Two pieces on Biden.
It’s in Biden’s own best interest to abandon re-election (Feb. 23):
A spate of midweek stories suggesting President Joe Biden may forgo a reelection bid should leave most people desperately hoping they are true. For the national good, Biden should make these next two years his last in office.
This conclusion need not rest on assumptions that Biden has done a bad job or that he is unfit for office today. The logic can be entirely observational and actuarial. If Biden runs for reelection, he will be asking his countrymen to put him in office until he is 86 years old. Plenty of 86-year-olds are in good physical and mental health for ordinary living, but that’s a far lower standard than it is to be fit enough for leadership of the free world and oversight of the world’s most potent nuclear arsenal…. [The full column is at this link.]
To really help Ukraine, Biden should stop dithering (Feb. 25):
By refusing to provide F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, President Joe Biden yet again is imitating then-President Lyndon Johnson’s tragic tactics in Southeast Asia six decades ago: He’s doing just enough to fail to win.
Biden told ABC’s David Muir Friday that the U.S. won’t send the jets because “we’re sending him [only] what our seasoned military thinks he needs now” and that “there is no basis upon which there is a rationale according to our military now to provide F-16s.”
This is sickeningly familiar. At various times in the past year, Biden has refused to provide Ukraine with Patriot missile defenses, HIMAR missiles, and Abrams tanks, only to later change his mind and send them. Each time he declined, he or his aides argued either that the weapons weren’t needed or that they would be considered too escalatory towards Russia. Then, as if by some secret divination, they decided Russia wouldn’t be too provoked by those systems after all. … [The full column is at this link.]
