CHARLES COOKE GOES OUT ON A LIMB: Joe Biden Is an Asshole.

At Axios, Alex Thompson reports the apparently surprising news that Biden “has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him.” Among the president’s favorite admonitions are: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!,” and “Get the f**k out of here!” Per Thompson, these revelations are important because, like his refusal to acknowledge his own granddaughter, they threaten to damage Biden’s “carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle.” But that image is for cretins and sycophants. Joe Biden has never been a “kindly uncle” — or anything approaching one. For his whole life, Joe Biden has been a plodding mediocrity with a Delaware-sized chip on his shoulder. What about him, I wonder, would not lead him to shout stupidly at people? He’s a bully. Check. He’s insecure. Check. He’s senile. Check. He is hostage to his precarious record of lies. Check. His anger is as inevitable as the sunset.

We don’t need Axios to tell us about it. In 1987, during his first run for president, Biden was in spiffing form. Asked by a voter in New Hampshire about his academic record, Biden grew unhinged. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” he said, before rattling off a sequence of falsehoods that ought by rights to have ended his career. He said that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. He did not. He said that he went to that law school on a “full academic scholarship.” He did not. He said that he “won the international moot-court competition,” “was the outstanding student in the political science department,” and “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.” None of that was true. In closing, Biden betrayed what the exchange was really about. “I’d be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like,” he jabbed. Mr. Dunning-Kruger, your table is ready.

Character matters. Biden has none. As president, the man spends his days considering how he can mislead voters about his record, how he can get around the Constitution, and how he can demagogue the other branches. All that talk in 2020 about “the soul of America”? That was guff. Flotsam. Malarkey. There is nothing the man won’t lie about. He lies about inflation. He lies about gas prices. He lies about the deficit. He lies about the border. He lies about having been arrested for his civil-rights activism, and about having been raised by Puerto Ricans and Greeks and Jews, and about having traveled to Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a Navy hero, and about his son’s death, and about the crash that killed his first wife and baby daughter, and about the small kitchen fire that he had 15 years ago, which, in his inimitable style, he has managed to transmute into “having had a house burn down with my wife in it.” In 1987, he plagiarized a speech by the British politician Neil Kinnock that contained a completely different backstory from his own. In 2012, he accused Mitt Romney of wanting to put African Americans “back in chains.” Push a pin into a history book, and you’ll find Joe Biden lying about something.

You can see Biden being an asshole as early as this 1974 profile by Kitty Kelley:

In his office in the New Senate Office Building surrounded by more than 35 pictures of his late wife*, Biden launched into a three-hour reminiscence. It wasn’t maudlin—he seemed to enjoy remembering aloud. He was the handsome football hero. She was the beautiful homecoming queen. Their marriage was perfect. Their children were beautiful. And they almost lived happily ever after. “Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports. Most guys don’t really know what I lost because they never knew what I had. Our marriage was sensational. It was exceptional, and now that I look around at my friends and my colleagues, I know more than ever how phenomenal it really was. When you lose something like that, you lose a part of yourself that you never get back again.

“My wife was the brains behind my campaign. I would never have made it here without her. It’s hard to imagine ever going through another campaign without her. She was the most intelligent human being I have ever known. She was absolutely brilliant. I’m smart but Neilia was ten times smarter. And she had the best political sense of anybody in the world. She always knew the right thing to do.

“Let me show you my favorite picture of her,” he says, holding up a snapshot of Neilia in a bikini. “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?

“My beautiful millionaire wife was a conservative Republican before she met me. But she changed her registration. At first she didn’t want me to run for the Senate—we had such a beautiful thing going, and we knew all those stories about what politics can do to a marriage. She didn’t want that to happen. At first she stayed at home with the kids while I campaigned but that didn’t work out because I’d come back too tired to talk to her. I might satisfy her in bed but I didn’t have much time for anything else. That’s when she started campaigning with me and that’s when I started winning. You know, the people of Delaware really elected her,” he says, “but they got me.”

Who talks like that – to the press(!) — about a recently deceased spouse? As Cooke wrote above, “Character matters. Biden has none.” It’s not just “a stutter” — it was always so.

UPDATE:

Some exceptions do apply to that “rule,” however.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Like they say:

Everyone can see that we've now reached the "pretend he's an angry alpha instead of an Alzheimer's patient" stage in the news cycle. Anyone who's cared for a loved one with dementia knows exactly what's going on here. https://t.co/2nu5gWqPIR

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 10, 2023

* UPDATE (From Ed): For years, Biden lied about both Neilia Biden’s death, and claimed the truck driver involved in the accident was drunk: Joe Biden’s false claim about drunken driver draws renewed scrutiny. “Now-retired Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the investigation as chief deputy attorney general, told Politico, ‘She had a stop sign. The truck driver did not.’ In 2008, he told [the Newark (Delaware) Post] that rumors about alcohol playing a role in the accident were ‘incorrect.’” As one person tweeted in 2019, “This is awful. Did you know for years [Biden] told people his wife and 13-month-old daughter were killed by a drunk driver, when in fact the accident was tragically her fault. The truck driver was haunted by the accident until he died.”

(Updated and bumped.)