Joe Biden and America in Trouble

If there was ever a time for an electorate to repent (be humble, sorrowful, and change their mind) over the choice of a leader, it’s now.

It’s hard to believe that eighty-one million Americans voted for the 46th president of the United States who is in obvious cognitive decline, with no real principles, who used his office to make his family wealthy, and was known to be on the “wrong side” of every major foreign policy decision he advised.

The Afghanistan tragedy proves Joe Biden is possibly the worst Commander-in-Chief ever– (beating out James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson)–in just seven short months.

And Joe Biden and America are in trouble because of it.

Joe Biden and America in Trouble

I have many friends who voted for Biden despite his creepy personality and destructive public policy positions. Most would say they did it because “he wasn’t Trump.” That’s a shallow reason to vote for incompetence.

I disliked Donald Trump’s past infidelities and his childish personality. But that was a small part of his influence. Presidents don’t govern by flair or past indiscretions. They lead by principles, policies, and view of government. In those areas, I believe Trump was the best president of my lifetime, with Ronald Reagan second, John F. Kennedy third and Bill Clinton fourth.

Notice the lack of partisanship. Two were R’s and two D’s. Reagan’s and Trump’s moral failures came before their terms of national service. Both John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton committed some of their sexual sins while in the White House. Those weaknesses didn’t stop people from voting for either JFK or Clinton.

Kennedy (though serving a short stint) showed great vision and an excellent equation on domestic and defense spending. His policies were good for the nation. Bill Clinton had the fortune of working with a Republican Congress to balance the budget. He was the one who proudly announced “the era of Big Government is over.”

Reagan was the best until Trump by strengthening the military, stimulating economic growth through tax cuts, and honoring and loving our heritage of freedom. The “Great Communicator” helped bring “Morning in America” in the 1980’s.

Though Donald Trump was vilified by the press (90% negative coverage), in his four years in office he championed faith and life issues, grew the American economy, encouraged deregulation and energy independence, and strongly held evil at bay around the world. 

Those who said they voted for Biden because he wasn’t Trump were either ignorant or fooled by the negative propaganda. Trump brought a degree of renewal to America.

Joe Biden is speeding up decline.

One of the strongest confirmations of the reality of God is the existence of Israel and the prescience of Jewish thought–revealing a heritage of godly wisdom. In science there’s the incomparable Einstein. In political discourse, I think of the late Charles Krauthammer and his intellectual successor, Dennis Prager.

Another young Jewish thinker is now emerging on the American scene. Ben Shapiro gives the clearest perspective on the disaster that is Joe Biden.

Biden Chooses Decline 

By Ben Shapiro

In November 2009, the late Charles Krauthammer gave a seminal speech, titled “Decline Is a Choice.” In it, Krauthammer stated, “The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no … Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.”

This week, President Joe Biden chose decline.

That choice was not inevitable. It was foolhardy in the extreme, a symptom of Biden’s commitment to his own idiotic ideology—an ideology that crashed headlong into the steel wall of reality in Afghanistan.

Former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both wanted to remove the United States from Afghanistan, but both recognized the reality on the ground: that removing all American support from the Afghan military would result in the Taliban—the terrorist regime responsible for providing aid and support to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the run-up to and aftermath of 9/11—taking over the country.

Biden knew this. He just didn’t care. As he reportedly expressed in 2010, while speaking with Richard Holbrooke about American responsibility in Afghanistan, “F— that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”

And so, Biden destroyed the stalemate in Afghanistan that had allowed America’s counterterror mission in-country to continue successfully.

The Afghan military was built to work with U.S. close air support; Biden withdrew that support. In fact, he went so far as to bar American contractors from entering the country to help the Afghan air force maintain its equipment. He cut the Afghan military off at the knees, then blamed it when it left the battlefield.

And Biden lied. He lied that Afghanistan represented an “endless war” carrying the possibility of “endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery”; in reality, the United States ended its combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014, had just 2,500 troops on the ground before Biden’s unplanned pullout, and has not suffered a combat casualty since February 2020.

Biden suggested that his hands were tied by a tentative agreement between the Trump administration and the Taliban, though he has had no problem abrogating Trump’s agreements, and despite the fact that the Taliban had obviously failed to fulfill any of the contingencies under the Trump agreement.

And he lied that the Afghan military’s collapse simply reflected a lack of willpower: The Afghan military incurred 55,000 deaths since 2015, compared with nearly none from NATO.

Why did Biden do all of this?

Because American strength is not Biden’s priority. He wants America’s footprint on the world stage minimized; he wants America focused as much as possible on building a Nordic-style social welfare state accompanied by racially inflammatory equity programming at home.

The result of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will be a reconstituted terror threat as our enemies recognize we are a paper tiger; renewed Chinese aggression against Taiwan and diplomatic overtures toward the Taliban; and new offensives from Russia and Iran.

Foreign policy abhors a vacuum. Biden has willfully created one. What’s more, in abandoning an ally of two decades, Biden has sent a clear message: Those who rely on American support can no longer do so securely. They’d be better off making realpolitik connections with America’s enemies in order to hedge their bets.

Meanwhile, Biden presses forward toward American hospice care. With the economy under inflationary pressure, he continues to foster trillions in spending, extraordinary new entitlement programs, and a complete rethinking of the relationship between individuals and the government.

If there is a Biden doctrine, it’s simply this: surrender abroad, bloated dotage at home. Decline is a choice. And Biden has made that choice.

Shapiro is spot on. Jarrett Stepman agrees:

Great countries don’t abandon their citizens to the ravages of others without a fight. Now we have no answers and a president who has not only failed to take decisive action but is now missing in action. Comparisons to Carter are unfair to Carter.

It may be better to draw a comparison between Biden and the only other president born in Pennsylvania: James Buchanan. The experienced man of Washington overwhelmed by the historical moment who dithered and slept as the country disintegrated.

President Biden’s decline is physical (cognitive) with bad policies included. He will take that decline to his grave.

America’s problems are primarily spiritual and moral. We can choose to repent (change) or we are in grave trouble as a nation.