What’s telling about “The Last Politician,” Franklin Foer’s history of the Biden administration, is that even when the author is trying to praise or defend the president, Joe Biden still looks completely out of his depth.
After Biden’s total failure in Afghanistan, with 13 US service members coming home in caskets, Foer rather unconvincingly writes that “grieving was his expertise … The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole once called him ‘the Designated Mourner.’”
But Biden doesn’t come off as comforting.
Confronted by a father who insists the president must “learn their stories,” Biden doesn’t respond that he will, but claims, “I do know their stories.”
Foer doesn’t even mention Biden callously looking at his watch, or how he kept bringing up his son Beau to family members who didn’t want to hear it. “Did I do something wrong?”
Biden tells press secretary Jen Psaki, “Maybe I should have handled that differently.” You think?
Foer is a good reporter and writer, but one suspects that if his subject were Donald Trump and not Joe Biden, he’d be willing to state the obvious: Grieving is no longer Biden’s expertise if it ever was. He was as tone-deaf talking to the Gold Star families as he was clueless in dealing with the Taliban.
On the topic of pulling out from Afghanistan in the first place, Foer again pulls his punches.
“When it came to foreign policy, Joe Biden possessed a swaggering faith in himself,” he writes, but fails to include the word “unwarranted.”
Is there any decision that Joe Biden has EVER gotten right?
He’s the only guy who opposed the raid to kill Osama bin Laden! “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once wrote.
Biden calls for regime change in Russia, and his staff is forced to correct him, leaving the president feeling “babied” and angry.
Yet on the rare occasion he gets it right — like a blind squirrel finding a nut — he caves to his own staff.
After taking office, he rightly predicted that reversing Trump’s policies would cause a flood of people over the border, and was shocked “when he learned that ICE might stop targeting fentanyl dealers, sex offenders and other felons.”
“They want me to increase the number of people in the country, but that’s kind of crazy,” he tells Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
It IS crazy, as is ICE letting in criminals!
Yet Biden only grouses and does nothing to stop it.
“The issue happened to be the place where he was most out of step with his evolving party’s leftward trajectory,” Foer writes.
But is he really in step with the “accomplishments” of his administration — colossal spending bills written by left-wing members of Congress — or simply an empty vessel good for signing a piece of paper?
Biden’s staff is dictating policy, correcting his statements, and making sure his public appearances are limited.
Foer concludes that Biden is “the old hack who could,” but what his own reporting concludes instead is that this is a Potemkin presidency, with a senile figurehead.
If Biden is truly “the last politician,” then good riddance.
We’ve had enough old hacks. Let’s get some young competence.