Our Empathizer-in-Chief has no clothes.
The crisis in Afghanistan, mushrooming with the force and immensity of a nuclear bomb, is clearly a huge nuisance for President Biden. His demeanor this week is that of a sullen 12-year-old boy whose summer vacation has been cut short.
He had to be dragged from Camp David to address the nation last Monday, and as the week went on he couldn’t believe this was still a thing. Irritation is his current mood.
Not even gentle questioning from friendly Democrat George Stephanopoulos could elicit sympathy from Joe.
About those desperate Afghans clinging to the side of an American military plane as it took off, falling to their deaths as the world watched?
“That was four days ago, five days ago!” the president snapped.
It had actually been two days prior, but that’s not my point.
Ladies and gentleman, the mask has come off.
This isn’t old age. This isn’t political defiance or mental defect.
This is stone-cold callous disregard for human life — lives lost due to Biden’s own insistence on a hasty withdrawal, keeping our allies in the dark. American civilians on the ground, now in hiding from the Taliban, were given no heads-up.
As for the Afghans who risked their lives, and the lives of their family members, to help us — President Biden doesn’t care about them either.
The other Joe Biden, the one you thought you knew, was a façade, a charade, a mirage, a con.
Biden has built a political career on grief. There hasn’t been a stump speech or interview given where he once hesitated in mining the tragic deaths of his first wife and 13-month-old daughter in a car crash in 1972, or the trauma of his two surviving sons Hunter and Beau, or Beau’s death from cancer in 2015.
Joe Biden wrote books about empathy and grief. He commodified and exploited his losses. He became D.C.’s go-to eulogizer (the New York Times published a loving taxonomy). He has given untold interviews in his expertise.
“The things that have given me solace and help, I try to pass on,” Biden told People magazine days before the 2020 election. “What I find is that I think the worst thing I can do is when someone confides in me, and I can feel the pain, to just sort of say, ‘Well, it’s going to be okay,’ and move on.”
Is there a more apt description for President Biden’s performance last week?
He literally told the world that despite the chaos and atrocities we’re seeing, despite his utter lack of a plan or interest in developing a plan, that it’s all somehow going to be okay.
Not hard to see why. The mainstream media has cheered this biliousness on for decades, never harder than during Biden’s campaign against Trump.
And yes, for our go-to thought experiment: Imagine if this were Trump. There would be calls for impeachment. The mainstream media would explode in righteous fury. Over at New York magazine there’s more indignation and moral outrage over what’s happening on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” than what Biden didn’t do last week — no exaggeration.
How did we get here? Let’s look at our pre-election media coverage:
“Joe Biden Doesn’t Just Feel Your Pain. He Has Lived It.” The L.A. Times, Sept. 14, 2020.
“Empathy Matters.” CNN, April 15, 2020.
“Joe Biden: An Empathetic Leader Whose Time Has Come.” Forbes, Nov. 7, 2020
“Joe Biden . . . and the Importance of Empathy.” Time magazine, Nov. 7, 2020.
“Through [his] journey of grief, Biden . . . forged within himself greater empathy and compassion,” said the Atlantic, two weeks before the election. “Biden may just be the person America needs.”
All this slobbering over Joe, despite his inside-the-Beltway reputation as a lifelong political hack, a mediocrity who understood nothing of foreign policy, geopolitical strategy, or who cared at all about the human cost of war.
Here is the late Richard Holbrooke’s account of a 2010 conversation with Biden, as recorded in his diaries and reprinted in the 2019 book “Our Man”:
“. . . [Biden] said we’re going to lose the presidency in 2012 if unemployment remains high, and Afghanistan was the other issue that could pull us down and we have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam.
“This shocked me and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us. He said, ‘F–k that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.’”
“F—k that” is clearly Biden’s guiding principle here.
Babies tossed over barbed wire at Hamid Karzai Airport? Nary a word.
This despite what a traumatized British soldier told the UK Independent last Thursday.
“The mothers were desperate,” the officer said. “They were getting beaten by the Taliban. They were shouting, ‘Save my baby!’ and threw the babies at us. Some of the babies fell on the barbed wire . . . By the end of the night, there wasn’t one man among us who wasn’t crying.”
This is last train out of Berlin stuff.
Yet it wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that Biden announced he would be staying in the White House, rather than retreating to his Delaware home for some R&R.
After all, the optics demand it. As for the Taliban’s death squads going door to door, the Americans told to stay in hiding, the reports of an Afghan woman burned to death for “bad cooking,” the fate of those we promised to protect?
F—k that.
