Miranda Devine: America is expressing what it thinks of Joe Biden loud and clear
Americans roundly boo the US President at every opportunity, even going so far as to hurl an expletive-laden heckle, which shows how far Joe Biden has fallen, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Joe Biden’s poll ratings are plummeting after his bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan but his “boo” ratings are skyrocketing. Wherever he has gone in the past two weeks he has been heckled.
“Boooo,” came the voices, when he arrived at the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan on Saturday.
“You’re a mutt for what you did to Afghanistan”, yelled a man. “Terrible, terrible.” “Don’t sniff ’em”, called out someone else when the President moved to greet a friendly face his minders directed him to – an elderly woman who appeared to be the same one he had greeted the previous year.
He is no more popular at college football games the past two weeks, where young people around the country have started chanting, “F--- Joe Biden!”
“F--- Joe Biden” was also the chorus at the Yankees-Mets game in New York on Saturday night.
Weekend concerts of country music stars were marked by the irreverent chant.
After Morgan Wallen in Nashville, Tennessee, paid tribute to the 13 young military members who died in Kabul last month, his fans spontaneously broke into the chant.
The same thing happened at a Brantley Gilbert concert in West Virginia and a rap song titled “F Biden” on YouTube has garnered 1.3 million views the past three weeks.
Even in the progressive enclave of Brooklyn, New York, “F--- Joe Biden” was heard on the Brooklyn Bridge this week, as a young crowd protesting the President’s recent vaccine mandate marched across.
It’s a crude insult but the President has not helped himself with angry rants and serial incompetence, from Afghanistan to the illegal migration calamity on the southern border, where vaccines are not mandated for migrants but are required for American citizens in the rest of the country, on pain of losing your job.
Biden’s draconian about-face on mandates has jarred a country where 65 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated, including 83 per cent of the over-65 age group. As well, an estimated one third of the population has natural immunity.
“Our patience is wearing thin,” he thundered last week in his vaccine mandate speech which spawned a thousand mocking memes. But it was his behaviour at the Ground Zero memorial service on Saturday morning that showed he has a thin skin for criticism and a peculiar insensitivity about how he alienates people.
A moment of inappropriate levity was captured in images of Biden as he and wife Jill stood alongside Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
He had removed his mask, his face was animated and his mouth wide open as if he were shouting at someone opposite. He made faces at people, waved and pointed in exaggerated fashion.
The stricken looks on the faces of everyone around him said it all.
Biden chose not to make a speech on the 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on US soil, although he visited all three places where the Islamists struck — the twin towers in New York’s financial district, the Pentagon and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the third hijacked plane crashed.
He had hoped to crow about being the only president to end the forever war but no such luck.
With the withdrawal botched, silence was his only option. Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep mum long and, in Shanksville, he tried to defend his Afghanistan blunders and then expressed his displeasure to reporters about protesters brandishing signs that said “F--k Biden”.
“I’m thinking of, you know, what the people who died, what would they be thinking. They think this makes sense for us to be in this kind of thing where you ride down the street and someone has a sign saying ‘Eff so and so’? I mean it’s not who we are.”
The President was peeved that he hadn’t been warmly welcomed that day.
But his sudden reverence for 9/11 seemed hollow after he had spent the past eight months downplaying the enormity of the attacks and claiming the January 6 Capitol riot was worse.
It also did not escape the attention of New Yorkers that he brought along the most despised politician in America, Californian Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and she had taken the prime spot in the front row at the Ground Zero memorial — a spot previously reserved for Rudy Giuliani.
It was a petty sign of disrespect to the hero former mayor who led New York through that terrible day 20 years ago — Democrats revile him because of his combative role as Trump’s personal lawyer.
But this year, of all years, it was jarring to see out-of-state leaders of the party that campaigned on “Defund the Police” elbowing aside the heroes of that day to stand in posed solemnity as the names of the fallen were read aloud. They may as well have spat on their graves.
After the Washington Democrats departed, Giuliani gathered his close-knit team at Cipriani on Wall Street for a night of bittersweet memories.
His NYPD commissioner of the day, Bernie Keric, was there, along with hero firefighters, members of SEAL Team Six which killed Bin Laden, and other veterans of the war on terror. They worked through some of the anger about Biden’s Afghanistan debacle and Giuliani vented against top general Mark Milley, saying he “wanted to grab his stars and shove [them] down his throat” over the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base.
There were tributes to the fallen and a celebration of the “largest evacuation” in US history, with 25,000 people moved out of the twin towers, thanks to the selfless courage of the first responders.
Giuliani praised the NYPD as “the best law enforcement agency in the world” during an entertaining speech full of impersonations of mobsters he had locked up when he was a crusading district attorney who cleaned up New York.
He even took off the Queen: “You did a wonderful job on September 11,” he said in a posh royal accent.
Nasty trolls on Twitter, who were not there, later described the speech as a drunken rant.
It was nothing of the sort, but it shows the depths to which partisan haters will stoop to besmirch what was a beautiful night for the heroes of 9/11 just a few blocks from what they described as “the first battleground in the last 20-year war on terror”.
Biden promised to be the “unity” President but he has done nothing but divide the nation into warring tribes, race against race, state against state, vaccinated against unvaccinated.
Then he dishonoured the sacrifices of the 9/11 generation — and that is why they boo him.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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