The Good Ship Biden Is Sinking

Apparently, it’s easier to criticize and complain than it is to govern. Such is the conclusion that mainstream media outlets have reached on the matter of the Biden presidency.

One understands that these outlets manned the barricades and threw their considerable weight behind the effort to replace President Donald Trump. They were true fanatics, willing to do anything whatever to remove Trump from power.

They were so intent on doing so that they chose as a candidate a shell of a man, one who was asleep half the time, who had notable brain deficiencies. They did not care. They did not ask themselves whether Joe could do the job. They did not care about anything else but replacing Trump. One could not offer a clearer picture of raw fanaticism.

One is tempted to trot out the metaphor of rats abandoning a sinking ship, but, whatever image we choose, leftist media outlets have suddenly decided that it’s time to start abandoning the Biden presidency. As they look towards a 2022 electoral wipeout, leading perhaps to a 2024 return to Trump, or perhaps to something worse, they are starting to toss good old Joe overboard, the better to find a suitable replacement, someone who can lead the liberal cause and who might be capable of governing.

Surely, they know that Biden will not be running again in 2024 and they want to clear the field for a new champion. They are also doing their best to dissociate themselves from a calamitously incompetent administration, one that they went to the ends of the earth and sold out their journalistic integrity to put in the White House.

As the press turns against Biden, the highly estimable Daily Mail reports on the media outlets, from The New Yorker to the New York Times to the Washington Post, that have suddenly, in unison, turned against Joe Biden. That they did not know previously that Biden would never be able to do the job of president makes this feel like too little too late. But still, if you want to balance that against another cliche, consider that it’s better late than never.

So, the Daily Mail begins with an article by Susan Glasser, in The New Yorker. You might know, and if you don’t, you should, but Glasser co-authored with her husband Peter Baker an excellent biography of James Baker, entitled: The Man Who Ran Washington. As opposed to certain other books that I write about on this blog, I did read the Baker-Glasser book. It is as good as people say it is. I recommend it.

Anyway, The Daily Mail reports:

The New Yorker published a piece Friday describing the Biden presidency as a 'haze of uncertainty' and a 'jumble of aspirations' that are far from what is politically possible to achieve. 

'The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them,' Susan Glasser writes. 'Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible.' 

To translate, the Biden people have no idea what they are doing. The reason, there is no one at the top leading the charge. Biden is too enfeebled to know what to do and everyone else spends their time protecting him and hiding his enfeeblement.

Glasser does mention, reasonably, that it isn’t over until it’s over, and that Biden might actually come back from the near dead. In truth, it's more likely that he will not last out the four years. Get ready for President Kamala:

Still, in the editorial entitled 'It's Too Early to Consign Biden to the Ash Heap,' Glasser says that conservatives declaring the Biden presidency 'dead' is as overstated as liberals dubbing him the second coming of FDR. 

'The warning lights are undoubtedly flashing red for Biden right now.' 

'The failed-Presidency crowd sees this as the inevitable outcome of a leader who strayed from the promise of his campaign to oust Donald Trump—to return America to competent, sane governance—and instead embraced a politically impractical vision of a progressive utopia,' the piece continues. 

'The general feeling among Democrats these days: Is it time to panic yet?' 

The true picture of the Biden presidency involves incompetent and mentally defective governance. Surely, one sign is the willingness of formerly centrist Biden to glom on to his party’s radical leftist wing.

'The difficult truth is that, should Congress fail to pass Biden's bills this fall, it would, in fact, be the kind of political blow that few new Presidents can recover from,  the New Yorker piece states. 

Glasser does credit Biden with one thing: he has not yet taken to denouncing members of his own political party. You will recall that President Trump took the occasion of two senate races in Georgia to denounce that state’s Republican Party leadership. Surely, this contributed, a little or a lot, to the loss of said senate seats-- and to the Democrats gaining control of the Senate. If the Republicans had won one seat, the Biden agenda would have been dead in Congress. Think about it.

