Big Boy Biden in His Own Words
Biden opens his Big Boy press conference with a cough.
Biden held his first press conference in a year last Thursday. His staff had promoted the event all week as a “Big Boy” press conference which would demonstrate to NATO leaders and the American public that his inept performance during his debate against Trump two weeks ago that so terrified the Democratic donor class was merely an aberration and that the President still had the mojo to run the Empire.
Things didn’t start off well. In a public event earlier in the afternoon meant to show NATO solidarity (Hungary, excepted) on Ukraine, Biden introduced Zelenskyy as “President Putin,” causing the crowd to gasp. Biden paused, a befuddled look on his face. People in the room shouted: “Zelenskyy.” He finally realized his blunder, walked back to the podium, then said, “President Putin? He’s gonna beat President Putin. President Zelenskyy! I’m so focused on beating Putin, we’ve got to worry about it. Anyway…”
Then the much-heralded early evening press conference was delayed for an hour and a half. When Biden finally strode stiffly to the podium, he immediately began coughing. Though freshly tanned, Biden seemed frail to me, his voice raspy, low and uneven in pitch and tone. He didn’t have moments of aphasia, where he stared with his mouth agape into some foggy middle distance this time. But his answers to some relatively easy questions from a handful of staff-picked reporters were fractured, meandering and often simply trailed off into silence, as if he’d lost his train of thought.
Thus I was a little surprised when that doyenne of liberal pundits Rachel Maddow called Biden’s performance a master class in foreign policy: “President Biden showed a startlingly impressive command of the issues at his press conference. He is not only strong on foreign policy, he is just fundamentally right on foreign policy in the way that he talks about it. It just shows you he is a master of the foreign policy field and has been for decades in his career.”This assessment was soon followed by her MSDNC colleague Lawrence O’Donnell’s assertion that Biden had delivered: The most masterful televised presidential press conference about foreign policy…This is as good as it gets with an American president.” WH deputy press secretary Andrew Bates was even more giddy: “To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that fucking good.”
After hearing these encomia, I had to check myself. This is Joe Biden they’re talking about, right? The same Joe Biden who voted for the Iraq War, the most disastrous foreign policy debacle in US history? The same Joe Biden who backed the overthrow of Qaddafi, turning Libya into an anarchic war zone dominated by slave trading gangs? The same Joe Biden who provoked and now refuses to seek an end to a bloody, stalemated war in Ukraine? The same Joe Biden who has continued Trump’s Cuban embargo and tariffs on China? The same Biden who has spent the last 3.5 years pandering to the bone-sawing Saudi regime he called a “pariah” state during his 2020 campaign? The same Biden who refused to renegotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran? The same Biden who has armed a genocide in Gaza that may end up claiming over 200,000 Palestinian lives? The same Biden who could barely string together two complete sentences a couple of weeks ago?
An unlikely transformation, IMHO.
So I went to the White House transcript of the press conference to see if I’d somehow misinterpreted the performance of a master statesman, our American Tallyrand.
I warn you, it is not an easy read. In fact, Biden’s answers reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett’s later works exploring the thought patterns of a decaying mind, such as Malone Dies, How It Is and Company. To spare you the trauma and tedium of reading the whole debilitated discourse, I’ve culled some typical passages so you can judge for yourself whether Biden is a modern Metternich or more like Reagan in his dotage, chattering away with Nancy over a TV dinner about how he filmed the liberation of the Nazi death camps at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald…
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“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be president. So, let’s start there. Number one.”
“And the mo- — the Putin piece, I was talking about Putin, and I said, “And now” — at the very end, I said, “Here” — I mean, “Putin.” And I said, “Oh, no. I’m sorry, Zelenskyy.” And then I — I added five other names.”
“Working-class people still have — need help. Corporate greed is still at large. There are — prices — the corporate profits have doubled since the pandemic. They’re coming down.” “Look, folks, this is a — Well, anyway. I —”
“And, by the way, I come from the corporate state of the world. Delaware has more corporations than an- — you know, registered in Delaware than every other state in the — in the nation combined.”
“And, by the way, I know — remember how I got so roundly criticized for being so pro-union — not labor — union — union? “And so, what — what did I do? I was told not to go over to Europe — I mean, to Asia — including Europe, but Asia.
“The first thing about Zelenskyy asking for the ability to strike deep into Russia: We have allowed Zelenskyy to use American weapons in the near-term, in the near-abroad into Russia. Whether or not he has — we should be — he should be attacked — “
“Our military is worki- — I’m following the advice of my commander in chief — my — my — of the — the chief of staff of the military as well as the secretary of Defense and our intelligence people. And we’re making a day-to-day basis on what they should and shouldn’t g- —…”
“And about four weeks later, I got a call — that — that’s not true — probably five months later — from the president Finland, could he come and see me. Becau- — in my office, I had — I invited him to the Oval Office.”
