of Fox News then asked Biden, “Are you worried that other leaders in the world are going to start to doubt that America is back, if some of these big things that you say on the world stage keep getting walked back?”

Biden acted as if he had never heard of this happening, asking Doocy, “Th— What’s getting walked back?”

Doocy explained, “Just in the last couple days, it sounded like you told U.S. troops they were going to Ukraine, it sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon, and it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia, and we know —”

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At that point, Biden interrupted with the defiant and preposterous claim that “none of the three occurred.” Doocy, surprised, asked, “None of the three occurred?”

Biden repeated, “None of the three. You — you interpret the language that way. I was talking to the troops, we were talkin’ about” — and here, Biden started enunciating his words very precisely, as if to make sure that the dastardly Doocy didn’t misunderstand him — “helping train the troops in, that are, the, the Ukrainian troops that are in Poland. That’s what the context. I sat there with those guys for a couple hours. That’s what we talked about.”

Doocy then pressed Joe on an obvious contradiction between this new claim and his initial statement. “So when you said, “You’re going to see when you’re there,’ you were not intending to —”

Related: The Media Cheered as Biden Nearly Got Us Into WWIII

Biden interrupted, “I was referring to — with, be with and talking with the, uh, Ukrainian troops who are in Poland.” This was obviously false, as Biden’s initial statement was that American troops would see Ukrainian women standing in front of Russian tanks, and they’re not going to see that in Poland.

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But in his response to Doocy, Biden stated that American troops were helping train Ukrainian troops in Poland, and as it turns out, that wasn’t quite true, either. Gen. Todd Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander, on Monday told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I do not believe that we are in the process of currently training military forces from Ukraine in Poland. There are liaisons that are there that are being given advice, and that’s different than I think you’re referring to with respect to training.” An unnamed Biden administration wonk backed this up, saying, “There are Ukrainian soldiers in Poland interacting on a regular basis with U.S. troops, and that’s what the President was referring to.”

So even in the process of correcting what he claimed was a misinterpretation of his earlier remark, Biden made yet another false statement that had to be “clarified.” In the exchange with Doocy, Old Joe tried to appear confident, competent, in command, and fed up with everyone twisting his words. But his lifelong tendency to lie with absolute brazenness combine his obviously foggy-minded state in his dotage to create a situation in which virtually nothing that he says can be trusted.

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How many international incidents is Biden going to create before his handlers recognize that they’re fighting a losing battle against this old man’s dementia and send him back to his walled beach compound in Delaware? Is only the prospect of President Kamala Harris preventing them from doing so now? Certainly that’s a frightening consideration, as Harris, ill-equipped as she is for the job, might not accept being run by anonymous handlers with the alacrity that Biden has so far displayed. And for Americans, the Biden-to-Harris transition will simply be a matter of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

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