But, to Biden's credit, Glasser writes: 'He has not, à la Trump, taken to Twitter to denounce the dissenting members of his party as 'dinos,' ... He has not fired anybody or started lining up primary challengers to his own party's members of Congress who have angered him. He has not called up MSNBC hosts in a panic for advice.' 

And, of course, beyond the debacle in Afghanistan and the monstrosities on the Southern border, Biden has notably failed to get the pandemic under control:

Meanwhile, Biden is being squeezed on all sides by a pandemic he promised would be essentially over by this time and is still killing 2,000 per day, a widely-condemned withdrawal from Afghanistan and a surge of migrants at the southern border.   

The New York Times, in the person of Frank Bruni, formerly a restaurant critic, takes issue with the Biden approach to immigration, by comparing it to Trump. It takes a special warp of mind to compare an administration that shut down illegal immigration on the border with one that opened the borders and allowed everyone in.

Bruni also takes Biden to task for the rank incompetence of his withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Daily Mail reports on Bruni’s take down of Biden:

The kind of border bedlam attributed to Trump’s incompetence and insensitivity has returned and once again dominates the news,' Bruni writes. 

Bruni also notes Biden's decision to withdraw the US military from Afghanistan by August 31 caught allies by surprise. 

'He pulled out of Afghanistan without the degree of consultation, coordination and competence that allies expected, at least of any American president not named Trump,' he writes

With the abandonment of thousands of Afghan allies, Bruni said, Biden also failed to live up to the empathetic image he's crafted to distance himself from the cold, caustic perception of the Trump administration.

On Tuesday the Washington Post, another legacy media organization, also joined in criticizing Biden. 

Trust me, the notion of empathy has largely outlived its usefulness. In the first place Biden has no feeling at all. In the second place the next time I hear someone whining about empathy I am going to throw up.

And then there is the Washington Post, in the person of the White House bureau chief, who has just noticed that Biden never fields press questions--unless they come from carefully preselected reporters and as long as he has the answer written out on cue cards:

White House bureau chief Ashley Parker also invoked Trump on Tuesday night after Biden met with Johnson in DC.

The truth finally dawned when Biden and his staff refused to allow the press to ask any questions while he was appearing with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson:

'Worth noting that Biden ran for office promising to restore democracy after 4 years of Trump. But today it was the British leader, NOT the American one, who spotlighted a key tenet of a flourishing democracy - respect for a free press - by taking questions from his press corps,' Parker tweeted.

Biden did not recognize any American reporters for questions during an Oval Office meeting with Johnson - and his aides cleared out journalists as they tried to query the president.  

White House staff even interrupted Johnson as they pushed to get reporters out of the room, shouting over the British prime minister as he and Biden sat in their chairs, watching the chaotic scene unfold as aides ushered journalists out of the Oval Office.

As reporters were ushered out, CBS White House reporter Ed O'Keefe shouted a question to Biden asked about the situation on the US-Mexico border. The administration is facing backlash and criticism following images of US Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips to round up migrants or prevent them from stepping onto American soil.

The notion that Biden was going to restore democracy-- whatever does that mean?-- while Trump had more direct interaction with the press than Biden the candidate and Biden the president ever have, is risible.

Anyway, Mark Penn, a former Clinton official who has always been fair and balanced, notes that, in comparison with Biden, Trump is now looking like a good president. If there were a most unkindest cut of all in politics, that would be it:

'The mounting issues on all fronts have led to the surprise conclusion that Trump is now seen as being as good a president as Biden, suggesting the honeymoon is being replaced with buyer's remorse,' Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard/Harris survey told The Times.

The polls are not looking very good for anyone in the Biden orbit:

The Harvard/Harris poll also found that 55 per cent of people believed former Vice-President Mike Pence was a better vice president than his successor, Kamala Harris, and that 63 per cent of people thought Mike Pompeo was a better secretary of state than Anthony Blinken.