Biden’s mess growing too big to clean up

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2024 (459 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“Now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine who has as much courage as he has determination, ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.” — U.S. President Joe Biden.

The world wasn’t watching a Saturday Night Live sketch. It was the real president of the United States hosting a NATO Summit in Washington.

He was wrapping up his summary of why Ukraine matters. At the end of his prepared remarks, delivered flawlessly with the help of a teleprompter, his job was to introduce Ukrainian democracy’s hero, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  It’s not likely he was reading the prompter, when he said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, President Putin.”

It doesn’t matter that he then rhetorically brought out the mop and pail and tried to Spic and Span it away. He knew and all of us watching knew that it didn’t matter what he did at that summit in the previous three days.

It would all be reduced to a small clip where he delivered a ballistic missile to his credibility and his campaign, confusing the president of Ukraine with the tyrant in the Kremlin, who only days earlier succeeded in murdering five more children — these latest being treated at a children’s hospital in the Ukrainian capital.

It was one of several hospitals targeted in Ukraine by Putin’s mission to strangle Ukrainian democracy. UNICEF says as of May, nearly 2,000 children have been killed or wounded since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began two and a half years ago. The government of Ukraine estimated earlier this year that more than 19,000 children have been forcibly removed, deported from Ukraine to Russia or Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine.

Yes, that is a war crime. Yes, if the world was just, Putin would be a convicted war criminal. And yes the president of the United States mistakenly referred to the president of Ukraine as Vladimir Putin. This happened only two days ago.

It needs to also be documented here that within hours of that blunder, Biden mistakenly referred to his own Vice-President Kamala Harris as Vice-President Trump. At a news conference after the NATO gathering, Biden said, “I wouldn’t have picked Vice-President Trump to be vice-president if I didn’t think she was qualified to be president.” This time he didn’t realize what he had done. So it just hung there like a dead fish.

Biden is not a masochist. But at times he behaves like one.

There is a genuine sadist in the U.S. presidential contest. It’s the former president, Donald Trump.

At a rally in Florida earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Trump claimed Biden had undergone several unsuccessful face lifts, later declaring that Biden had committed the worst crime on TV — he had “bad hair.”

The Times went on to report that Trump riffed on how horrible Biden looks in a bathing suit, and said Trump “suggested that Nancy Pelosi might actually be deteriorating faster than Mr. Biden.”

When it comes to cruelty in the U.S. presidential campaign of 2024, nobody is going to outdo Trump. Like any sadistic personality, he offers up the cruelty deliberately, frequently and enthusiastically.

His current opponent is not known for being cruel to anyone other than himself.

In 2008, when Democratic presidential nominee Obama put Biden on the ticket, making him his vice- presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton’s associates were unhappy. Naturally they felt Obama should have picked her, not only because she had the better resumé. She had done much better in the Democratic primaries that year, knocking off Obama in several of them. Biden entered those same presidential nomination contests, but he never bested Obama or Clinton.

The Clinton campaign, which would have wanted Obama to put Hillary on the ticket, thought Biden was a risky bet because even then, long before he was mistaking Ukrainian heroes for Russian villains, Biden was seen as a human gaffe machine. His propensity for boneheaded mistakes has nothing to do with age. That’s simply who Biden has always been.

But the stakes are now higher. Only weeks ago at a Hollywood fundraiser, Obama put his hand on Biden’s and led him off the stage. Now there are reports he is trying to help Biden get off the big stage as soon as possible.

The Democratic Convention is six weeks away. The polling numbers aren’t inspiring, the big donors don’t want to throw good money at bad, and Biden is running out of Spic and Span.