There’s no masking the titanic failure of Joe Biden’s presidency behind partisan name-calling or spinning the defeats by his sycophants in the media. Joe Biden’s incompetence is on display for all the world to see.
This frightens America’s allies and delights our enemies. At home, some Republicans are calling for Biden to resign, but until Democrats rise up and demand Biden leaves office, those GOP congressmen are just spitting in the wind. And Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to walk off the cliff with Biden come what may.
That’s what makes Biden’s failed presidency so frightening. America has to put up with another three years, five months of an incompetent, possibly mentally impaired man as our national leader. Meanwhile, the world isn’t vouchsafing America any time or space to ride out the storm in peace. There are still threats out there. China is still testing its limits as a superpower, Russia is still pressuring its neighbors and thumbing its nose at the U.S. The Taliban is on the rise, as is ISIS.
The moral of the story is, you can’t keep evil people down unless you sit on them. And, much to our chagrin, we’re discovering Biden can’t sit on anyone.
For all his time-serving in Washington, Biden was widely understood to be a lightweight, a fabulist, a plagiarist, an exaggerating braggart, a walking gaffe machine, a purveyor of malarkey who covered his inch-deep grasp of everything with his Irish charm and his ability to talk fast and at length until the listener had long since lost track of the topic. Biden rarely had ideas of his own, and when he did, they were usually the subject of mockery. His capacity for filling airtime at Senate hearings without actually saying anything was legendary. Yet, as Clarence Thomas and others warned, Biden could also be two-faced, reassuring people with promises in private and breaking them in public.
He could handle the Senate because he’d been there since he was 29, and there are lots of places to hide from accountability as one of a hundred. When Obama made the biggest right decision of his career to take out Osama bin Laden, Biden was the guy in the room saying “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go” because there would be nobody to pass the political buck to if it failed.
In fact, Biden has been wrong about every major foreign policy issue of the last 40 years, including the Gulf War, confronting the Soviets, supporting the Afghan rebels, opposing the surge in 2007, and supporting the 2009-11 withdrawal (a move that was seconded by Tony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, now his secretaries of state and defense).
Biden might, in normal circumstances, have relied on the American and European press, Democratic politicians, and his allies abroad to close ranks against any criticism. But instead, they have come to face what he really is.
Why? Perhaps because the failure is too public and too easily dramatized to ignore. There is a difference between bad, and bad with pictures. For all the American media’s political biases, there is no rule of television more certain than “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Indeed, the media has nothing really invested in Biden. They used him as a stalking horse in their efforts to get rid of Donald Trump. Biden was a convenient strawman to set up and build up as a great alternative to Trump.
But no one had the emotional attachment for Biden that they had for Obama or Bernie Sanders for that matter. This means that as Biden’s cognitive abilities continue to decline, the media will probably not even bother trying to hide it anymore.
It is long past time for people to notice who Joe Biden always was, and who he has become in his dotage. He is a hollow man, incapable of managing a picnic, let alone a war. His credibility, always unearned, is shot. His only real skill is his quick tongue, and it has deserted him. Even his onetime virtues — his old-timey patriotism, his faith in institutions, his empathy for others — are easily discarded as the old man reverts to his base instincts when cornered. Biden must hobble through the remainder of his presidency, if only because the alternative is Kamala Harris, his imprudent choice — or threat — of an heir. But nobody should, any longer, pretend that Joe Biden is fit to lead this nation.
If America could survive a James Buchanan or a Jimmy Carter, we can make it through the Biden years. This nation is more resilient than we usually give it credit for being. But Biden’s arrogant stupidity is making us question everything that makes us an exceptional nation.
It’s not like we haven’t had our faith shaken before. But Biden’s humiliating, chaotic, unplanned withdrawal from Afghanistan tests us in ways we haven’t been tested in a long time.
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