Joe Biden will soon have nowhere to hide
America is waking up to what anyone paying attention during the election campaign knew was Biden’s biggest problem, the taboo topic of his cognitive fade-outs, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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For some reason, comedians are struggling to parody Joe Biden. According to The Washington Post, the reason has nothing to do with liberal bias.
It is that Biden is so “self-effacing” and his “pleasantly boring presidency has been a welcome return to normality.”
That’s one way to look at the rapidly accumulating crises besetting the nation, especially on the southern border.
More likely, comics are at a loss because the president already is a walking, talking parody of himself, with embarrassing gaffes and senior moments piling up, despite the best efforts of his handlers to keep him out of sight.
Now that he is president, Biden’s befuddlement and the opaque nature of White House decision-making is making voters nervous. Readers are writing in to ask who the hell is running the joint.
Upper West Sider Jay Cummings is one reader who has no problem seeing the dark humour in a bleak situation.
“Hey, did you see Biden in a hardware store the other day?” he writes.
“The owner asked, ‘Could I help you?’ and Biden said, ‘Yes, I have a loose screw.’ ”
Boom boom. SNL should give him a job.
Kidding aside, America is waking up to what anyone paying attention during the election campaign knew was Biden’s biggest problem, the taboo topic of his cognitive fade-outs.
Whatever the cause, the pandemic gave him cover, but now that vaccines are kicking in and herd immunity is on the horizon, the oldest president in history soon will have nowhere to hide.
Already, voters have picked up that something is not quite right at the White House.
More than six weeks since his inauguration, Biden has not held a press conference, or the customary first-year address to a joint session of Congress, and a Rasmussen poll this week shows that more than half of voters are worried about his ability to do the job.
Only 34 per cent of voters are “very confident” that Biden is “physically and mentally up to the job of being president,” while 14 per cent are “somewhat confident.”
Fully one third of Democrats are at least “somewhat concerned” that Biden has not yet held a press conference, as are 56 per cent of independents.
Whatever his handlers are hiding, even his trusty teleprompter can’t fill in the gaps.
At the podium this week to announce two new women generals, Biden forgot the name of his secretary of Defence, Lloyd Austin, as well as the name of the building where Austin works — the Pentagon.
“I want to thank the, uh, the uh, the former general … the guy who runs that outfit over there.”
Time for a new Loader of the Teleprompter.
On the rare occasion an unscripted comment slips out, it is off-key, like when he told a group of NASA engineers that Indian-Americans are “taking over the country.”
In recent days he has lost track mid-speech and blurted out: “What am I doing here?”
He told CNN that he is confused each day when he wakes up in the White House.
“I wake up every morning, look at Jill, and say ‘where the hell are we?’”
If his wife isn’t by his side answering policy questions on his behalf, it’s Vice President Kamala Harris hovering nearby.
Unusually, she has stood in for Biden on six solo phone calls with foreign leaders.
In a rare outing this week, to the DC hardware store to which Cummings was referring, reporters yelled questions to the president about the border crisis before his wranglers shooed them away.
Biden avoided the hairy topic by looking blank.
It’s not good enough.
America needs to know who is making the decisions at the White House.
If it really is Biden, then let him off the leash to explain if there’s method to the madness.
It matters who is in charge because the Biden administration is enacting radical nation-changing at breakneck speed.
Someone needs to be accountable.
People voted for Biden because they believed he was a moderate who would fulfil his campaign promise to unify and heal a fractured nation.
That is the opposite of what his presidency has delivered.
Nowhere is the contrast between promise and reality starker than at the southern border, now a self-inflicted humanitarian, natural-security, public-health disaster.
From Day 1, Biden signed a flurry of executive orders to dismantle hard-won Trump-era border protections that had slowed illegal border crossings to a trickle.
The result was an inevitable magnet. Of the tens of thousands of illegal migrants flocking to the border, some wearing Biden T-shirts, only one in three is intercepted, according to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
An estimated 6 per cent have tested positive for COVID-19 but have been allowed to melt into the country.
Biden has handed people-smugglers a lucrative incentive to prey on vulnerable children. Already, 3,250 migrant children are being housed in hastily constructed tent cities in Texas. They reportedly are arriving at triple the rate of two weeks ago, and yet Biden’s immigration spokespeople refuse to take responsibility.
They blame Trump, hurricanes and the pandemic for the post-election surge, anything but the “pull factor” of Biden’s open-border message.
“This is a full-blown disaster that they’ve created,” Patrick told Fox News Wednesday. “There is no end in sight to these people who are coming over the border. We are talking millions …
President Joe Biden answers a reporter’s question after speaking in the State Dining Room of the White House.
Alex Brandon/AP
“President Biden is nothing more than a prop of the left. He has no idea what’s going on down there.”
If that is not true, Biden needs to prove it and fast.
His scheduled prime-time address Thursday is a good place to explain what he’s up to, and he should hold a press conference afterwards and answer every question.
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