The media will try, but you cannot reconcile a “man who has lived history,” “one of advancing age and broad experience” who can only converse in a “sometimes scattershot way.” A President with a “stiff gait, muffled voice, and fitful syntax” that holds “fast to a vision that has reigned since World War II, in which a rich and powerful America leads an alliance of democracies to safeguard the globe from tyranny.”
You know things aren’t going well for President Joe Biden when even Time Magazine, the same outfit that practically cheered on a Civil War and praised a secret cabal for rigging the 2020 election, can only damn him with the faintest of all possible praise. To Massimo Calebresi, the President is described in the sort of glowing terms one might use to gloss over the failings of a doddering old fool, a slightly more polite version of what the Department of Justice claimed when they decided to not charge him for classified document related crimes. He is a “man who has lived history,” “one of advancing age and broad experience” who can only converse in a “sometimes scattershot way.” He has a “stiff gait, muffled voice, and fitful syntax,” but holds “fast to a vision that has reigned since World War II, in which a rich and powerful America leads an alliance of democracies to safeguard the globe from tyranny.” He views democratic values as the “grounding wire of our global power” and our alliances “our greatest asset,” but even Mr. Calebresi can’t deny the cold, unmistakable truth of our misbegotten foreign policy, as he recites a frighteningly long list of failures bordering on catastrophe. “During his 40 months in office, events have tested Biden’s vision of American world leadership. Alliances haven’t been enough to win a new European war in Ukraine. U.S. power and leverage haven’t prevented a humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle East, marked by alleged war crimes. Putin is trying to assemble an axis of autocrats from Tehran to Beijing. In China, the U.S. faces an adversary potentially its equal in economic and military power that is intent on tearing down the American global order. President Xi has told his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, U.S. officials say, raising the possibility of a dark analogue to Normandy in Asia.” Despite these shortcomings and the Afghanistan debacle which oddly went unmentioned, the President himself still believes that “We’re playing [that role] even more. We are the world power.” For his part, Mr. Calebrisi is convinced – or at least pretends to be convinced – that all of it is more than impotent blather. “Biden’s record in facing these tests is more than just nostalgic talk. He has added two powerful European militaries to NATO, and will soon announce the doubling of the number of countries in the Atlantic alliance that are paying more than the target 2% of their GDP toward defense, the White House says. His Administration has worked to prevent the war in Gaza from igniting a broader regional conflict. He brokered the first trilateral summit with long-distrustful regional partners South Korea and Japan, and coaxed the Philippines to move away from Beijing’s orbit and accept four new U.S. military bases [a later correction mystically noted that the based are not new, just continuing to use what was already there]. He has rallied European and Asian countries to curtail China’s economic sway.” “We have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world,” Biden says, so that “we are able to move in a way that recognizes how much the world has changed and still lead.”
At this point, anyone who has been paying attention is probably wondering what any of this means in the context of a world quite literally on fire. The sad reality is that “two powerful European militaries” added to the existing 30 some odd NATO militaries, whether or not everyone pays the required 2% (which by the way, is more to the credit of former President Donald Trump), have proven themselves absolutely useless in influencing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s behavior the slightest bit. His army still sits in Ukraine, slowing but surely winning the war, and he will never relinquish Crimea or the other contested territories. He assassinates enemies and dissidents with impunity. He, backed by an economy the size of Texas that has prospered under our failed sanction regime, does whatever he wants because he’s far from impressed with the equivalent of a debate club that President Biden is supposedly leading so masterfully. Likewise, Iran and Israel recently exchanged the first direct attacks on each other in history, and President Biden has proven himself incapable of either reigning in Iran, its surrogates in Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis whether or not the media chooses to cover the reality. Attacks on crucial shipping in the Red Sea occur almost weekly – on May 30, May 9, April 29, March 15, and March 6 to cite just recent history. Whether or not we choose to admit there is a wider war already in progress, there is one and the only question is how wide it gets with President Biden rather unsteady at the helm. Similarly, coaxing two countries – both of whom are supposed to be our steadfast allies – into holding a summit that produces nothing would not normally be considered an accomplishment, and expecting one of our longest standing and closest allies in the region, a country for which we have an established defense agreement, to host military bases should be considered standard operating procedure rather than achievement of any kind, especially when the correction revealed those bases already exist. Needless to say, the real reason for Mr. Calebresi’s attempts to make either failure or normalcy sound like success is the hope that Time Magazine and other mainstream publications can improve the President’s currently dismal standing with the American public. As he puts it with little self-awareness, “American Presidents must earn a mandate from their fellow citizens, and it’s far from clear that Biden can. In surveys, large majorities say that he is too old to lead. As he walked TIME through the West Wing and sat for a 35-minute interview on May 28, the President, with his stiff gait, muffled voice, and fitful syntax, cut a striking contrast with the intense, loquacious figure who served as Senator and Vice President.”
