‘I want your point of view, Joe,’ Barack Obama once told his vice-president Joe Biden. ‘I just want it in ten-minute increments, not 60-minute increments.’
Obama understood Biden’s biggest flaw – his mouth runs away with him. He’s a verbal firebomb always threatening to go off.
Last night, oops Biden did it again. As he rounded off his fiery speech in Poland against Vladimir Putin and autocracy, he concluded: ‘For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.’
The White House, in what is now a familiar routine, issued a quick clarification. The President was not demanding ‘regime change’ in Moscow. It just sounded a lot like he did. ‘The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region,’ said the statement. Ah.
Yet this was Biden’s third potentially world war three-triggering blunder in as many days. On Thursday, at the G7 summit, he told the press that if Russia used chemical weapons, his country would ‘respond in kind’. Did he really mean the US would breach international law if Russia did? We just have to hope he didn’t.
On Friday, speaking to the 82nd Airborne about Ukraine, Biden said: ‘You’re gonna see when you’re there – some of you have been there’. This one was a Biden special: a gaffe that fails on two levels, since the Commander-in-Chief not only suggested that US troops were about to be sent in to the war zone – in direct contradiction to his government’s policy – he also managed to imply that his forces had already been secretly operating there.
It’s easy with Biden to blame this clumsiness on old-age: he’s 79, has had two brain aneurysms and now exhibits a number of signs of incipient senility.
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