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I don't understand how the US state machinery can withstand the humiliation of Biden constantly saying dumb stuff. It was pretty bad when Bush went
Biden's just done the same thing: https://x.com/FunNormalGuy/status/1811518090355614120
The trained seals clap anyway because why not? About 2 seconds later Biden realizes and tries to undo it, 'no he's gonna beat President Putin, its President Zelensky!' And the man he's just humiliated is standing right there, ready to come on stage! Nobody is going to be thinking about what Zelensky has to say.
This silliness is actually dangerous, it renders the US unpredictable and volatile. When Biden says stuff like 'we're gonna defend Taiwan' and the White House clarifies it as 'no the one China policy hasn't changed and we've signed no treaty' what does that mean? Who is to be believed? Is it a strategy of strategic ambiguity or is it strategic schizophrenia? Who is making decisions and drawing up policy? How can you negotiate with a leaderless country?
Next he's going to praise America's best buddy in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran!
The crown prince of Iran is a Republican, so I don’t expect Biden will praise him. But you never know these days.
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Set aside the kayfabe that a president is the one in charge and making all the decisions in the executive branch. The main part of his role is as a figurehead and he can't even do that. Making clownish mistakes like this in matters of high end foreign policy is terrible optics for the US like you've said.
I can only image some PR wonk in his team came up with the idea of "Joe, you need a win to distract from this whole senior thing, so lets try to set up a show where you're brokering peace in the Ukraine" or some such nonsense. Then Biden does what he does and digs his hole even deeper.
To be fair, Trump used to fire from the hip with comments and tweets and the white house would then have to scramble to realign and 'clarify' his statements.
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Bush said that, but it was many years after he left office, in 2022. So that, at least, has nothing to do with US state machinery; if your elder statesmen are a little more elder than statesmen, that's no big deal. You left off the best part: he added "Iraq too."
True, I knew that. But that doesn't exactly come out in the post does it, it reads that I was drawing a direct equivalence. I guess I thought it was pretty bad to give these washed-up old guys a big podium and have them mess up their lines.
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TBH, if a politician in their mid 70s who's been retired for well over a decade makes such a gaffe, that's just life as usual and there's nothing really wrong with it.
I find it ironic that Bush was known for gaffes but those are small potatoes compared to what you get all the time from both Biden and Trump.
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