Joe Biden’s last week in office
President Joe Biden gave his concluding foreign policy address Monday at the Department of State, touting his accomplishments, maintaining that he returned “normalcy” to American statecraft, and claiming the world is safer and more stable than it was four years ago. America shrugged, and by Tuesday, the speech was barely a blip in the morning newsletters. No one believed the old man. The best his friends in the press could muster was that he “meant well.” A press corps that once dedicated itself to propping up Biden’s candidacy and administration (and viciously attacking anyone who questioned his fitness to lead) was AWOL. The king’s guard fled the castle. And all we’re left with is the question of how it ever even happened in the first place. I remember as a kid I was amazed that the free American press corps hid the fact that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t walk. Over 20 minutes on his last Monday afternoon in public office, Biden lurched from region to region and area to area, claiming victory after victory. His speech was delivered with the angry yells and menacing whispers that have so marked his public decline. He muttered and slurred his words together (“Izraderfur peace and real security”). The audience was professional, holding its applause until he finished. The press was polite, if skeptical. “Biden,” the Reuters headline read, “defends foreign policy record despite ongoing crises.” CBS let its skepticism show with its headline: “Biden ... insists he is ‘leaving the next administration with a very strong hand.’” “Biden,” Michael Hirsh at Foreign Policy wrote, “meant well.” Politico’s morning newsletter included a picture from the event, but the news below was about his State Department’s floundering attempts to restore stability in the Middle East. The skepticism is completely warranted, of course. Biden’s foreign policy has been anything but steady, and from the Red Sea to Kabul and from Ukraine to Taiwan, the world is measurably less safe than when he took the oath of office. What made the skepticism so striking, however, is how incredibly absent it was from the moment he secured the nomination in the winter of 2020 to the moment he debated Trump in the summer of 2024. We needn’t detail every lie told along the way; the crucial point is that it happened at all, and no one — absolutely no one — has faced consequences for anything more specific than a general drop in viewership and readership. I remember as a kid I was amazed that the free American press corps hid the fact that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t walk. When I got a little older, I was amazed at how it covered up President John F. Kennedy’s affairs. “That would never happen today,” I thought. “They love a scandal!” Today, I realize how naïve I was about the nature of the American press, its partisan bones, and its worship of Democratic power and access. The reality is that the Washington groupthink is as dominant a feature as the lack of curiosity for inconvenient narratives, and more than anything, the narrative rules Democratic presidencies, from “Camelot” to “Hope and Change” to Joe — the next FDR. Remember when Biden first entered office? Our vaunted presidential historians like Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin assured him (and us) that he was a president of historic importance who would fundamentally lift society up with the next New Deal. In the end, that never got off the ground because they couldn’t find enough lesbian or black contractors to do the work (seriously). All the last-minute pardons of child-rapists and murderers won’t make up for that in the book of Progressive History. Remember when then-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace assured us that Biden’s inaugural address was “the best inaugural address I ever heard,” going all the way back to Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” speech in 1961? Wallace left Fox shortly after, and, in the end, CNN+ didn’t renew his contract. Remember when CNN political director David Chalian said the spotlights along the National Mall were “almost extensions of Joe Biden's arms embracing America”? Chalian is still employed, sadly. In just a few days, Biden won’t be. And all these people — Meacham, Goodwin, Wallace, Chalian — aren’t even willing to guard his legacy. He’s been exposed, and they’ve scattered in the light of day. Biden is already alone, and he hasn’t even left yet. It’s almost a shame. He always, always wanted to be president. He ran for the office four times and earned the most esteemed titles in free world politics along the way. The devil’s deal that finally delivered the Oval Office is almost Kennedy-esque in its tragedy. When Biden finally got it, he wasn’t there. After half a century in American politics, history will record him as the world’s most powerful placeholder — for a time. Sign up for Bedford’s newsletter Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.
President Joe Biden gave his concluding foreign policy address Monday at the Department of State, touting his accomplishments, maintaining that he returned “normalcy” to American statecraft, and claiming the world is safer and more stable than it was four years ago. America shrugged, and by Tuesday, the speech was barely a blip in the morning newsletters.
