Who is Our President?

For John, BLUF:  Sadly, our President is dishonest, not in the exagerated way President Donald Trump is, but in the very marrow of his bones, from early in his life.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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A Not-So-Fond Farewell to Joe Biden

Here is the sub-headline:

The old boy’s winking Irish charm never worked on me.

From The Wall Street Journal, by Opinion Writer Joseph Epstein, 24 July 2024 at 3:27 pm ET.

Here is the lede plus four:

I’m pleased that Joe Biden has left the 2024 presidential race.  I’ll be even more delighted when his term ends.  Even though the old boy has limited his interviews and public appearances more than any other president in the modern era, I long ago had more than my fill of him.

After more than 50 years in government, Mr. Biden has become the emblematic politician, which is no compliment.  He came into office promising to heal the rifts dividing the country, and instead widened them by his own leftward political turn.  He continues to call himself Catholic yet is blithely pro-choice on abortion.  Everything about him—his ideas, his language, his very smile—seems fake.

Mr. Biden doesn’t lie as often as Donald Trump, but his lies are grander.  He claims to have inherited high inflation and worked sedulously to lower it.  He claims to have enlarged and held the North Atlantic Treaty Organization together.  He claims to have created millions of new jobs.  None of these claims hold up under even cursory investigation.

He frequently recounts uninteresting advice his working-class father gave him.  He never misses a chance to tell you that he lost his son Beau, who served in Iraq but didn’t die there.  No Irishman is ever taken in by Irish charm.  If I am any measure, it doesn’t work so well on Jews either.

So many of Mr. Biden’s sentences begin with the word “look.”  A great many others never find their ending.  During speeches he is imprisoned by the teleprompter; interviews often find him clutching his notes.  When he leans in to whisper what he takes to be crucial sentiments, as if speaking in italics, he doesn’t deliver.  He has managed to seem, somehow, fragile yet unsympathetic.

President Biden can not seem to let the truth be the truth.  He must embelish it, not by polishing it, but by blowing it all out of proportion.  His exageration of the truth is so bad that people are able to easily see through it.  It is blatant and even the best efforts of his Press Secretary, Ms Karine Jean-Pierre, can not sustain his fabrications.♠

What disappoints me is that my friends tend to trust President Biden as a truth teller and to believe what he dishes out to us.  Otherwise, how do we explain his election in 2020?  In a previous bid for the White House he stumbled when he took Welsh MP Neil Kinnock's life story and made it his own and the trick became public.  But, it wasn't his first act of plagerism.  He seems not to have learned from his time in Law School.  Isn't this something he should have learned in High School?

Hat tip to the Howie Carr Show.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  I do not envy the Press Secretary her job.  She must keep straight President Biden's fantasy life and continually provide support to his tall tales.  She is doing a hard job very well.