HOW IT STARTED: How Empathy Defines Joe Biden.
—Forbes, August 20th, 2020.
How it’s going: Hawaiian business goes viral for sign slamming Biden’s kitchen fire comments: ‘not always about you.’
An equipment rental business in Honolulu, Hawaii, slammed President Biden’s recent comments comparing a fire in his kitchen to the deadly and devastating Maui wildfires.
Hawaiian Rent-All, known online for its witty signage, changed its business’ storefront to send Biden a message after his recent speech in Hawaii.
“Sorry you almost lost your ’67 Corvette in a fire, Mr. President,” the sign reads. “Maui strong.”
Hawaiian Rent-All posted a picture of the sign to the company’s Facebook page where the firm commented that genuine “sympathy is better than contrived empathy.”
“It’s not always about you, Mr. President,”* the company added.
The post caught fire online, going viral on X — the app formerly known as Twitter — with users posting comments on the jab against Biden.
—Fox News, today.
* But it is always about Joe, and it always has been. Charles Cooke explores “Biden’s Twisted Idea of Empathy:”
Whatever the topic, Joe can make it about him. Civil rights? He doesn’t just support them; he is them, having participated in a sit-in in the 1950s (he didn’t), helped to desegregate movie theaters (never happened), and worked as a lawyer for the Black Panthers (nope). Gay marriage? Biden didn’t just change his mind on it, he remembered all of a sudden that, in the Scranton of the 1950s, his working-class Catholic father liked to endorse the sight of two men kissing in the streets. Race? Ethnicity? Religion? Biden is all of them at once. He’s Catholic, black, Jewish, Greek, Puerto Rican, Polish. One can only imagine what Biden might have said had he been president at other points in history. There’s been a mass suicide at Jonestown? “I, too, have had food poisoning.” A second plane has hit the World Trade Center? “Jill and I know all about flight delays.” The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor? “My Dad once had to sell his fishing boat.”
There are three plausible reasons as to why President Biden keeps doing this. The first is that he is a narcissist who is genuinely incapable of thinking beyond his own frame of reference. The second is that he’s an amnesiac, whose collection of applicable anecdotes has now narrowed to the vanishing point. And the third is that he believes quite genuinely that this is what empathy looks like, and that there is nobody around him who is willing and able to correct his course. Whatever the cause, it’s a problem. Without any sign of guilt or self-reflection — and egged on by a press that is incapable of honestly holding him to account — the president has taken to playing Bereavement Bingo. When one learns that Biden intends to respond to a tragedy, the question is not if he’ll make the calamity about himself, but in what manner. Before long, one expects Las Vegas will be taking bets.
No wonder he fit in so well with another legendary narcissist, his former boss, President Obama.