OPINION:
How to figure out a president who begins his job by throttling our energy supply, then begs foreign tyrants to sell us more oil as inflation roars?
A smattering of insider books and quotes portray him as an unfocused, rambling blabbermouth. Even his former boss, former President Barack Obama, says so privately.
Let’s look at the record. Besides throwing America into an unforced energy crisis in his first White House hours to please billionaire climate warriors, President Biden:
- Immediately caves to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin by reopening a Trump-closed Baltic Sea gas pipeline, then extends the START treaty, which former President Donald Trump had withheld because Mr. Putin was cheating on other treaties. (Mr. Putin, months later, invaded Ukraine.)
- Promises a safe evacuation from Afghanistan, then defends the exit’s deadly chaos that left 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghan civilians killed by an airport terrorist, $7 billion in relinquished American weapons, an innocent Afghan family killed by a Pentagon strike, and an embassy staff running for their lives.
- Opens our southern border to narco-state cartels, now free to traffic drugs and humans into our neighborhoods.
- Proud of himself, Mr. Biden then focuses on winning the 2022 midterm elections by manipulating voters and making up stories about his life. He was arrested in the civil rights movement, he tells a crowd in Georgia. (False.)
- Single-handedly thumbs-up hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off student loans without any congressional OK. Even Nancy Pelosi said he couldn’t do that.
- Depletes our oil reserves designed for a national security emergency so that gasoline prices go down and Democrats can brag.
- Makes abortion access a big campaign issue and underscores the theme with political theater. FBI agents raid the homes of pro-lifers. Post-Roe Supreme Court ruling, the White House also encourages activists stalking justices’ homes.
- Declares the COVID-19 pandemic over when it is not, misleading us on an important health issue.
There are some answers about how his mind works in books written by the people who have watched Mr. Biden up close as a senator and vice president.
Understanding the Afghanistan debacle takes us to Robert Gates. He was one of Washington’s wise men, a Republican who was respected even by the city’s dominant liberal media. Mr. Gates was Mr. Obama’s defense secretary and thus had repeated encounters with then-Vice President Joe Biden.
In his 2014 memoir, “Duty,” Mr. Gates wrote: “Not too many meetings had occurred in the Situation Room before the president started impatiently cutting Biden off. Joe is a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis.
“Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. After one meeting at the White House, [Adm. Michael] Mullen and I were riding back to the Pentagon together, and Mike turned to me and said, ‘You know you agreed with the vice president today?’ I said I realized that and was therefore rethinking my position. Joe and I would disagree on many issues over two and a half years, especially Afghanistan, but the personal relationship always remained cordial.”
Mr. Biden, the former defense secretary wrote, opposed the raid on Osama bin Laden and undercut the military as it tried to increase troop strength in Afghanistan. Mr. Biden and his chief adviser Antony Blinken believed they knew more about counterterrorism than commanders did. In fact, Mr. Biden prompted Mr. Obama at a White House meeting to issue the demeaning “That’s an order” to his military advisers.
“The military can’t be trusted,” and “the military is trying to game you, to screw you,” Mr. Gates quotes Mr. Biden as telling the president, at times using the F-word.
There is another seemingly objective observer who weighed in on Mr. Biden.
Former FBI Director James Comey is pretty much reviled by both parties. He embraced and pursued the Hillary Clinton campaign-sponsored dossier, which we now know was filled with bogus claims against Mr. Trump. Right before the 2016 election, Mr. Comey angered Democrats by disclosing a renewed investigation of Mrs. Clinton and her lax handling of classified information.
Mr. Comey told of the day in January 2017 he briefed then-President Obama on Russian interference in the 2016 election. He portrayed Mr. Biden as annoying and unfocused.
“It was at moments like these when I occasionally caught a glimpse of the warm, brotherly, and sometimes exasperating relationship between Barack Obama and Joe Biden, two very different personalities,” Mr. Comey wrote in his memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.”
“The pattern was usually the same: President Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’ Obama would politely agree but, something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or ten minutes, we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”
In his presidential memoir, “A Promised Land,” Mr. Obama was kind to his two-term vice president.
But his true feelings toward the now-octogenarian president are that of a politician who is a poor manager and simply talks too much.
Mr. Obama told an adviser, according to “The Long Alliance,” by New York Magazine reporter Gabriel Debenedetti, that “Joe Biden is a decent guy, but man, that guy can just talk and talk. It’s an incredible thing to see.” (New York Post reported.)
And there is the well-reported Politico story that quoted Mr. Obama as telling friends, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to F… things up,”
Mr. Biden loves to unleash the F-word. It makes him sound tough. In Florida, the president told a hurricane victim, “No one f—ks with a Biden.” (I think that was really a calculated message to any prosecutor who would bring charges against his son Hunter Biden.)
Mr. Obama’s memoir quotes the vice president as saying, “It’s f—king ridiculous” — his reaction to commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal openly differing with the White House war policy.
Jeff Connaughton, a former Biden Senate aide, wrote in the 2012 book “The Payoff” that the senator would refer to a beleaguered staffer as a “dumb f—k.”
As in, “Dumb f–k over here didn’t get me the briefing materials I needed.”
If anything, President Biden’s moments of profanity, memory loss and overall befuddlement are getting worse as he reaches his 80s. Maybe we will read books about them someday.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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