So the last Curmudgeon checked out how Joe Biden had done during his first year as a legislator and we found out that he was making progress but that neither he nor anyone else in the Democrat’s world had any idea of how to make clear to the American public what he had already accomplished or why he hadn’t done more.
This time we’re gong to look at some of the other stuff; COVID, Afghanistan, maybe a war with Russia; the small stuff that gets caught in your teeth.
We’ll start with COVID because it was already here when he arrived in the White House.
Yes, it’s a disease and who would figure that a disease would have such a political impact but it definitely has. Maybe it’s because Trump was dumb enough to deny its existence until it was killing off a serious chunk of the citizenry or maybe it’s that there are enough of the ignorant far right to give some weight to the anti-vaccine movement or maybe it’s just that Joe never stood up behind a mike and said, “Fine, don’t take the damn vaccine! There will be less of you to vote against me in ’24.”
I know, I know! You’re not supposed to say stuff like that but everybody thinks it, even the anti-vaxers. As I said, it’s a disease, a bad one and that’s why before we could deal with it we had to find out what it was and how it worked. That took time, some false leads and a hell of a lot of experimentation. It’s interesting that the problem with COVID isn’t so much that it’s killing people but that it’s inconveniencing them. I don’t see anyone standing on a corner with a sign saying “save the sick,” but everybody is bitching about masks or having to carry around a vax card. Once again though, the Dems can’t seem to get the message out. Biden did what he was supposed to do about COVID and still they condemn him for it because nobody, including Biden or the CDC understands it yet or has any idea what the President was supposed to do about it.
Even Trump eventually did the right thing once he realized that this thing could really kill you. He hustled the drug companies, though if the truth be known and admitted, they really didn’t need much hustling. They saw the trillions in profit from the git-go.
When you get right down to it the only ones blaming Biden for COVID are the GOP and that’s because they blame him for everything.
Afghanistan is the one that I really can’t wrap my head around. Biden promised to end the war in Afghanistan when he was running. Every politician who has run for anything since Bush/Cheney started that war has promised to end it and Biden did. So instead of giving him a parade the media shit on his head. Why?
This was a real war that went on for over two decades. It ended with a bunch of crazed Afghans running after an airplane and a dozen or so people including some American soldiers getting killed by a bomb. The media went crazy over this but it seemed to be a pretty small price to pay to get out of a twenty year- war. Wars are messy. People get killed in wars, lots and lots of people. I thought we were pretty lucky to get out with the body count we did. You want to assign blame for what happened during the exit? Blame the assholes that got us into it. Blame Bush and Cheney, along with Rumsfeld and the rest of the warmongers that made up the Bush administration.
Afghanistan is a terrible country. The people there have been killing each other for a couple of thousand years. They never knew how to keep a peace and they won’t keep this one. If the government doesn’t starve the people first, they will have gunned each other down long before some other dumb country tries to invade them.
What Biden did was absolutely right. He just forgot to do the proper PR first. This should have been a triumph but a couple of greedy reporters looking for a hot story, twisted the facts and came to the wrong conclusion.
Even those who say it was the right decision but done badly are wrong. We had a frantic mob of thousands of Afghan’s trying to escape their collapsing country, God knows how many heavily armed Al Qaeda and a few hundred American combat troops all milling around an airport left unsecured by an Afghan army that had sold their guns and split. All the while, overloaded planes were taxing down runways full of people and you only end up with a casualty count of a dozen? It’s practically a miracle. It should have been a couple of thousand. Did the American forces function? You bet they did and anyone who says otherwise is a Trumpian sized liar.
Calling this anything but the right move by Biden is a lie or GOP propaganda, which we all know is the same thing.
And then there’s the war with Russia. Most people aren’t blaming Biden for it yet, because it hasn’t happened yet, but given the chance, the non-functional Democratic publicity machine will surely find a way to let old Joe take the blame – whether it happens or not.
It’s important to understand that this war should never happen, not unless someone really screws the pooch. Putin doesn’t want this war but he does want the threat of it to get him serious clout in Ukraine and maybe even a little piece of Ukrainian soil added to what he has already grabbed.
30% of Ukrainians consider Russian their native language so there’s good reason why Putin has a thing for the place. The problem he faces is that he can’t, from a political POV, afford to lose a war and he can’t, from an economic POV, afford to win one.
So all Biden has to do is show a little bit of strength and take control of what Putin as started. He must step into the breech, slap Putin on the wrist for what he as done so far and lay down an ultimatum of what we will do if he doesn’t back off. This will work if he doesn’t forget that Putin is a dictator and dictators have big egos.
Biden’s biggest problem is that his biggest weapon, the ability to shut down Russia’s gas traffic to the rest of Europe is a card he cannot play, at least not without creating havoc in the countries that rely heavily on it to survive. Germany and England are already having problems with the current gas shortage; a shutdown could crash their economies.
So yes, all of the above could be big problems for Joe Biden even though none of them are really his fault and he seems to be working diligently to solve all of them. Biden’s biggest problems are really about the Democrats inability to get the message out and his own personality. He’s just not a particularly charismatic guy. His speeches, what there is of them, are plodding and generally uninspiring. What he has going for him is that he understands governing and he’s smart enough and honest enough to know what he should be doing and how to do it. Now if the party machinery can do its job and convincingly inform the nation about what a gem they have in the White House, maybe this country can get back on the right track.