Thus, it should be no surprise that the remainder of the article can best be described as the puffiest of puff pieces, transforming everything the President has done into some kind of masterclass in diplomacy, more suited to a Teddy Roosevelt than the current occupant of the Oval Office. Heroes, of course, need villains, but rather than noting the obvious fact that Iran, as the world chief’s sponsor of terror, is the leading antagonist in the Middle East, Mr. Calebresi prefers to target Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the real stumbling block to President Biden’s foreign policy and hence, overall success. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has upped the cost of Biden’s commitment to Israel at every turn. Nearly eight months after the conflict started, the death toll in Gaza, according to the local Hamas-led Ministry of Health, has climbed to more than 36,000 people, including an unknown number of Hamas fighters.” Upping the costs is one thing, committing war crimes quite another, but Mr. Calebresi presses onward regardless, citing notoriously anti-Israeli organizations in a rather pathetic attempt to offer the President the opportunity to condemn Israel to satisfy his progressive base. “On May 20, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court requested a war-crimes indictment for Netanyahu, his Defense Minister, and three leaders of Hamas. Four days later, in a largely symbolic move, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt operations in Gaza. Human Rights Watch says Israel has ‘imposed collective punishments on the civilian population, deprived the civilian population of objects indispensable to its survival, and used starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.’” The President himself – despite direct access to the United States massive intelligence services – bizarrely claims, “It’s uncertain” whether war crimes are being committed, but regardless, the “only holdout to the broader pact [peace deal] is Netanyahu. The President declines to say as much, but when asked by TIME if Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political reasons, Biden admits, ‘There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.’”
What is this pact Prime Minister Netanyahu is supposedly blocking, the grand peace deal that President Biden announced on May 31? It can be summarized in a single sentence: A temporary ceasefire with no conditions, followed by a magical permanent ceasefire with unspecified conditions, and then the rebuilding of Gaza, presumably funded by the United States – all while Hamas remains in power, ready to both slaughter more Israelis, kill more hostages, and steal all the rebuilding money. This isn’t a deal or a proposal. It’s a fantasy more suited to a bong-induced stupor at a college dorm room, but certainly Prime Minister Netanyahu could only be rejecting it out of politics – though the President himself doesn’t actually say that in the transcript, to his credit he refused to condemn Israel in his actual answers, more on the odd disconnect below. In the meantime, it is only at this point that Mr. Calebresi starts acknowledging the obvious. President Biden may talk a great game – though how one squares that with the “scattershot,” doddering old man issues – but none of it means anything in the real world. “Critics say the problem is too much friend making and not enough deterrence. The U.K. recently said China may be preparing to provide lethal aid to Russia, a move that Biden said in March 2022 would put Xi ‘in significant jeopardy’ of harsh U.S. sanctions.” “The single biggest problem with the Biden team is their failure to grasp what it takes to achieve effective deterrence against aggressors,” explained Matt Pottinger, Deputy National Security Adviser under President Trump. “They failed against the Taliban, then Putin, and then Iran and its proxies. And now Beijing is making moves that could prove fateful for the world.” “These high-profile photo ops,” added another former Trump official, stating the obvious, “are not a substitute for raw military power.”
