The tornado outbreak last week that claimed dozens of lives in several states — especially Kentucky, which was hardest hit — was an object...
The tornado outbreak last week that claimed dozens of lives in several states — especially Kentucky, which was hardest hit — was an object lesson in how ill-equipped President Joe Biden is for the job he holds.
During a speech at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, hours after the storms, Biden confused the type of weather event that caused the deaths (calling it a “hurricane” early in the speech) and then insisted that he was certain climate change played a role in causing the tragedy, no matter what kind of weather it was. That should have been enough to alert the White House handlers that the solemnity of the moment needed to be impressed upon Biden.
Instead, he went to Kentucky and cracked a joke right off the bat — because that’s just the kind of president we have right now.
Speaking in Dawson Springs, Kentucky, on Wednesday, Biden decided to jape about the state, implying the best thing he could think of to emerge from the Bluegrass State was the woman who had married his brother.
Watch the video here, and note the wreckage from the storm is clearly evident in the background.
“I kid and say the best thing to ever come out of Kentucky is my sister-in-law,” Biden said during his remarks. “And she is, uh, all blue. She went to [the University of Kentucky], then she went to Duke Law School, and she’s married to my brother, and we’re all thankful [for her] marrying my brother.”
In other words, standing in one of the state’s most storm-damaged towns, the only good thing Biden could think about regarding Kentucky was his family. Making tragedy about those close to him and not those who have suffered is actually a theme for the president, unsurprisingly.
After the loss of 13 American troops in a suicide bombing during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, Biden reportedly infuriated several of the Gold Star families during private meetings when he made the killing of their loved one about the death of his son Beau. Even though Beau Biden served in the Army National Guard, his death from cancer came years after his deployment to Iraq.
What do you know — the sister-in-law joke didn’t make it into the president’s tweet about his visit, which was appropriately solemn. It’s almost as if he isn’t writing these things:
(Had Biden actually written it, it might have said: “No red states or blue states, just Americans giving each other a helping hand. But no, seriously folks, the second-best thing to come out of Kentucky is the Derby, and that’s where the list ends for me. Haha! We have fun here, we do.”)
As if to prove my point about the media’s capacity for distraction when it comes to the president, here are some tweets from ABC News about the president’s speech:
Here are some other tweets from ABC News about the president’s visit:
The number of tweets about the ill-conceived joke was a solid zero.
Not that the remark should overshadow the entire visit, but it merits a mention — and not just because the media would collapse the entire visit around the joke if it had been Donald Trump who made it.
For starters, the joke played into a wider problem with the president, which is that he seems to have lost his tenuous grasp on what constitutes appropriate behavior.
I’m going to assume, safely, that no speechwriter played a role in convincing him to fit this bit of hilarity into his remarks. What, then, are we to make of a president who thinks this is the time and the place to pull out this gem about storm-ravaged Kentucky?
For that matter, the joke served as a repudiation of the myth that Biden is a blue-collar guy who can empathize with working-class voters in the South and Midwest. One can’t really see him, for instance, going to Los Angeles or New York City and saying the best thing about those places was his sister-in-law.
Kentucky, though? That seems to fit the modus operandi of the elite Democrat perfectly — and the president is no exception.
If it were someone different, too, it’d arguably pose much less of a problem. Voters will get to decide, in the not-too-distant future, whether to further empower a man who’s undergoing diminishing cognitive returns before their eyes.
And after the 2022 midterms, in a little less than three years, the White House assures us we’ll be voting on whether or not to keep him as president.
In many ways, the 2020 election was a referendum on the presidential bearing of Donald J. Trump. Might voters be having a bit of buyer’s remorse when they see the current occupant of the office joking — as he spoke in the epicenter of a storm that’s confirmed as of Thursday to have killed 88 people, according to The Associated Press — that the best thing about the state of Kentucky is one of his relatives?
One is tempted to ask what Biden was thinking when he uttered this. The problem is that he wasn’t thinking — and there’s no amount of spackle the media can apply that makes that look normal.
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