“And you heard — I think you hear- — maybe — I can’t recall if he said it publicly or in our — in a closed meeting, but he wouldn’t mind it being repeated.”
“We’re in a situation where when — and we’ve reestablished direct contact with China after that — remember the “balloon,” quote, unquote, going down and, all of a sudden, the thing came to an end?”
“In the last administration and other administrations, where the access to that market was enticive [sic] enough to get companies to come in because they had access to over a billion people in the mar- — a — a market — not a billion, but a lot of people in the market.”
“In terms of being able to help their economy as well as — as well as help them in — as a consequence that their ability to fight in — in — in Ukraine.”
“We’re going to be in a position where the West is going to become the industrial base for it to be able to buil- — the — the ability to have all the defensive weapons that we need.”
“But what they do have control of is they are very good at controlling and running the — the public outcry that relates to how they use mechanisms to communicate with people.”
“I recommend — I know you know this because you’ve — you’ve written about it — read Putin’s speech after they moved in. What it was all about — in Kyiv — it wasn’t about just — anyway, read what his objective is.”
“We — you know, we just put together with — today, we — we had — we — I brought on — I asked the — our NATO Allies that we bring on the group from the South Pacific: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Australia — I — I already mentioned Australia.”
“The Israeli War Cabinet I’ve been — I’ve been de- — dealing with Israel since Golda Meir. I — some — some of the reporters around here who cover me all the time have heard me say this: The last — first time I met with Golda Meir, I sat ne- — across from her and her desk
“Once we got bin Laden, we should have moved on because it was not in our — no one is ever going to unite it — unite that country. I’ve been over every inch of that — not every inch — of the entirety, from the poppy fields, all the way to the north.”
“But we’re — remember what happened when — when you had the attack on Israel from — with rockets and — and intercom- — and ballistic missiles?”
“It’s time to end this war. It doesn’t mean walk away from going after Sinwar and Hamas.”
“I just have to keep ma- — moving to make sure that we get as much done as we can toward a ceasefire — a ceasefire — and get those — And, by the way, look — look at the numbers in — in Israel. I mean, I — I — my numbers are better in Israel than they are here.”
“I want to finish it — to get that finished. If tomorrow — if — if you — if we had a circumstance wherev- — the — there was a lineup, and I didn’t — hadn’t inherited what I did and we just moved things along — anyway, it’s — it’s going to change.”
“I’m determined on running, but I think it’s important that I reali- — I allay fears by seeing — let them see me out there. Let me see them out — you know, for the longest time it was, you know, “Biden is not prepared to sit with us unscripted. Biden is not prepared to” — you know, anyway.”
“We have headquarters — I forget exactly how many. I don’t want to n- — cite a number and then find out I’m off. But we have scores of headquarters in all — in all the — the — the toss-up states. We’re organized. We’re moving.”
“I’m going to be going down to the Johnson Library on — to — anyway, I’m going to be going around making the case of things that I think we have to finish and how we can’t afford to lose what we’ve done or backslide on civil rights, civil liberties, women’s rights. The — that little button we have: “Control guns, not girls.””
“And, by the way — I’ll end this — well, I — well, I’m going — not going to do that. Haley has — has to come up too.”
” I’ve taken three significant and in- — intense neurological exams by the neurolo- — by our neurosur- — a neurologist. In each case — as recently as February, and they say I’m in good shape. Okay?”
“Although I do have a little problem with my left foot because it’s not as sensitive, because I broke my foot and didn’t wear the boot. But — but I’m — I’m good. “
“The point I’m making is: I think it’s important that I — if — if my — if the neurologist tells me he thinks I need another exam — and, by the way, I’ve — I’ve laid every bit of the record out. I haven’t done — hadn’t hidde- — hadn’t hidden — hidden a thing.”
“I get overwhelming support. Overwhelming support. I won how — I forget how many votes I won in the primary. The overwhelming —”
“And so, tomorrow, if all of a sudden, I show up at a convention and everybody says, “We want somebody else,” that’s the democratic process. It’s not going to happen.”
“In my state of Delaware, which was a very — at least a purp- — it wa- — it was a red state when I started, in terms of where you now talk “red and blue.””
“I — I don’t recall most of the Democratic presidents winning my state when I was a candidate.”
Q. “Sir, respectfully, earlier you misspoke in your opening answer. You referred to Vice President Harris as “Vice President Trump.” Right now, Donald Trump is using that to mock your age and your memory. How do you combat that criticism from tonight?”
THE PRESIDENT: “Listen to him. “