Gold Star Family Remembers 'Creepy' Meeting They Had With Biden in 2016

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

I wrote the other day that Joe Biden was sociopathic, after he gave his last Afghanistan rant.

When you spend your time checking your watch repeatedly during meetings with the families of the dead that you sent into harm’s way, something is very wrong with you — if you don’t even that much normal empathy to know how wrong that is. On top of that, when you use you own son’s death as a defense mechanism — a kind of emotional blackmail — to ameliorate criticism, something is seriously missing there.

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But it’s not just that, as we saw throughout his repeated rants about Afghanistan. Reality doesn’t matter. People left behind don’t matter. What matters is people understand he is right. He’s going to keep saying the same things, even yelling at us, until we get it.

We saw it during the campaign — he could never take being challenged, would bristle and attack, even calling voters names and, in one instance, challenging a man to go outside. It’s why until last year, when the Democrats desperately needed to rebrand him, he was always dismissed as a fool who talked a lot and couldn’t be trusted.

Joe Biden is just not the kindly, old grandfather and empathy-filled dude he was sold as to the American public. He never was.

Unfortunately, the families of the 13 service members who died in the Kabul airport terrorist attack found that out when they met with him.

In addition to repeatedly looking at his watch, some of the families said that Biden also spoke more about his own son than about their loved ones. Beau Biden served in Iraq but died of cancer after he returned, he was not killed while serving.

Some also described that Biden’s attitude was dismissive of what they had to say. Shana Chappell, Kareem Nikoui’s mother, said Biden rolled his eyes at her and waved his arms when he walked away from her as if to say “whatever.” Mark Schmitz, Jared Schmitz’s father, told Biden to remember his son, “Don’t you ever forget that name. Don’t you ever forget that face. Don’t you ever forget the names of the other 12. And take some time to learn their stories.” He said that seemed to disturb Biden, who bristled at Schmitz’s words, and then claimed that “[he knew] their stories.”

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But that wasn’t the first time that Biden has had problems during meetings with Gold Star families. His first “dignified transfer ceremony” was after service members were killed at another suicide bombing in Afghanistan, this time at the Bagram Airfield in 2016. That meeting, with the family of Army Pfc. Tyler Iubelt, also didn’t go well.

“Well, unfortunately, they’re a 14th-century country, they don’t want us there, they’re never going to change,” Biden said of Afghanistan, according to Charlotte Loquasto, the fallen soldier’s mother. [….]

Biden made his comments, the family said, after the Gold Star mother asked him what could be done to prevent tragedies such as the one that claimed the life of her son, whose wife Shelby had given birth to a daughter just months earlier.

“He’s second in line [to the presidency], he could potentially be our leader any day, and he doesn’t even know why we’re there,” Loquasto said.

That clearly foreshadowed the situation that Biden is now in today, over his views on the country.

But that failure to understand why they were there in Afghanistan wasn’t the even the worst of the meeting.

Mike Iubelt, the father of Tyler Iubelt, described what Biden said next.

Iubelt said he left their conversation “feeling worse” than before.

“He told my daughter-in-law … that she was too pretty for this to happen to her,” Mike Iubelt recalled. “It’s probably a good thing that he was surrounded by Secret Service, probably for both of us, because I’d probably be locked up in jail right now.”

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Loquasto said Biden’s remarks about her daughter-in-law “[were] not comforting, it was creepy.”

Biden has a serious problem.

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