Joe biden

There was a picture taken on Tuesday that says more than just a thousand words. The photograph was snapped in Sharm el-Sheikh and shows Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett seated either side of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. According to the Egyptian president’s office, they met to discuss ‘the repercussions of global developments, especially with regard to energy, market stability, and food security’ but ‘they also exchanged visions and views on the latest developments of several international and regional issues’. That’s a very wordy way of saying ‘Iran’.

You can tell that the Biden administration is getting serious. They have unleashed their ultimate weapon, cackle diplomacy. The warhead is nicknamed Harris, and it is now in Poland cackling away, endeavouring to assemble the high-level Pierogis before Russia flattens Kiev or Putin decides to go nuclear – and by 'go nuclear', alas, I mean 'go nuclear'. Some observers say that sending Kamala Harris on this mission will give her a chance to 'burnish' her foreign policy credentials. Cynical folks – and I would include myself in that group – think it is just another emission of fog by America’s first certifiably senile administration.

It’s arguably not the right moment to focus on Joe Biden’s verbal slips, but it is a little unnerving when the leader of the free world says ‘Iranians’ — or possibly ‘Uranians’ — when he means to say ‘Ukrainians’. These are dangerous times and we need politicians to speak clearly. Still, Biden got in his point across in his State of the Union address. He announced that he was closing US air space to Russian aircraft. He led a standing ovation for the Ukrainian ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova. He said that Putin is ‘now more isolated from the world than he has ever been’.

‘He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.’ So once said Robert Gates, the former US defence secretary, of the now president Joe Biden. We don’t yet know if Biden is wrong about the current Ukraine crisis. We may be about to find out. His speech on Tuesday was at least competent, if not entirely coherent. ‘Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called ‘countries’ on territory that belongs to his neighbours?’ asked the president, in one of his now all-too-familiarly infirm attempts to sound firm.

The only thing more sombre than President Joe Biden’s tone at his press conference on Friday afternoon was his funereal ensemble of dark suit and even darker tie. Biden made news with his declaration that the Russian president isn’t havering about invading Ukraine, if he ever really was. Instead, he’s made the decision, we were told, to attack Kyiv itself. A full blown invasion would be the big reveal, surpassing Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968 If Biden’s remarks were anything to go by, Putin means business. Stories are circulating that Putin and his camarilla have drawn up extensive kill lists of prominent Ukrainians they intend to terminate in coming weeks.

Why does Vladimir Putin need Russia Today and Sputnik News when the western media are doing such a great job on his behalf? Throughout his two decades in power, Putin has yearned for international respect. Failing that, he’ll settle for fear. And what more satisfying outcome could there be for a serial sabre-rattler like Putin to have his bluff finally taken seriously? For weeks, British papers and TV have been filled with images of scary Russian tanks, warships and artillery blasting away — mostly provided, if you check the photo credits, by Russia’s Ministry of Defence. Since November, the US and British governments have been issuing increasingly strident warnings that Putin is preparing an imminent and massive attack on Ukraine.

In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a black woman, last week the commentator Jonathan Capehart effused on PBS NewsHour that any black woman was bound to duplicate the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer’s famous pragmatism, because ‘there is no more pragmatic people in the world, of necessity, than a black woman (sic)’. With no other knowledge of the prospective nominee beyond her race and sex, Capehart trotted out confidently that she will ‘probably be more impressive, have more qualifications, be more brilliant than the folks who have come in before her, because people used her race to downgrade and belittle and not think much of her simply because she was black’.

President Joe Biden promised last week to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court. ‘Long overdue,’ he says. When it comes to elevating African-American females to high office, Biden has form. He chose Kamala Harris, remember, to be the first woman US Vice President of colour. But what if Biden elected to choose the same woman — namely, Vice President Kamala Harris — for the Supreme Court? Wouldn’t that be so unimaginative and tokenistic, as to be quite racist? Even a leader as error-prone as Biden wouldn’t do that, would he?

During a rare press conference on Wednesday, which lasted well over an hour, President Joe Biden told the press corps that he ‘didn’t believe the polls’, said he’d ‘over-performed’ in his first year, accomplishing more than any president in history in his first year, scolded RealClearPolitics reporter Philip Wegmann and blamed the country for somehow misunderstanding what he meant when he labelled his political opponents as allies of Bull Connor, who opposed the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Biden also noted that without his voting legislation, the 2022 and 2024 elections would be rigged and not legitimate. The presser came at a time when a phenomenon is occurring in Biden-friendly media.