As of Tuesday, Old Joe Biden has been the ostensible president of the United States for 348 days. During 95 of those unhappy 348, however, the pretend president wasn’t even trying to keep up the pretense; instead, he was on vacation. That means that for a whopping 27.3% of his presidency, or whatever it is, Old Joe has been even more absent than he usually is.
According to the National Pulse, Biden had been the alleged president for only two and a half weeks before he first retreated back to familiar ground in Delaware. And while Donald Trump was lambasted by the media (which hated everything he did and hated it even more when he did nothing) every time he took any time off at all, Kay Smythe of the Pulse reports that Biden’s “trips back and forth to his home state for ‘personal time’ have been celebrated by the far-left media. They congratulate the 79-year-old for chasing his dogs around but at least he’s not playing golf.”
By October 2021, Old Joe had fled the sycophantic media and Potemkin press conferences for the more welcoming climes of Delaware no fewer than 25 times. Nor were these working vacations: Smythe reports that “only on one vacation did he take time away from relaxing to do his job, when he visited Dover Air Force Base for the homecoming of the 11 service members killed in a suicide bomb attack in Kabul, Afghanistan.” Those service members were killed due to the catastrophic bungling by Biden’s handlers of the withdrawal from Afghanistan: “The service members were murdered in the terror attack during Biden’s failed exit from Afghanistan.” Even then, the faux president could hardly be bothered and clearly was itching to get back to Matlock: “Biden was mostly noted for repeatedly checking his watch that day, for when he could leave.”
The problem with Biden’s incessant vacationing is not that he isn’t on the job. It is by no means clear that he is on the job when he is in Washington. Biden has more than once made it clear that he isn’t the person in charge. On Dec. 21, he told a press conference: “I’m not supposed to be having this press conference right now.”
Who tells the president of the United States when he may and may not hold press conferences is unclear, but that person certainly exists and is apparently a stern taskmaster. They act as if they’re well aware of Barack Obama’s famous dictum: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up” and are determined to give him as little opportunity to do so as possible. Last June at the G7 Summit, Biden said: “I’m sorry, I’m going to get in trouble with staff if I don’t do this the right way.” At a press conference in November, the Oval Office puppet gave the impression that he was not supposed to take too many questions: “I can take…I’m going to get in real trouble … this is the last question I’m taking.”
Related: The Morning Briefing: Oldest President Ever, But There’s No Adult In Charge
Clearly Biden’s handlers, which many believe consist primarily of Obama, Susan Rice, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain, keep him on a tight leash. The people who are really running things don’t really care if Old Joe is relaxing in the White House or relaxing at his taxpayer-funded walled beach house in Delaware, except for one thing: they can’t pull strings without a puppet. The ventriloquist can’t work without a dummy. Obama famously said in late 2020: “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” That could be Biden’s role — stand-in or front-man for Obama — but if Old Joe weren’t the occupant of the White House, Obama and Biden’s other handlers would be hard-pressed to find a president who would be as docile as Biden, meekly accepting their orders and worrying that he was going to get in trouble for not obeying their instructions to the letter.
Consequently, the vacationing Biden is the ideal president for the political elites today, which may be one reason why they’ve thrown Kamala Harris to the wolves and gleefully watched as those wolves devoured her. If they tell her she will get in trouble if she doesn’t call on the properly scripted people at a press conference, they might not find her as willing to go along as Joe is. In the meantime, Joe will keep on enjoying Delaware vacations. Joe simply appearing to be the president while his handlers run things is just the way those handlers want it.
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