Joe Biden’s latest press-conference disaster: When will staff decide to put him back in the basement?
President Biden’s press conference Sunday seemed almost designed to add to already-rampant doubts about his age.
Bizarrely, he announced, “I tell you what, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to bed” — but kept answering questions shouted from the press pool.
At which point Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre grabbed a mic to interrupt-announce, “this ends the press conference” — and Biden stayed on stage to answer another query, albeit inaudibly.
Before then, he cleared up the mystery of that “dog-faced pony soldier” insult he threw out during the 2020 campaign: It turns out to be an Indian’s line in a John Wayne flick, one the prez’s brother has long repeated.
We guess that means the insult is supposed to show he’s calling out a really brazen lie (rather like his also-weird whispering shtick that seems meant to indicate his words are extra-important).
Though a presser in Vietnam (where, for some reason, he made a point of only taking questions from women) is a pretty odd time to finally give the context.
Also striking is that he went there over a question about the lack of any agreement at the G20 Summit on fossil fuels, except he went on:
“Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about — about global warming, but not anymore. All of a sudden, they’re all realizing it’s a problem. And there’s nothing like seeing the light.”
That is, he went on about the “liars” who he says are now “seeing the light” when the non-agreement shows that some other world leaders aren’t “realizing it’s a problem.”
Maybe this wasn’t Biden’s worst press conference ever; the competition’s pretty stiff.
But the unsettling performance comes as most Democrats are saying he’s too old to run for another term (especially with Kamala Harris as his veep), while the party has rearranged its 2024 primaries with an eye to making his renomination a mathematical lock as quickly as possible.
It feels like a race to make him utterly inevitable before his handlers decide they just can’t let him out in public at all.