JIM GERAGHTY: Joe Biden Emerges — to Lament the Reversing of His Record.
Since leaving the presidency, the 82-year-old Biden hasn’t completely disappeared from the public eye, but his public appearances have been few and far between.
He’s done one major televised interview, with the ladies of The View. His office has intermittently released brief statements, such as his insistence that he “made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.” (Note the irony of Biden insisting he was always aware of what he was doing and signing and did not simply trust his staff’s directions and requests . . . through a brief written statement distributed to the press by his staff.)
As with Biden’s speech to the conference of the National High School Model United Nations, there was not a lot of media coverage of the remarks of the former president, beyond a little local television coverage. As far as I can tell, no transcript of Biden’s remarks has been released.
Perhaps the most extensive coverage of Biden’s remarks that we can find are from the Wall Street Journal, in an article under the headline, “Biden, in Rare Remarks Since Presidency, Warns His Accomplishments Are Coming Undone.”
Biden is quoted as saying, “Many of the things I worked so damn hard, that I thought I changed in the country, are changing so rapidly.”
You can almost hear everyone who voted for Trump answering, “Yes, that’s the point.”
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Let’s also point out that if Biden is lamenting that his legacy is being destroyed right before his contact-lens-assisted eyes . . . he has a lot to do with that! In the past months, we’ve seen whole bunch of books detailing how a slew of videos taped for the 2020 convention were deemed unusable, as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all”; how he couldn’t remember the names of national security adviser Jake Sullivan and communications director Kate Bedingfield; how Senator Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that the president had no idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy; how in the early months of 2024, the Biden campaign’s high command debated whether Biden could get away with refusing to debate Trump; and how Biden couldn’t get through a single 2024 debate practice session.
Just how durable a legacy did Biden and his top staffers think they were building under President Mr. Magoo?
Finally, from that article in the Journal:
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., SHRM’s president who joined Biden on stage after his address, asked him what he would most like to be remembered for.
“Being a good father,” Biden responded.
Beg pardon?
Oh, that’s right, the former president already did that.
But not a very good grandfather: “‘Every single day, I contact every single one of my grandchildren,’ Biden, who as president repeatedly failed to acknowledge the existence of the granddaughter his son, Hunter, fathered out-of-wedlock, claimed.”