Otherwise, the actual interview transcript reveals a President completely adrift from reality and unable to put together a coherent thought, making it clear that Mr. Calebresi has done the propaganda work necessary to avoid Biden sounding like a complete lunatic. Some of the quotes have to be read to be believed. “I don’t know why you skip over all that’s happened in the meantime. The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated. Number one.” Yes, it’s been decimated, but $200 billion in funding for Ukraine isn’t enough to win the war and Ukraine itself is slowly being ground down by a military that doesn’t exist. How does that math work? “Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine. That’s what peace looks like,” except they have been occupying Ukraine since Crimea a decade ago and the contested regions have always been contested. There is no reason to believe that will ever change, no matter how much we spend. See if you can make sense of this one, “And it doesn’t mean NATO [for Ukraine], they are part of NATO, it means we have a relationship with them like we do with other countries, where we supply weapons so they can defend themselves in the future. But it is not, if you notice, I was the one when—and you guys did report it at TIME—the one that I was saying that I am not prepared to support the NATOization of Ukraine.” Apparently, Ukraine is now a Schrödinger’s Cat of a country. It’s both not NATO and NATO at the same time. Oddly as I mentioned earlier, the President does seem to acknowledge that Hamas has been the main stumbling block to peace in the region, contrary to what the article actually says. “Hamas. Hamas could end this tomorrow. Hamas could say (unintelligible) and done period. And, but, and the last offer Israel made was very generous in terms of who they’d be willing to release, what they’d give in return, et cetera. Bibi is under enormous pressure on the hostages, on the hostages, and so he’s prepared to do about anything to get the hostages back.” Briefly, the conversation veers to rapid inflation, producing an incomprehensibly false answer. “Wage increases have exceeded what the cost of inflation [they have not], which you’re talking about as the prices that were pre-COVID prices. Pre-COVID prices are not the same as whether or not they—you have American, corporate America ripping off the public now. You have everything from shrinkflation to what’s going on in terms of the way in which they’re artificially moving significantly to increase their, their, their, their, their profits. That’s not the same as inflation. That’s price gouging.” On tariffs, “What I’m talking about, I said, we’re gonna play by the same rules. You tell me if I want to, if an American corporation wants to invest in China, it has to give 50% ownership, 51% ownership to a Chinese operator. And that goes on from there. And I said, so you’re gonna do that to us? (unintelligible) We’re going to do the same thing if you want to invest here. We’re not putting a tariff on. We’re just saying, if you want to do that, well, we’re gonna do that. And you cannot change the market in a way where you flood the market by—ignore all Chinese government subsidies to undercut their ability as to deal with electric vehicles. And we’re not going to put up with it. That’s the thing we talked about. And that’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about tariffs across the board.”
Does anyone know what he’s talking about? The media will try, but any attempt to put lipstick on this proverbial pig is doomed to failure. As if we needed any more evidence, the interview itself was conducted to commemorate President Biden’s visit to France for the 80th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion. However, the media may spin it, the trip itself was a disaster. The President appeared to get lost getting out of his car, tried to sit down without a chair, ranted about Russia, and had to be dragged away by his wife, claiming his “advance team said I gotta be the first one to leave.” Ronald Reagan on the 40th anniversary, he most certainly was not, but that didn’t stop some, like CNN from making the comparison, This, my friends, is the man they think can last over four more years.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 
“It’s a fantasy more suited to a bong-induced stupor at a college dorm room, ” That sums it up well. The question is: Why do people deny reality? Oh yeah … I covered that in my book. Did you get a chance to read it?
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Completely agreed – not yet, I received it, but haven’t had the chance to dig in. It is up in my queue very soon though. I flipped through it and sounds like an awesomely unique perspective.
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