Rusted out Joe makes himself heard
Actions speak louder than words, but words are important, too, especially when they come from a president.
In recent days, President Joe Biden has delivered two resounding addresses, one dealing with the crisis in the Middle East, the other with the crisis of democracy at home.
Both statements give the lie to the idea that Biden is on the verge of mental collapse, or has already crossed over into the land of the ever-forgetful; nothing could be further from the truth. His hands and face may be drawn with age, he may be squinty-eyed and his gait slow, but Biden is a clear-thinking chief executive.
For those of you who are doubters, as Casey Stengel used to say, “you can look it up,” on YouTube.
Late last month, Biden was in Tempe, Ariz., to help inaugurate the John McCain National Library at Arizona State University. According to the university, the library, in addition to holding McCain’s papers, will be a “gathering spot to learn more about leadership, democracy, and national security.”
The late senator and Republican presidential candidate and Biden were longtime friends, despite their political differences. The president said he urged McCain to court and marry Cindy McCain. “I’ll take credit for you guys,” Biden imparted to the senator’s widow, who moments before introduced him to the ASU audience.
“In the end, John McCain thought about the beginning,” the president said. “Five years ago, as John was dying from brain cancer, John wrote a farewell letter to the nation….
“His words tracked back centuries to America’s founding and then toward a triumphant future. Here is what John wrote, ‘We are citizens of the world, the world’s greatest republic. A nation of ideals, not blood and soil. Americans never quit. They never hide from history. America makes history.’
“And John was right.”
In his Arizona address, Biden was tough on the man who disparaged McCain’s service to his country as a Navy fighter pilot. Shot down over Hanoi in 1967, McCain spent five-and-a-half brutal years in the North Vietnamese dungeon facetiously regaled as the Hanoi Hilton. In 2015, Donald Trump, who never even sniffed military service, said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero because he was captured. I like people who aren’t captured, OK?”
Following McCain’s death in 2018, Trump was quoted as saying, [the] “guy is a … loser.”
In an unusual direct reference to his predecessor, Biden noted, “Trump says the Constitution gave him ‘the right to do’ whatever he wants as president. I’ve never even heard a president say that in jest. Not guided by the Constitution or by common service and decency toward our fellow Americans but by vengeance and vindictiveness.”
Trump and his MAGA supporters threaten “the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions” by casting shade on the election process and by attempting to break down other norms, Biden said.
“Democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle. They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up or condemn the threats to democracy, when people are willing to give away that which is most precious to them because they feel frustrated, disillusioned, tired, alienated.”
According to the New York Times’ Peter Baker, Biden spoke from a place of raw emotion on Tuesday of last week in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks that claimed the lives of hundreds of Israeli civilians, including scores of children and the elderly.
“Even for a president who often wears his emotions on his sleeve, it was a striking moment,” Baker reported.
Biden recounted the horror – “young people massacred … women raped and paraded like trophies … and thousands wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured.
“The attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”
The president recounted a snippet of a conversation he had with the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, when he was a young senator, around the time of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
“‘Don’t worry, Senator Biden, we have a secret weapon here in Israel. We have no place else to go.'”
I get it that his words can be clanky, his sentences can be run-ons, and he’s way too fond of such colloquialisms as “listen, man” and “think about this” and “I’m serious.” Besides, he walks the walk of the aged.
And yet for all of that, Joe Biden is not only mentally acute, he’s morally fit for both the office and the times.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.