“Incompetence.”

Understanding Joe Biden’s.

It’s your mess now. Eisenhower and Kennedy in the Oval Office, December 1960. (Abbie Rowe, the White House)/ Wikimedia Commons.)

The Floutist enjoys an international readership and is committed to addressing, as best we can,  those readers and subscribers who watch America from a distance. As is very often true, it can be difficult to see into another nation’s collective life—what drives it, its structures and assumptions, the psyche it reflects. We publish the following piece with this in mind. At so fraught a moment as this, it seems to us, it is also useful to remind our American readers of the nature of Amercian power.

An earlier version of this commentary appeared in Global Bridge.

—The editors.  

29 JANUARY—During an impromptu encounter with the press at an airport the other day, a correspondent shouted at President Biden over the howls of jet engines, “Are the air strikes in Yemen working?” America’s commander-in-chief, evidently in his usual state of befuddlement, replied without thinking, “Well, when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

So have they done. The Biden regime has, since that unscheduled exchange, bombed Yemen more or less daily to no apparent effect.   

Let us consider those 11 seconds at the airport, recorded in a video that can be viewed here. As a useful microcosm, they reveal things about the world’s most powerful political figure that may not be immediately apparent—especially for those reading The Floutist from a distance. There is the extent to which Biden lives and moves in a fog, for instance—his fundamental incompetence. There is his native stupidity in matters to do with international relations, his dimness—I do not know how else to put this—and the nonsensical utterances that often result. In that brief exchange we can identify the president’s inability to shift from a fixed, and I would say mindless course in his foreign policies—as if his intent is to do the same thing over and over (to cite the familiar wisdom) and expect a different result.

Most Americans are very well aware of Joe Biden’s physical decline and ever-more-obvious mental deterioration. It is too plain to miss at this point. In a more balanced polity he would be considered unfit for office. But most Americans speak or write of these matters very seldom, and always obliquely, because the liberal authoritarians who control American media remain determined that he should be reelected to office this coming November. This makes him a perfect case of the emperor who presents himself in public with no clothes and his hailed for his finery. Biden is straight out of Hans Christian Anderson.