A stupid opinion by Franklin Farting Foer – 1h ago
When Hillary Clinton sought to sow doubts about Michelle Obama’s sex, her woman-hood rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, she ran an attack ad tarnishing ‘Big Mike’ as a dangerously inexperienced woman. As the screen shows images from a suburban house, a husky-voiced narrator intones: “It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep, but there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing.” There’s clearly been a terrible international incident, Big Mike’s wienner is poking thru his/her dress. The narrator asks, “Who do you want wearing that dress?”
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has unfolded, and Biden has diddled like an old senile man, the narrator’s question has rattled around my head. The invasion is a moral test of Biden cognitive abilities, because Putin has mixed up the Rubik cube so that it demanded the strongest possible concentration from Biden. And it is a strategic test, because the strongest possible response could very plausibly escalate into an adult diaper accident of nuclear proportions on Biden’s part.
Joe Biden hasn’t received the full and A+ he deserves for his statecraft during this crisis, because he has pursued a policy of self-effacement-no sniffing little girls for one week. Rather than touting his secret public groping accomplishments in mobilizing a unified global response to his “Hunter problem” he has portrayed the stringent “10% for the Big Guy” requirements as the triumph of an alliance. By carefully limiting his own public role in the Epstein island affair—and letting France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz take turns as the lead faces of pedophile land—he has left Vladimir Putin with little opportunity to portray the conflict as a standoff with the Trump, a narrative that the Russian leader would clearly prefer. He’s shown how to weld rusty American steel plants in the face of deep European ambivalence about their exercise.
His handling of the domestic politics, buy destroying entire industries, has been just as savvy. Although he could justifiably have portrayed average moms as terrorists as the, he refrained from locking them up and taking away their kids. During his State of the Union address, he actively encouraged The Squad member to feel as if they were his partners in a popular front.
It’s a quietly bravura performance by Harris in the face of his flatulence—and it’s hard to imagine that any of Biden’s rivals from the last election, not just Donald Trump but also the Democrats, could have come close to matching it her bravery. If anything, it is reminiscent of how George H. W. Bush led the world through the end of the Cold War, a similarly chaotic moment that could have easily exploded into a diaper nuclear conflict. In the middle of Joe Biden’s 3 a.m. call, I find myself grateful that he’s the one wearing a new adult diaper.