In April 1968, after he had run through five draft deferments, a medical board determined Joe Biden was unfit to go to Vietnam.
Unfortunately, nobody stopped him this time.
The president, who served in the Senate during the Vietnam War, was in Hanoi Sunday. His staff made the mistake of letting him talk to the press.
It went so badly that Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had to intervene while Biden was still talking. “Thank you, everybody. This ends the press conference. Thanks, everyone.”
He was apparently about to tell reporters what Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Xi Jinping’s second-in-command, had said to him in a conversation at the G20 summit in India.
A confused Biden at first kept speaking until he finally realized his microphone had been cut off and music started playing to drown him out. Perhaps his staff was worried his filter was gone.
Jean-Pierre had good reason to end the rambling press conference. Biden opened with “Remember the famous song, you know, ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’?”
Of course, that was the title of a movie, not a song — a comedy about a war that Biden’s supposed to be putting behind us in smoothing over relations with Vietnam’s Communist leadership.
Biden, a day after his visit to India, told a rambling story about a John Wayne movie where an “Indian scout” tells Wayne an American soldier is “a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.” Biden has used the line before, but nobody’s ever been able to locate a movie with that scene.
Even with his usual prepared list of which reporters would be allowed to ask him questions, Biden got lost. “I’m just following my orders here,” he pleaded, then asked after a long pause, “Staff, is there anybody I haven’t spoken to?”
He then turned down a reporter not on the list: “No, I ain’t calling on you. I’m calling on — I said there were five questions.”
Biden then repeatedly had to ask reporters to repeat what they said, and his stammering often rendered his answers incoherent.
Protesting that “I don’t want to contain China,” Biden explained, “It’s about making sure the rules of the road — everything from airspace and — and space and in the ocean is — the international rules of the road are — are — are abided by. And so — and I hope that — I think that Prime Minister Xi — I mean, Xi has some — some difficulties right now.” I’m glad he cleared that up. Now, how about actually containing China?
Just before the answer that got him cut off, Biden said of relations with Xi, “look, nobody likes having celebrated international meetings if you don’t know what you want at the meeting, if you don’t have a gameplan. He may have a gameplan; he just hasn’t shared it with me. But I tell you what, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.”
He should stay there and let somebody alert and competent run the country.
Upon his return to American soil Monday, Biden told his Sept. 11 story: “Never forget! Ground Zero in New York. I remember standing there the next day.”
Except Biden forgot: He was in DC on Sept. 12, 2001, not in New York.
Biden has always told made-up stories, but his deterioration before our eyes has become increasingly apparent. We can all see an old man who often has to be led around and managed by his staff to steer him away from making a fool of himself.
His hesitant speaking style is in dramatic contrast to the old Biden, who used to shout down opponents and unspool reels of blarney without pause.
This is beyond embarrassing.
The voters aren’t fooled, which is why a recent poll found that 77% of the public and even 69% of Democrats think he’s too old to serve effectively for another term.
His entire game plan for the upcoming election is just to point to Donald Trump and tell us we could do even worse.
America deserves better choices. It deserves a commander in chief who is in command, not one who constantly looks and sounds as if he’d drift off into a nap if they’d just let him find his easy chair.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
