Privately, the Beltway Establishment Has Never Respected Biden. By John Fund.
There are countless stories that will come out of the Afghan tragedy. But one of the more surprising is the extent to which liberal media outlets and the foreign-policy establishment have turned on President Joe Biden. …
Their prior investment in [their] position doesn’t fully explain the visceral and swift way in which they’ve attacked Biden and his aides for the moral and logistical nightmare of the U.S. withdrawal.
What I think we are seeing in part is pent-up frustration with a Joe Biden whom the Beltway establishment has never had much confidence or faith in.
Robert Gates, former defense secretary under Obama, famously said in his 2014 memoir that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” …
It is remarkable that officials in the once nearly leak-proof Biden administration are making their displeasure known. …
It is remarkable that officials in the once nearly leak-proof Biden administration are making their displeasure known. …
So embarrassing to those who know him best:
What is going on here? No one knows for sure, but one explanation I’ve been told several times is that media figures and the establishment sources who leak to them are boiling over with frustration at how much Biden has disappointed them.
Biden came from way behind to win the Democratic nomination in early 2020 largely owing to the onset of COVID and the primal fear Democrats had that socialist Bernie Sanders would lose to Donald Trump. Both groups latched on to Biden as a life preserver that kept afloat their hope to defeat Trump. They cosseted him, they covered for him, they pampered him incessantly, they excused his clearly slipping energy and coherence. They went to extraordinary lengths, including censorship, to protect him from stories such as the one over Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Despite all of their efforts, now Biden has insisted on embarrassing them. Make no mistake, there is a genuine collapse of confidence in Biden. …
Pot … kettle:
During the 2020 campaign, Biden certainly thought the issue [of mental competence] was fair game when directed at his rival. President Trump was well known for his meandering monologues, short attention span, and failure to listen. For Biden, that represented a basic issue of competence: He said Trump “doesn’t seem cognitively aware of what’s going on. He either reads and/or gets briefed on important issues and he forgets it, or he doesn’t think it’s necessary that he needs to know it.” …
Biden naps on the job?
“There are seldom two meetings on the presidential schedule, and there have only been a handful of trips to places other than Delaware,” [Michael McKenna, a Washington Times columnist] notes.
“Announcements of the closure of the news-making portion of the day (“lids”) have been called as early as 11 a.m. During and after the fall of Kabul, the president was at Camp David, apparently by himself.”
As for media exposure, he notes Biden has given less than ten in-person on-camera interviews, compared with the 50 that Trump and the 110 that President Obama, his former boss, had conducted by this point in their presidencies. …
Obama knew him too:
Obama wasn’t high on Biden’s strengths. Politico reported that “one Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, ‘Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.’” During the 2020 campaign, Obama told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
