For most of our modern presidencies – at least the past 40 years – White House administrations have scrupulously sought to give the appearance that the nation‘s chief executive was on top of everything, down to the most local story of consequence imaginable.
“I can tell you the president has been briefed on that,” became a common press secretary answer to a White House press corps hungry to be fed the most minute detail because they have the most consequential job in journalism, according to them.
I’ve never fully understood why it matters that a president knows everything about every loud news story across this vast land every day. He’s supposed to be thinking about big things, important things, key decisions no one else can make, grand strategies we’ll need down the road.
The answer, of course, is that it looks good, appearances becoming the most important thing in politics after television happened.
Never mind the actual importance of any event or if a president could actually do anything about it. If he knows about it, then he’s on the ball and on the job.
And urgently telling the world about it makes Washington journalists look like they’re on the job too. And very important.
Which is why it was rather stunning to hear the other day direct via Joe Biden’s own forked tongue that he had no clue about this baby formula shortage until April.
Not one inkling, according to the claims of the former 18-wheel truck driver. When the most breathless crisis in recent history since the last one began unfolding way back in February, and baby-food company executives quickly reported the oncoming shortages to their DC overlords.
Biden said he “became aware of this problem sometime in early April, about how intense it was. We did everything in our power from that point on…I don’t think anyone anticipated the impact of the shutdown of one facility.” [The tainted formula factory recommenced production this weekend.]
Joe Biden professes puzzlement over how Americans fail to grasp the stellar job he’s doing. He hasn’t dared to do a press interview in almost four months since he’s frighteningly awful at making his own case and media does a better job for him anyway.
Americans do grasp, however, the pathetic job he’s doing. That explains his job approval rating now slipping down through the 30s, below every other president at this point in their administration, even the mean tweeter.
This is how we know now that a large portion of Joe Biden’s brain is nonfunctional. No one in their right – or left – mind would pull out an addled teenager excuse, “I didn’t know going 80 in a school zone is illegal.”
This should severely taint Barack Obama’s legacy that he foisted this very old man on our present and future.
That’s because Obama wanted a non-threatening, white VP with long DC experience — never mind how productive the lengthy tenure was. That, he felt, would calm the elite’s jitters over having atop the 2008 ticket a young black pol who allowed a political nobody like Alan Keyes to take 27 percent of the vote in the 2004 Illinois Senate election.
And now, in turn, Joe Biden has stuck us with his own empty VP, a black woman who excels at patronizing audiences to hide her own ineptness. Remember, appearances rule. Because it’s all about how things look, not the longer-range import.
Biden’s biggest problem is his lack of intellect and foresight. He’s a reactive president. And whoever is telling him what to do doesn’t get it either. Worse, everyone in this administration, including the Big Guy, thinks that’s OK.
Everything seems to surprise this president. OMG, the women he’s so fond of sniffing get emotional over the specter of not having food for their babies. Who’d have ever thought?
Gee, we better appear to be doing something. Have the Air Force that’s supposed to be protecting the country instead fly millions of formula feedings in from Europe.
Biden thinks this looks decisive when, in fact, the 46th president had just arranged for the United States of America to become the recipient of foreign aid from Europe for the first time in modern history. All because under his “leadership,” the administration could not foresee the volatility of more empty food shelves, this one for helpless infants.
Joe Biden is always late for everything, except cutting out of town for another long weekend. And not just late for meetings and news conferences.
Remember how he assured us that the first tremors of inflation 14 months ago were just passing blips? Of course, they weren’t. Fueled by his forget-about-tomorrow trillions in new spending, today’s inflation rates far exceed any wage gains. And that’s not Putin’s fault.
In fact, we are now two-thirds of the way to the 13.5 percent inflation rate that scuttled Jimmy Carter’s reelection plans in 1980. C’mon, man!
Biden was shocked to see the Taliban march across Afghanistan so easily last summer. And he was disastrously late to realize that the generals he so distrusts were correct to warn against withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan before evacuating thousands of Americans and their allies.
So, the commander in chief had to send back in three times as many military as he’d just withdrawn. And 13 of them perished for that unnecessary chaos.
And then he took them out again prematurely, still leaving thousands of vulnerables behind.
These poor folks who trusted the United States are now being hunted down — and often executed — by Taliban security forces using the personnel files we also carelessly left behind. As well as billions in sophisticated military gear parked in tidy rows that could have been bombed into uselessness as we departed.
But wasn’t.
We have no idea what drugs they’re giving this casually cruel Joe Biden, who enters his 80s this year like all his party’s House leaders. But after all that, the drugs must be stronger than Ambien to let him sleep at night with whatever remains of his conscience.
And some insomnia should afflict the “watchdog” media there that lets this all slide, as they so blithely let Obama off for going AWOL throughout the Benghazi murders. But Donald Trump’s phone call to Ukraine — Oh, my! — that required impeachment.
So much Biden tardiness. The persistent global supply-chain crisis that he announced was fixed after a couple of photo ops. The mask mandate he said in the campaign would not be necessary, but then was. The severe sanctions on Russia and Russians that might have deterred Putin before his Ukraine invasion. But will not change anything now.
Now that we’ve had some more tragic mass shootings, Biden calls for new gun controls, as he always does after these sad affairs, to no avail. Instead of addressing the real cause: unattended mental illness.
Late last year, apparently using classified intelligence, Biden announced that Putin had decided to invade Ukraine. The Russian did on Feb. 24. But the war was a month old before Biden got around to sending military aid that, months previous, he knew would be desperately needed.
Since then, numerous world and other nations’ leaders, and that includes Great Britain, have visited Kyiv to show support for the little nation that could hold off Russia’s army. Biden sent his wife.
But, by golly, when 5:30 came around last Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden was punctually airborne for another long weekend at his Delaware beach house.
