RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joe Biden just finished addressing the American people from the Oval Office, for the final time in his presidency. And at the end of it all, with this humiliatingly garbled ramble that read like the sort of delusional self-exculpatory fantasy his caretaker wife might whisper consolingly into his ear, Biden concluded his career much as he began it over half a century ago: as a venal, petty-souled fool in denial about his own limitations and failures. (We learned nothing tonight that we didn’t already know. Nothing was revealed.)

In a thick, slack-toned voice, stumbling over his words from beginning to end as he squinted at a teleprompter with vacant eyes, Biden slurred through the single most incoherent speech of his life. He began by taking complete credit for the breaking Israeli hostage deal with Hamas — which was to be expected — and then launched into a sleepy lecture awkwardly framed around the Statue of Liberty and how it was built to sway in the wind, much like America was built to be flexible enough to withstand his presidency. One marble-mouthed cliché after another poured from his half-opened maw, smooth featureless pabulum with all the texture and flavor of Gerber baby food. (Shall America “lead by the example of power or the power of our example?” An imponderable for the ages.)

He then turned to what was doubtless intended as the high-minded legacy section of his farewell speech: a warning against the new “oligarchy [that is] taking shape” before our very eyes, the “tech-industrial complex.” This limp attempt to invoke Eisenhower’s farewell address was followed by an equally tired rehash of every complaint the mainstream media and the Democrats have been rehearsing against Silicon Valley since they lost hammerlock control over it. (Both “disinformation” and “misinformation” were cited.)  Robber-barons and trust-busting were invoked as appropriate images to compare with the dangers posed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

His delivery collapsed into utter incoherence near the end of the speech, as he rambled on about climate change and artificial intelligence and giving America a “fair shot,” before returning clumsily to his opening Statue of Liberty metaphor. Americans will remember nothing about it a day from now. Thus ends the Biden presidency.

To be fair, I can’t pretend I expected Joe Biden to walk out onstage tonight and deliver the speech I would have preferred he had, something like “America, my entire presidency has been an appalling fraud, and I’m sorry to all of you for willingly conspiring with my wife and my staff to lie about my mental decline. May God and history alike forgive my selfishly destructive vanities.” (This, among other things, is why I would never make it as a Democratic speechwriter.)

But his speech made it clear his eye is on posterity nonetheless, and the early returns look justly disastrous. Earlier this morning, CNN was out with its final national poll of the Biden presidency, and Biden is in historically poor company: He sports a 36-64 approval rating, narrowly edging out what would otherwise have been a three-way tie with Jimmy Carter and — ’tis to laugh — Donald Trump. It’s not the peer group he hoped to have on his way out: The former just died and has “stagflation” forever to his name, while the latter just won reelection despite having January 6 forever to his name — and solely because of Biden’s drifting, aimless term in office.

Biden had no intent of addressing any of this, of course. Only empty boasts that seemed inexplicable save to his most diehard supporters. Biden prematurely took credit for a peace deal in Israel’s war against Hamas that may yet not pan out, and one both sides of the American argument hold him directly responsible for delaying with his intransigent and inattentive leadership. He claimed he had “strengthened NATO” and “pull[ed] ahead of our competition with China” and created affordable high speed internet that never actually got built.

Every president tries to give a flattering account of themselves on the way out of office, a way of contextualizing their time in power into an upbeat narrative. The problem with Biden’s attempt at an apologia tonight isn’t even just that he is no longer physically capable of delivering it, but rather that his account bears no relationship to the story the American people saw throughout the four years of his presidency, or the threats they worry about presently. We didn’t see economic competence, or foreign policy strength.

Instead, in four years’ experience with Joe Biden, we saw a venal cynic who lied about such basic matters of integrity as pardoning his son when he wasn’t violating his promise to be a “bridge to the future.” We saw an incompetent bumbler who threw open the borders and watched the world light itself ablaze as a detached spectator. Most of all, we saw a frail, dependent old man whose mental and physical condition had weakened to the point where he allowed himself to be hidden from view and governed by a coterie of his closest advisers, who sought only to please the activist “Groups” whom they gleefully slopped favors to from America’s policy trough. Finally, remember: This man, who was already collapsing in the first months of his administration, sought another four years in office.

It is this grand imposture that will inevitably be Biden’s legacy. His empty, platitudinous speech merely cemented our realization that the last four years of American politics have essentially been presided over (as in the old joke) by three small kids stacked atop one another in a Biden suit. He is as hopelessly delusional about the way posterity will view his failed presidency as he was about his fitness for the presidency in the first place; the former is merely the inevitable byproduct of the latter. Good riddance to the useless old shell of a man, and this uniquely loathsome chapter in modern American history.