MICHAL GOODWIN DOES NOT SEE HOW AMERICA CAN GO ON UNDER BIDEN'S FUMBLING, MUMBLING AND DISASTERS FOR THE REST OF HIS TERM

It’s weak by week for old Joe Biden

 

By Michael Goodwin

 

New York Post

October 30, 2021

 

 

 

President Joe Biden's signature legislation is stuck in Congress, and he had to grovel to an offended France 

 

Another week, another series of fumbling, mumbling and disasters. How low can Joe Biden go? 

Once again, the common theme was weakness. At home and abroad, he is shrinking the presidency before our eyes. 

The diminished commander in chief visited his party members in Congress Thursday and was reduced to pleading for them to save his bacon. 

“The House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens next week,” he confessed to Democrats.

It was an extraordinary moment for a president, the ostensible leader of his party, but in reality this one is a beggar-in-chief. His focus was on the fate of two massive pieces of legislation, worth $3 trillion combined, even though the larger of the two hadn’t been written and major issues, including whose taxes would be raised, were still hotly disputed. 

Nonetheless, with his job approval tanking and needing anything he could call a victory, especially at the Scotland climate summit, the president was desperate for signs of progress. Even a mere promise that both bills would eventually be passed would have been something he could boast about.

Instead, he got the back of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ hand. 

After Biden’s closed-door meeting and a public statement in which he tried to portray progress by citing a sketchy “framework” for the social spendathon, which includes $550 billion worth of climate projects, the real power emerged from the shadows. Sanders, the Vermont socialist, flatly rejected the president’s request to pass the separate infrastructure deal first and urged his fellow travelers in the House to say no, which they promptly did. 

So the man who is supposed to be the leader of the free world cannot even lead his own party, meaning Biden headed for Europe bearing nothing except embarrassment. 

On Friday in Rome, he was again the pleader-in-chief, this time seeking forgiveness from French President Emmanuel Macron after a rupture in relations over a nuclear submarine deal in which Australia backed out of a deal with France and switched to one with the US and Great Britain.

 

President Joe Biden’s clumsiness has damaged America’s relationship with France and its president Emmanuel Macron after the botched submarine deal

 

The deal enraged France and hurt Macron politically just months before an April election. Video showed Biden looking like a scolded, sheepish child as he called events around the Australian deal “clumsy” and confessed he was not up to speed when the deal was announced. 

So if the president isn’t up to speed on major events involving key allies, who is up to speed and, most important, who is making the decisions?

Weakness here, weakness there, weakness everywhere. Even live coverage of Biden’s meeting with the pope was canceled by Vatican TV, with a few minutes airing later. Why not show the whole thing?

In both meetings, Biden was maskless, a rare sight when he is in the United States. Is the rule follow the science, or when in Rome . . . ? 

If that were all, the week would have been trouble enough. But Friday brought a disaster of another sort in the form of a report on the administration’s plan to pay up to $1 billion to illegal migrant families separated at the border by the Trump administration. The Wall Street Journal scoop was so outlandish I first thought it had to be a mistake or a pre-Halloween prank because something so fundamentally stupid can’t possibly be true. 

But of course the report is true and as such reveals two other disturbing aspects of the Biden presidency: arrogance and incompetence.

There is no rational way to explain the mere existence of settlement talks with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the migrants, and the fact the talks were held in secret, then leaked. Perhaps the aim was to complete the deal, then treat it as a fait accompli at an announcement. 

Whatever the plan, the idea is nuts on so many levels, including that it offers yet another clear signal to the cartels and people smugglers to keep bringing their caravans north. 

Uncle Sap doesn’t just open his border, he also opens his wallet! 

Sen. Tom Cotton got it right in a tweet: “It’s unthinkable to pay a burglar who broke into your home for the ‘psychological trauma’ they endured during the crime,” the Arkansas Republican wrote. “Yet the Biden admin wants to reward migrants who illegally entered our country with up to $450,000 each for just that reason. Insanity.”

Others, including Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who lost an eye in combat in Afghanistan, noted that the families of American service members killed in the line of duty receive an insurance payment of $400,000.

“Let that sink in,” Crenshaw tweeted.

 

The Biden administration has clearly gone insane with possibly paying undocumented immigrants millions for breaking the law

 

The migrant payment is hard to swallow, as is so much else that Biden is dishing out these days. The sheer volume of inanity and failure, combined with the president’s mental and physical decline, recalls a wise observation by the late economist Herb Stein that, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

 

What's happened to Biden's VP?  Kamala Harris has been conspicuous by her absence

 

It’s a hopeful thought, but doesn’t tell us how this disaster of a presidency will stop and when. Though it feels like forever, we are still in the first year of Biden’s term. And while he has been busy shrinking the presidency and avoiding the press, Vice President Kamala Harris has pulled a total disappearing act. 

Perhaps America can go on like this for four years. But I don’t see how.