The Joe Biden Who Never Was

Biden is proving the Biden he always was—as incompetent as Jimmy Carter, without the latter’s probity. He may prove as corrupt as Bill Clinton yet without his animal energy.

   By Victor Davis Hanson  April 18, 2021

 

These are the most radical first three months of a presidency since 1933, the most divisive—and certainly the most dangerous. And its catalyst is the myth of ol’ Joe from Scranton who has unleashed furies and hatreds never quite seen in modern American history. 

 

“Woke” Joe Biden

At an age when most long ago embraced a consistent political belief, late septuagenarian Joe Biden suddenly reinvented himself as our first woke president. That is ironic in so many ways because Joe’s past is a wasteland of racialist condescension and prejudicial gaffes. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, he positioned himself as the workingman’s Democrat from Delaware (or, as Biden once beamed, “We [Delawareans] were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”). In truth, he exuded chauvinism well beyond that of his constituents. ............. 

Joe Biden, Uniter

The message of the Biden campaign was one-dimensional: good ol’ Joe was the antidote to Trump’s tweets and leaked Oval Office trash talk. He would “unite” us. Yet, there was no proof that Biden was ever a uniter. (Remember his dishonest ad hominem interrogations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork?) When he boasted on two occasions of taking Trump behind the proverbial gym bleachers to beat him up, he was channeling his earlier repertoire of he-man stories of slamming faces into lunch counters and such............. Calling opponents Neanderthals, chumps, dregs, and racists, and denigrating those who support modest requirements of presenting an ID to vote with slurs like Jim Crow are not lowering the temperature but vintage Biden. 

Competent Joe Biden

Joe Biden was never stable or steady. Robert Gates notoriously emphasized his ubiquitous ineptitude when he said Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” A “Biden Plan” usually is a contorted mess (cf. his oversight of “shovel-ready jobs” and “cash for clunkers” in 2009, the latter being a program he now wishes to resurrect). The Biden idea to trisect present-day Iraq was a prescription for a new Middle East Balkans. He gave loud support for interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—only to orphan them when the news cycle pronounced them lost. .................

Upright Biden

Biden dropped out of two prior presidential runs for being accused of past plagiarism and biographical misrepresentation. When it was disclosed that Hunter Biden’s laptop turned up with reference to the “Big Guy’s” 10 percent cut, and when a participant in the discussions of the corrupt Biden family syndicate’s machinations over how to divide its quid pro quo spoils explained the scam on national television, Biden swore the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”  A corrupt media and a more conniving social media monopoly squashed the story. As insurance, Biden wheeled out dozens of compromised former national security mediocrities to swear he was a victim of “the Russians.” And now Hunter himself admits that he cannot quite deny that the laptop was his. That Biden slur of “the Russians did it” became even more resonant than the earlier affronts that Trump appeased them as they put bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan or he colluded with Putin to rig the 2016 election ............And the media that hated Trump and hyped his coarseness, worships Biden’s as it masks his far greater crudity................ To Read More....