It’s a day since President Joe Biden’s press conference marking the first anniversary of his swearing-in, and I remain in the same state of horrified and stunned disbelief I experienced while watching it.
I’ve always wondered what it would be like to see the behavior of an actual human being, as opposed to a character in a spy movie, who’d been given a shot of sodium pentothal. That’s what Biden was like at the press conference. Everything he said he probably shouldn’t have said, but he just couldn’t help himself. It was his Internal Monologue Made Exterior, and it was terrifying.
He said, look, it’s fine, only 5% of America’s schools are closed (then he said it was 2%). Five percent of America’s 130,000 schools equals . . . 6,500 closed schools. That’s OK?
He said store inventories are at 89%, which, he said, is only a few points lower than before the pandemic.
Really? Stores are missing one-tenth of the goods they usually sell, and that’s fine?
He said, in effect, that Americans should expect inflation to continue to rise due to skyrocketing oil prices. “It’s going to be hard,” he said. “It’s going to be very hard.”
And hamburgers are more expensive also. Why? “The Big Four are controlling it all.” Say what now? The Big Who? I know, I know. He’s claiming there’s a food cartel that’s gouging America’s hamburger-eaters. Which would explain why the cost of everything else in America is rising at the same time, and inflation is at the highest level we’ve seen in four decades.
After a spate of reasonably tough questions, Biden got fed up and asked, “Can you think of any other president that has done as much in one year? Name one for me. I’m serious. You guys talk about how nothing has happened. I don’t think there’s been much on any incoming president’s plate that’s been a bigger menu than the plate I had given to me.”
I didn’t know that menus were served on plates, but OK, let’s let that one pass. If he’s done such a great job, why was his RealClearPolitics approval rating at 55% just after his inauguration and 41% today? “I don’t believe the polls,” he answered.
And I haven’t even gotten to the Russia stuff. You know, where he kind of said a “minor incursion” by Vladimir Putin’s military into Ukraine would be “one thing” — meaning, maybe, somewhat acceptable.
And that if Putin went all in, he’d “be able to prevail, but it’s going to be heavy, it’s going to be real, and it’s going to be consequential.” How will it be heavy, real and consequential? Why, sanctions! Putin’s never seen sanctions like these sanctions. He’s going to hate those sanctions! But look, Biden said, “militarily, [the Russians] have overwhelming superiority” and “my guess is he will move in.”
His guess? He’s not Stephen A. Smith, trying to figure out what Bill Belichick’s next coaching move might be. He’s the president of the United States. What he says affects and will affect what Putin does. And while he didn’t actually give him a green light, he all but said his invasion would be successful in the long term — which is maybe the most horrifying thing any leader has ever said on the eve of a potential fight.
Now I know why they kept him in the basement during 2020, the way Mr. Rochester kept his crazy wife in the attic. The stakes were too high then for Biden to risk his own future by shooting off his own fool mouth, and even Biden understood it.
He needed to stay quiet so the focus would remain on Donald Trump, and circumstances conspired to make it possible for him not to venture out and go off the cuff in self-destructive ways.
Well, Mrs. Rochester is out of the attic, and like her, Biden just set the house on fire.
