While the country careens toward fiscal disaster, Joe Biden is busy hobnobbing in Japan at the annual G7 conference. Never has a bigger waste of time existed outside of the World Economic Forum in Davos, but the president felt it necessary to attend instead of staying in town to negotiate a deal on the debt ceiling.
Ask yourself, is watching Biden get lost in public again really worth the time and money being spent to attend this pointless exercise? Has anything of substance come out of the G7 in the last decade?
In the video, all the other world leaders have no problem ascertaining which direction to exit the photo op. Heck, Biden is in the center of the group, so he’s even got the cheat code of being able to simply follow everyone else. Yet, he still somehow manages to get turned around and jam up the line before having to be shown the right way to go.
I mean come on, I know it’s not a big thing in a vacuum, but we don’t live in a vacuum. Biden continually gets lost in public, specifically when trying to exit any kind of stage environment. How does he find that entire process so complicated? What’s the big hang-up for him? That’s a question we all know the answer to, even if the mainstream press is too in the tank to say it.
(See: Biden Faces Down His Arch-Nemesis Gets Lost Again After Gas-Lighting)
Speaking of the mainstream press, after Biden figured out where he is, the president later chastised them for asking him questions. During an exchange, he told a reporter to “shush up” and then launched into an incoherent rant defending his strategy regarding the debt ceiling.
Putting aside the verbal fumbles shown in the above clip (that’s always to be expected), one of Biden’s tells, when he’s faced with a question he doesn’t like, is pretending that he’s an expert who’s “been there and done that.” He tells reporters that he’s done this before and that negotiations always go this way, but is that true? Do negotiations always go with one side refusing to negotiate while jet-setting off to Japan while the nation faces economic doom? Somehow, I don’t think that’s the normal script.
The thing is, Biden doesn’t have a real excuse at this point and he and his handlers know it. They had hoped that Republicans would eat themselves alive and not pass a bill to avoid a default. When McCarthy managed to corral his cause and get a well-made plan through, that changed everything. Suddenly, the White House’s top talking point, i.e. that Republicans are responsible if the nation defaults because they haven’t put forth a workable deal, died on the vine.
Regardless, I’ve been assured by the big brains of the press corps that disrespecting a reporter is literally a threat to democracy. It’s an attack on the very foundation of the country. Unless the one doing the disrespecting is a Democrat, of course.