No one believed the old man. The best his friends in the press could muster was that he “meant well.” A press corps that once dedicated itself to propping up Biden’s candidacy and administration (and viciously attacking anyone who questioned his fitness to lead) was AWOL. The king’s guard fled the castle. And all we’re left with is the question of how it ever even happened in the first place.
I remember as a kid I was amazed that the free American press corps hid the fact that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t walk.
Over 20 minutes on his last Monday afternoon in public office, Biden lurched from region to region and area to area, claiming victory after victory. His speech was delivered with the angry yells and menacing whispers that have so marked his public decline. He muttered and slurred his words together (“Izraderfur peace and real security”). The audience was professional, holding its applause until he finished.
The press was polite, if skeptical. “Biden,” the Reuters headline read, “defends foreign policy record despite ongoing crises.” CBS let its skepticism show with its headline: “Biden ... insists he is ‘leaving the next administration with a very strong hand.’” “Biden,” Michael Hirsh at Foreign Policy wrote, “meant well.”
Politico’s morning newsletter included a picture from the event, but the news below was about his State Department’s floundering attempts to restore stability in the Middle East.
The skepticism is completely warranted, of course. Biden’s foreign policy has been anything but steady, and from the Red Sea to Kabul and from Ukraine to Taiwan, the world is measurably less safe than when he took the oath of office. What made the skepticism so striking, however, is how incredibly absent it was from the moment he secured the nomination in the winter of 2020 to the moment he debated Trump in the summer of 2024.
We needn’t detail every lie told along the way; the crucial point is that it happened at all, and no one — absolutely no one — has faced consequences for anything more specific than a general drop in viewership and readership.
I remember as a kid I was amazed that the free American press corps hid the fact that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt couldn’t walk. When I got a little older, I was amazed at how it covered up President John F. Kennedy’s affairs. “That would never happen today,” I thought. “They love a scandal!” Today, I realize how naïve I was about the nature of the American press, its partisan bones, and its worship of Democratic power and access. The reality is that the Washington groupthink is as dominant a feature as the lack of curiosity for inconvenient narratives, and more than anything, the narrative rules Democratic presidencies, from “Camelot” to “Hope and Change” to Joe — the next FDR.
Remember when Biden first entered office? Our vaunted presidential historians like Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin assured him (and us) that he was a president of historic importance who would fundamentally lift society up with the next New Deal. In the end, that never got off the ground because they couldn’t find enough lesbian or black contractors to do the work (seriously). All the last-minute pardons of child-rapists and murderers won’t make up for that in the book of Progressive History.
Remember when then-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace assured us that Biden’s inaugural address was “the best inaugural address I ever heard,” going all the way back to Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” speech in 1961? Wallace left Fox shortly after, and, in the end, CNN+ didn’t renew his contract.
Remember when CNN political director David Chalian said the spotlights along the National Mall were “almost extensions of Joe Biden's arms embracing America”? Chalian is still employed, sadly.
In just a few days, Biden won’t be. And all these people — Meacham, Goodwin, Wallace, Chalian — aren’t even willing to guard his legacy. He’s been exposed, and they’ve scattered in the light of day. Biden is already alone, and he hasn’t even left yet.
It’s almost a shame. He always, always wanted to be president. He ran for the office four times and earned the most esteemed titles in free world politics along the way. The devil’s deal that finally delivered the Oval Office is almost Kennedy-esque in its tragedy. When Biden finally got it, he wasn’t there. After half a century in American politics, history will record him as the world’s most powerful placeholder — for a time.
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Sign up to get Blaze Media senior politics editor Christopher Bedford's newsletter.
THE FIRE RISES
Unherd: Why the police ignored the rape gangs
The scandal rocking British policing is so awful because it was so well known for so long. Rather than protect vulnerable little girls, the police and journalists and politicians worked to discredit the reporters and the few champions they had. It’s finally coming to a head. Dominic Adler reports:
The statistics behind the rape gang scandal — let’s banish the wholly inadequate word “grooming” — are staggering. For over 25 years, networks of men, predominantly from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds, abused young white girls from Yeovil to London to Glasgow. The victims’ accounts are beyond depravity, unthinkable in a supposedly advanced Western democracy.
That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw firsthand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.
The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders ...
Originally Published at Daily Wire, World Net Daily, or The Blaze
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