Joe Biden Makes a Pathetic Attempt to Achieve Relevance and Claim Credit for the Wuhan Virus Response

AP Photo/John Locher

Few things are more pathetic in public life than an irrelevant politician flailing about trying to seem as though he matters. Hillary Clinton has raised this to an art form in the past months. But #QuidProJoe takes a backseat to no one in the race to irrelevancy. With his campaign stagnating and reduced to ‘live,’ nearly embalmed would be a better description, statements on Facebook where he loses his place and falls asleep, Biden has been further shunted to the side by the Wuhan virus crisis. Now, in an attempt to show President Trump how ‘it’s really done,’ Biden has attempted to interject himself into the management of that travesty.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden is offering to call President Trump to discuss a strategy to combat the coronavirus pandemic rocking the nation, Fox News has learned.

Biden’s offer comes after Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, challenged him to “call the White House today and offer some support.”

The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment on whether the president would be receptive to Biden’s offer for a phone call, or when the proposed phone call between the two could take place.

Biden has been offering advice and warnings to Trump about the coronavirus in media interviews and appearances for months. Wednesday, however, is the first time the former vice president is offering to speak with the president directly.

“Vice President Biden has been extending his advice for months, and he did so again on the air last night,” Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield told Fox News. “As he has said repeatedly, Donald Trump is not accountable for coronavirus itself — but he is accountable for the federal government’s slow and chaotic response to this outbreak.”

“Unfortunately, Trump spent months after the virus was discovered disregarding repeated warnings from his scientific and intelligence experts, and downplaying the threat of this outbreak to the American people,” she continued. “He could have heeded Vice President Biden’s public advice not to take China’s word as they misled the world about their efforts to stop the spread.”

Bedingfield added: “The Obama-Biden administration even wrote a literal playbook for pandemic response, but unfortunately Trump’s administration left it on the shelf. Now we have more coronavirus cases than any other country.”

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In a sane world where Joe Biden was napping by the pudding table with a drool cup suspended under his chin rather than being on the cusp of becoming the Democrat nominee for president, a sense of proportionality and self-awareness would have kicked in and this conversation would only have taken place in Biden’s mind. But this is not a sane world. There is virtually not a true statement in anything that this Bedingfield creature says. It was the Trump administration that began research on a vaccine before the first case arrived in the US. It was President Trump who imposed travel restrictions and removed bureaucratic red tape that was impeding both testing and treatment protocols. The idea that Biden, who has appeared at time as though he was a owned by China, contributed anything of value about China’s duplicity is laughable. The ‘playbook’ that Bedingfiled referred to, as revealed by Politico, is nothing more than a laundry list of potential actions that could be taken in the event of a pandemic. It doesn’t identify decision points for actions or provide any useful material. If a brigade or division operations officer had presented that garbage to the commander he would have rightly had his ass kicked up around his shirt collar.

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Making this worse it that this is the guy who counseled Barack Obama to not carry out the raid that killed bin Laden. This is the guy who former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pointed out had been on the wrong side of every major policy issue for “the past 40 years.”

This is Biden’s play. He’s not in the actual loop for receiving up to date information about what the administration is doing. He isn’t smart enough to use that information if he had it. He’s trying to set up a win-win for himself. On the one hand, he’s trying to position himself as the wise old veteran who is willing to rise above the political fray and lend his experience to the hapless OrangeMan. He knows he’s going to get turned down. He’s counting on it. And then he can say that he predicted every twist and turn remaining in the crisis but Trump would not talk to him. The real win for him would be Trump accepting the call and then Biden taking credit for every success the Trump administration has worked to achieve and blaming shortcomings on them not taking his advice.

 

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