The Patriot Post® · The Book on Biden

After 31 months of cleanups on aisle 46, the Long Knives of the Left have finally come out for Joe Biden.

As we noted in yesterday’s Executive Summary, excerpts from a soon-to-be-released book by Atlantic writer Franklin Foer about the Big Guy’s first term in office paint a rather unflattering view of the career politician. It’s the latest in a whispering campaign that began just over a year ago and has continued to gain momentum as Biden’s 2024 electoral prospects reciprocally lose momentum.

All we can say to Foer is, Welcome to the party, pal.

As recounted in a particularly notable excerpt, Biden, during a speech in Warsaw shortly after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, does what he often does: He goes off script. Perhaps you remember the moment when, at the very end of his speech, he exclaimed, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

Immediately thereafter, the mops and buckets came out. As NBC News reported at the time, “The White House on Saturday tried unsuccessfully to contain the controversy, saying Biden’s remarks were about the global impact of Putin’s animus, not a call for Putin’s immediate removal.”

Uh-huh. Apparently, even after more than 50 years in Washington, much of it during the Cold War, Joe Biden never learned that even a U.S. president ought not to call for regime change in a country that still has thousands of long-range nuclear weapons aimed in our direction.

As Foer writes: “Biden left for home … feeling sorry for himself. Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler. Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?”

Memo to Joe: During those perilous two weeks of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, John Kennedy never called for then-Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev’s removal from power. Put another way: Scranton Joe, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

In another excerpt from Foer’s book, a lengthy one covering Joe Biden’s hasty and disastrous retreat from Afghanistan — a retreat that resulted in the fall of that country to the Taliban, the bloody bombing of Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate, and the utterly preventable loss of 13 American warriors — Foer writes that Biden had an outsized estimation of his foreign policy competence and a “swaggering faith in himself” that contributed to the chaotic American evacuation.

As for the media’s sustained and critical reaction to the botched withdrawal, Biden called it “overheated,” and he reportedly told an aide that “either the press is losing its mind, or I am.”

Nothing like a shot of projection with an introspective chaser.

In any case, Foer’s assessment of Biden’s foreign-policy chops would seem to mesh with that of former Bush and Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who in his memoir said he believes Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

As Foer also noted of Biden when the time came to receive the transfer of those 13 American warriors and console their loved ones: “For a man vaunted for his empathy, he could be detached, even icy, when confronted with the prospect of human suffering.”

But lest we think that Foer’s book is a hard-hitting piece of history rather than a mostly friendly look at a woefully inept and decrepit president, we offer this brief excerpt from Foer as well: “So much about the withdrawal had slipped beyond Biden’s control. But grieving was his expertise. If there was one thing that everyone agreed Biden did more adroitly than any other public official, it was comforting survivors.”

Really? Joe Biden is better “than any other public official” when it comes to comforting survivors? How so? By lying to the families of the 13 fallen Americans about how his own son died? And by lying to survivors of the catastrophic wildfire in Maui about how [a long-ago kitchen fire]((https://patriotpost.us/articles/99907-the-bidens-not-so-excellent-tahoe-adventure-2023-08-23) nearly cost him his ‘67 Corvette?

Foer’s book is titled The Last Politician, but that’s clearly a misnomer. Joe Biden won’t be the last tone-deaf backslapper to come down the pike and put one over on our nation’s low-information voters.