Joe Biden did a news conference from Hanoi last Sunday. He did himself no favors with the execution. You can explain and excuse all you want about schedules and lack of sleep on international flights, but the bottom line is always execution, and his left a lot to be desired. When questions were kept simple and directly to the point he managed to get through the answers with logic and charm but when things got a little complicated, he wandered and lost his point. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a big Biden fan. I think he has been the best President in decades, but public speaking is no longer his strong point. He has always had to battle being a stutterer and now he is seemingly faced with organizational problems.
This doesn’t appear to be anything that slows him down while making Presidential decisions, as can be seen by his admirable output as our national leader. But it could be a problem when he gets into the debate season.
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It proved to be a bad weekend for the Biden administration and the media and if any more evidence was needed, the interview between Margret Brennan and Kamala Harris lays there like a giant egg. Basically, Brennan wanted to know if there was a specific number of weeks that Harris and the administration would accept before an abortion cutoff. Harris either wouldn’t or couldn’t answer the question. It looked very bad.
If the American public re-elects Joe Biden as President in 2024, they will be doing it with the knowledge that Kamala Harris could possibly become president during the next four years. That means it behooves her to be an asset to his re-election. Right now, I don’t see that she is and that’s puzzling because she is an intelligent, functional person who has gotten herself elected to many posts during her career.
The point, after all, of the interview was to make Harris look more electable. She is in a very different place now than she was coming up to the 2020 election. Then she was Biden’s running mate, and he was really the only consideration. Most voters didn’t spend two minutes thinking about her. She was just the Veep on the ticket who was there to collect the black women, and ultra-Liberal votes. Now she is the running mate of a man wo might not live to finish his term and we must consider how we feel about Kamala Harris as President.
I know she was trying to make a point about Roe v Wade and how we want it returned exactly as it was, but her obstinate refusal to address the basis of the question, which was how many weeks the Democrats are willing to give to get abortion back and legal, made her look inflexible and unable to address anything but party line. I don’t think Kamala Harris thinks that way and I want her to show us she doesn’t.
We know what Harris wants. We know what the Democrats want but you rarely get what you want by being inflexible. Joe Biden, in his wisdom, has shown us that over and over as he has racked up one accomplishment after another. It’s a lesson we should all learn, especially Kamala.
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Biden’s trip to Vietnam for the G20 bought out the need for Americans, including many in government, to better understand foreign policy. If there is ever going to be a time when Americans in general need to understand it, that time is now. You all know how I feel about polls and that is magnified when we are dealing with something that the American public knows very little about, like foreign policy. This small insight from a recent CBS poll may be very revealing.
Opinion on our current policies for dealing with China:
Too tough 5%
Too Easy: 57%
About Right 38%
On the prospects for world peace stability:
Optimistic 29%
Pessimistic 71%
Biden is making our position in world:
Stronger 24%
Weaker 50%
Not much effect 25%
Of course, everything is relevant, but when one compares where we are now in our international stature, to where we were when Trump was kicked out of office a little less than three years ago, the figures above are a joke and the opinions of the grossly ignorant.
According to this poll, more than twice the number of people think Biden’s policies are making us weaker rather than stronger in the world, but when Trump finished kissing the asses of the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea, wrecking the nuclear pact with Iran and attacking our allies in NATO we were at the nadir of our international power, with China flexing it’s muscles all over the South China Sea, North Korea testing missiles and nuclear weapons at will and Russia figuring that we didn’t have the military or the will to stop them from invading Ukraine.
Less than three years later, under Biden’s leadership, we have halted China’s economic takeover of the world and relegated them to a distant second, stopped their muscle flexing over Taiwan, put them on notice that we will not tolerate further incursions in the South China Sea and formed an alliance with India, Japan, South Korea and Australia to keep China’s military at bay. We have almost, but not quite, stopped North Korea’s nuclear testing and we have backed up Ukraine to the point where they are counter attacking against Russia’s failing army in the Donbas.
Biden has rebuilt our Western alliances by talking sense to the nations of NATO and reenergizing that organization to protect themselves and the entirety of the European continent from Russia’s thirst for expansion.
Look at these facts and look at that poll and you will understand the desperate need for education for the American public.
The American educational system has always featured a push in its secondary schools for higher math in its curriculum. It would appear that the place for higher math is in college when one has chosen a career path that needs that discipline. What our students are not currently getting in high school is civics, more realistic history, and current events. If we taught those subjects maybe our voters would have some concrete idea of who to vote for and how to do it.
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As if to prove that he has no power or standing in either his party or the government, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy announced this week that he is opening an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
This is, of course, a joke, pure pandering to a few powerful far right nuts like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Matt Gaetz.
We all saw this kind of pathetic stunt coming when it took McCarthy 15 votes to nail down the Speakership. It was glaringly clear then, that he had given up everything except his stones to get the one job he had always wanted, and Taylor-Greene had a firm grip on them. Well, he got the speakership and now it’s getting in the way of our government’s ability to function. But McCarthy cares nothing for that. As long as he can hold onto the tiny bit of power that the likes of Gaetz and Taylor-Greene allow him, he is satisfied.
The whole thing is so outrageous, such a huge lie that even many GOP congressmen and House members are calling it out. French Hill, Lisa Murkowski and many others have spoken out so far. Others will follow.
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