Remember Joe Biden?
It’s a question everyone will ask someday, the only mystery being how long into the future it’ll be before Americans begin querying the subject on a regular basis. Presidents of either the excellent or putrid variety tend to engender the most wonder or regret from nostalgic folks. For example, conservatives and Republicans look back with tremendous fondness on the first eight years of the 1980’s decade, when Ronald Reagan ran for and then presided over the executive branch while articulating visions of our nation that people felt in their hearts.
Then there’s Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who drums up opposite emotions among those with long recollections of news and events from their lifetimes. Carter was as blasé and negative as Reagan was inspiring and positive, the former’s infamous “malaise” speech setting the tone for his one term. One shouldn’t forget that Carter’s presidency was largely defined by his mismanagement of the hostage crisis in Iran, a country which not so coincidentally shares a lengthy border with Afghanistan next door.
Carter is remembered for Afghanistan, too, having decreed that the United States summer Olympics team would not compete in the 1980 Moscow games, a boycott attributed to Jimmy’s objections to the Soviet invasion of the landlocked and mysterious tribal nation. It was just one instance of the longtime Georgia peanut farmer’s blindness to reality, as though the hardline communists behind the iron curtain gave a squat about what the world thought of their aggressiveness.
If not for its backwards nature and the inability of the world’s two superpowers to conquer it, no one would probably ever hear of or think about Afghanistan. It does have a rather prominent spot on a “Risk” boardgame, but beyond that, who would even know where it was? The country lies to the southeast of Turkmenistan and southwest of Tajikistan… and can anyone speak to what’s in either of those places?
At any rate, like Carter, senile Joe Biden’s legacy will likely forever be intimately tied to the region, including Afghanistan. W. James Antle III wrote at The Washington Examiner:
“Throughout last year’s campaign for the White House, all the way through the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term, it was a common refrain: Republicans couldn’t find a line of attack that stuck to him. That may change following the collapse of Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government at the hands of the Taliban weeks before the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States…
“Biden was supposed to be boring — a welcome reprieve from constant controversy and rapidly shifting news cycles under former President Donald Trump. Viewership and readership of news outlets declined, along with interest in politics, as Biden replaced Trump earlier this year. As Kabul fell, the news cycle is as chaotic as the conditions in that war-torn country, despite Biden’s best efforts to keep the White House in vacation mode…
“Biden mostly succeeded last year by making the presidential election a referendum on Trump and his management of the pandemic. But now vaccinations have stalled, the delta variant is boosting COVID-19 caseloads, and Afghanistan has joined the border as an area where the nightly news shows Biden getting bad results. It won't be easy to run away from this record next year or in 2024.”
Well, realistically speaking, it’s not easy for Biden to run anywhere, period, but we’re not making age-related jokes here. Those with a thorough grounding in Joe Biden’s history recognized the bumbling, gaffe-prone, plagiarizing senator from Delaware was capable of producing bad results without personally breaking a sweat. His former boss, none other than the Big “O” himself, summed it up like this, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up”.
Wow, things are f***ked up now, aren’t they? When future Americans ask, “Remember Joe Biden?” they’ll recall that the oldest president of the United States could scarcely be bothered to address the citizenry on his vacation about what was happening on the other side of the globe. It’s not as though we haven’t been bombarded with the word “Afghanistan” practically every day since 2001. Nearly twenty-five-hundred U.S. service and intelligence personnel met their deaths there, and we’ve sunk trillions into trying to convert the native population into lovers of democracy and western values.
Judging by the prevalence of armed Islamic gunmen in the streets of Kabul, we failed miserably.
In other words, Joe Biden is a lot more likely to forget what he had for lunch than Americans are to extinguish Afghanistan from their minds. As the old saying goes, it takes a lifetime to build a reputation but only a moment to ruin it. And for Joe Biden, that “moment” has been stretched into days and weeks (months?), complete with images taken from smart devices and broadcast to the world via social media.
There’s no hiding from it, though Biden will certainly try. His handlers did a great job of tucking him away during the 2020 campaign, but it won’t be as easy this time. At some point he’ll have to answer press questions about his policies and even the establishment media will be probing for meaningful responses. Poor Jen Psaki -- imagine how much she looked forward to getting back to the White House press room!
Antle’s piece noted how Republican senators are criticizing Biden for the Afghanistan travesty. Biden himself tried shifting the focus back to COVID-19, a topic that he feels comfortable blubbering about even though the “delta” variant has all but displaced the original virus and is proving resistant to vaccines. Not nearly as deadly, of course, but enough of a menace to get the truly terrified talking about new lockdown and masking measures.
Ain’t it funny how “infrastructure” suddenly left the public discourse? Bernie Sanders hit the road this week to sell voters on the Democrats’ bloated $3.5 trillion budget resolution -- which is somewhat tied to the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill -- but does anyone feel good about placing more money and power in the hands of the federal government when the Biden administration couldn’t even get American citizens out of Afghanistan before the Taliban took over the place?
Political support is a funny thing. With Biden’s approval ratings nosediving recently, how much residual goodwill remains for the president to talk about spreading welfare goodies and “climate change” fixes throughout the land? The problems in Afghanistan are real for all to see, not some far-off catastrophe that “science” has predicted. Right now, “science” has about as much credibility as Biden himself.
Few could’ve accurately predicted these events a year ago, but like Obama, no one knew for sure how badly Biden would botch the border situation and Afghanistan. Presidents aren’t often associated with two entirely negative catastrophes within the span of seven months, but Biden’s managed it. George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, but he was somewhat justified to do it after 9/11/01. Then there was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but that crisis was almost entirely media created.
Obama was tied to Obamacare and then Benghazi, but he managed to wiggle and lie his way out of severe repercussions. Bill Clinton had Whitewater and then Monica Lewinsky, but the media and liberals didn’t care about either of those scandals. But it’s a lot less likely that Joe Biden will escape from his self-created Afghanistan public relations prison.
The primary reason is he can’t avoid the shocking reality simply by lying about it. Again, public opinion will keep him where he is, and unpopular presidents, once they’re inexorably linked to negative events, rarely recover. When you toss in rapidly rising inflation, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, trillions in new debt, the danger that goes along with an open southern border and the serious reputational hit America’s taken abroad, Biden already looks like a legacy loser.
Senile Joe’s administration was constructed on a sandy foundation, and the tide is rolling in. Instead of gentle waves, it’s pounding surf whipped up by a global climate change-fostered weather event. Lots of people are questioning his mental abilities, his leadership style and his lackluster decision-making.
Biden’s reputation is destroyed. His fate was sealed the moment the Afghani army disintegrated and the first Taliban thugs entered the country’s capital. In years to come when someone asks, “Do you remember Joe Biden?”, Americans will see people climbing on top of airplanes. It’s not a legacy to be proud of.
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