Take The Keys Away

 

Back during the early days of The Trump Administration, Trump fired the FBI Director James Comey. It caused a massive reaction from the press and, naturally, Twitter, which is really where the press looks to decide what is and is not news.

My wife and I were watching the news.  Trump seemed especially in over his head in those days.  My wife asked me if I thought Trump was going to make it through the year.  I told her I didn't know if he was going to make it through the week.

Well, he made it through four years with only two impeachments and a single solidarity pandemic.

I always had the feeling that Trump was making it up as he was going along. He was winging it.

I got the same feeling this week with President Biden.  

He was supposed to be the grown-up.  No more of this self-centered, bombastic slop like we had with Trump.  He, like his old boss, was going to be no drama.

To say that hasn't happened is an understatement.

There is one word to describe Biden's performance this past week.

Awful.

I know he is from my side of the river, but Jim Geraghty said, "The transcript of President Joe Biden’s interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos dropped, and the president’s incoherence, insistence that he was incorrectly briefed, denial that he was warned by his military advisers, and oddly low profile in the past week raise troubling questions about his ability to perform his duties."

I would have written the same thing but would have ended it with "prove his ability to perform his duties are, as Dan Rather would have said, slim to none and Slim has left town."

As we say in the church, you need to look into your heart of hearts. You need to ask yourself one question: Will this get better?  The answer is no. It will not get better. There is a reason Biden never got into the double digits the other two times he ran for President is that he wasn't that great to begin with.

Let's put it this way:  there's no snap in his fastball, if you catch my drift.  He is an old man that is looking and acting older every day.

I'm not being ugly or mean.  The Presidency is a tough job. Biden is 78 years old. He should be enjoying his grandchildren, not sitting around trying to come up with some dopey excuse for how everything went terribly wrong.

On top of this, Grandpa is lying to us.

On July 8, 2021, there was this exchange.

Q: Mr. President, thank you very much. Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
THE PRESIDENT: That is not true.

Q: Is it — can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?
THE PRESIDENT: That is not true. They did not — they didn’t — did not reach that conclusion.

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden said the following:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you know that Senator McConnell, others say this was not only predictable, it was predicted, including by him, based on intelligence briefings he was getting.
BIDEN: What — what did he say was predicted?
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator McConnell said it was predictable that the Taliban was gonna take over.
BIDEN: Well, by the end of the year, I said that’s that was — that was a real possibility. But no one said it was gonna take over then when it was bein’ asked.

Either the President didn't remember what he said on July 8, 2021, or he lied to Stephanopoulos. 

STEPHANOPOULOS: So when you look at what’s happened over the last week, was it a failure of intelligence, planning, execution or judgment?
BIDEN: Look, I don’t think it was a fa– look, it was a simple choice, George. When the– when the Taliban — let me back — put it another way. When you had the government of Afghanistan, the leader of that government get in a plane and taking off and going to another country, when you saw the significant collapse of the ta– of the– Afghan troops we had trained — up to 300,000 of them just leaving their equipment and taking off, that was — you know, I’m not– this — that — that’s what happened. That’s simply what happened.

I guess he is saying that it wasn't a failure of intelligence, planning, execution, or judgment. It was just one of those things, you know. 

STEPHANOPOULOS:  So, you don’t think this could have been handled — this exit could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?

BIDEN:   No, I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that, we’re gonna go back in hindsight and look — but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how that happened.

 

At least we got a promise to go back and look so that maybe next time we don't have people falling off of planes when we are trying to leave a country. 

Look, I have no idea what would have happened if Trump had been re-elected and pulled out of Afghanistan in May like he wanted.  We probably would have heard speeches and press conferences about "the best pull out ever" and a "beautiful evacuation, probably the best that anyone has ever seen".

I've just know what happened under Biden's watch. We'll have a national conversation about taking away the keys from Grandpa, sooner or later. Bet on sooner.