Joe Biden Is an Asshole

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

 

There is a moment in Back to the Future Part III in which Marty McFly steps outside of the unfamiliar mores of the 19th-century American West and says of Buford Tannen, the man who has challenged him to a duel, “He’s an asshole!”

 

That line is just three words long, but it contains a universe within its delivery. McFly is incredulous. He is impatient. He has lost his desire to play along with the customs of the age. “We can all see this, right?” he seems to be asking the assembled crowd. We all know that Tannen’s an asshole?

 

I feel the same about President Joe Biden. He’s an asshole. Can we not all see it? For those who cannot conceive of truth without triangulation, I will freely stipulate that Donald Trump is an asshole, too — and that, in some ways, he’s an even worse one. But that does not let Biden off the hook. President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”

 

At Axios, Alex Thompson reports the apparently surprising news that Biden “has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him.” Among the president’s favorite admonitions are: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!,” and “Get the f**k out of here!” Per Thompson, these revelations are important because, like his refusal to acknowledge his own granddaughter, they threaten to damage Biden’s “carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle.” But that image is for cretins and sycophants. Joe Biden has never been a “kindly uncle” — or anything approaching one. For his whole life, Joe Biden has been a plodding mediocrity with a Delaware-sized chip on his shoulder. What about him, I wonder, would not lead him to shout stupidly at people? He’s a bully. Check. He’s insecure. Check. He’s senile. Check. He is hostage to his precarious record of lies. Check. His anger is as inevitable as the sunset.

 

We don’t need Axios to tell us about it. In 1987, during his first run for president, Biden was in spiffing form. Asked by a voter in New Hampshire about his academic record, Biden grew unhinged. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” he said, before rattling off a sequence of falsehoods that ought by rights to have ended his career. He said that he graduated in the top half of his law-school class. He did not. He said that he went to that law school on a “full academic scholarship.” He did not. He said that he “won the international moot-court competition,” “was the outstanding student in the political science department,” and “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.” None of that was true. In closing, Biden betrayed what the exchange was really about. “I’d be delighted to sit back and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like,” he jabbed. Mr. Dunning-Kruger, your table is ready.

 

Character matters. Biden has none. As president, the man spends his days considering how he can mislead voters about his record, how he can get around the Constitution, and how he can demagogue the other branches. All that talk in 2020 about “the soul of America”? That was guff. Flotsam. Malarkey. There is nothing the man won’t lie about. He lies about inflation. He lies about gas prices. He lies about the deficit. He lies about the border. He lies about having been arrested for his civil-rights activism, and about having been raised by Puerto Ricans and Greeks and Jews, and about having traveled to Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a Navy hero, and about his son’s death, and about the crash that killed his first wife and baby daughter, and about the small kitchen fire that he had 15 years ago, which, in his inimitable style, he has managed to transmute into “having had a house burn down with my wife in it.” In 1987, he plagiarized a speech by the British politician Neil Kinnock that contained a completely different backstory from his own. In 2012, he accused Mitt Romney of wanting to put African Americans “back in chains.” Push a pin into a history book, and you’ll find Joe Biden lying about something.

 

There are many ugly consequences of our present bout of negative partisanship, but by far the worst is that it leads otherwise sensible people to pretend that up is down. That a person might prefer the Democrats to the Republicans or tax hikes to tax cuts or anyone to Donald Trump is comprehensible to me. That, in pursuit of that aim, they might feign admiration for the grotesque is not comprehensible at all. Joe Biden is an asshole. Always has been, always will be — until the last tawdry whopper leaves his lips.