NBC News this week published a long piece on the Biden White House collapsing, allegedly after interviewing various unnamed officials. They claim that Biden is very worried because his entire situation is a disaster.
They say he doesn’t know anything that is going on, and is very angry at the staff for not informing him. The whole thing is kind of ridiculous, as it implies Biden is aware he doesn’t know what is going on. It’s been like, close to a year ago that John Kerry said Biden wasn’t aware of the biggest diplomatic scuffle with France since World War II like a month after it started.
John Kerry admits in interview with French TV that Joe Biden had no idea about the fallout with the French from the AUKUS sub deal.
"He literally had not been aware of what had transpired" pic.twitter.com/EblvE05zKg
— POLARIS (@polarisnatsec) October 5, 2021
Usually, the government makes a bigger deal of trying to cover up the fact that Biden doesn’t know what is going on, but that made it clear. And it’s not like we all don’t see it. He has some more lucid days, and I’m sure on those days he’s angry, but most of his day is clearly spent playing with the dogs and watching reruns of Matlock.
This part was interesting though:
Amid a rolling series of calamities, Biden’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break. “Biden is frustrated. If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” said a person close to the president.
An assumption baked into Biden’s candidacy was that he would preside over a smoothly running administration by dint of his decades of experience in public office. Yet there are signs of managerial breakdowns that have angered both him and his party.
Biden is annoyed that he wasn’t alerted sooner about the baby formula shortage and that he got his first briefing in the past month, even though the crisis had long been in the making. (The White House didn’t specify when Biden got his first briefing on the formula shortage.) His nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Robert Califf, told Congress last week that the agency was sluggish and that it had made “suboptimal” decisions as parents hunted for formula on empty store shelves.
Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.
The issue came to a head when Biden ad-libbed during a speech in Poland that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.” Within minutes, Biden’s aides tried to walk back his comments, saying he hadn’t called for Putin’s removal and that U.S. policy was unchanged. Biden was furious that his remarks were being seen as unreliable, arguing that he speaks genuinely and reminding his staff that he’s the one who is president.
Asked about the staff’s practice of clarifying Biden’s remarks, the official said: “We don’t say anything that the president doesn’t want us to say.”
So, what does that even mean? He wanted to change the official policy to regime change but his staff wouldn’t let him? And this “feeds the Republican talking point” that he’s “not fully in command”? If he was fully in command, he could just fire whoever decided to change his statement, and then announce that the official US policy is now regime change in Russia.
I don’t even know how NBC News managed to print something so confusing and conflicting.
He also said during that same trip that US troops would soon be invading the Ukraine, and his staff corrected that. Did he also intend to announce an impending invasion of the Ukraine, but the White House staff forced him to change his plans?
What about the most recent example, where he said he wasn’t sending new missiles to the Ukraine and then changed his statement the next day? Obviously, that’s the same thing.
This brings us to the same question we’ve had from the beginning: who is making all of these decisions? There is no clearly visible point of single authority in the administration. It’s not even clear who organizes the denouncements of Biden’s statements.
The article also claims he’s planning a total overhaul of his staff. Who knows if that’s even true, but if he can change his staff, then the staff is not significantly in charge.
Poor old guy.
I have one message for Joe Biden: