Joe Biden should never have become the President. We all knew that before the latest catastrophe, but having gifted Afghanistan back to the Taliban, even those who backed him must be regretting it now. Many of those who voted for him must have wondered what possessed them, but there is a simple reason. During last year’s election campaign, the US media simply gave Sleepy Joe a free ride. He wasn’t Trump, therefore he was their man. So they failed to ask any of the questions that a presidential hopeful should be expected to answer. Instead, they treated him like the messiah.
The big-tech companies followed suit. They drowned out conservative voices, suppressed the incriminating Hunter Biden story which implicated Sleepy Joe in his corrupt activities, and backed their man to the hilt. They discredited everything that Trump did, hung onto every word that the incoherent Biden uttered, and the journalists, following Biden around on the campaign trail, were more interested in his favourite flavour of ice cream than in his foreign policy or how he would deal with the pandemic.
It was pathetic. Throw in a few dubious election results, and President Trump was history. No one had bothered to ask if Biden was up for the job, because he wasn’t Trump… and that was all that really mattered.
But Biden was never up to the job. His first acts were mostly negative; he simply reversed everything that Trump had done. While this often happens with a new president, with Biden it seems mostly to have been done out of spite. The “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau” – which was designed to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas – was paused by Biden’s administration earlier this year. Set up in 2012, and expanded by the Trump administration, it was designed to assist Americans to return home, particularly from war-torn states. Biden’s team revoked the funding and the approval for the plan, in spite of COVID, and with the knowledge that the Afghanistan withdrawal was going to happen soon.
And now 15,000 Americans, not to mention their Afghani support personnel, are at the mercy of the Taliban. Smart move, Sleepy Joe. Images of women pushing their babies over barbed wire fences, in the hope that they will be saved, and bodies falling from planes as desperate Afghanis hang onto the wheels (in a tragic simile to those who jumped out of windows in the World Trade Centre 20 years ago), will be the haunting legacy of the Biden presidency. He cannot be saved from this. He is a total failure.
The trouble is, we have an analogy back here in good old New Zild.
We can’t actually blame the media for Jacinda’s premiership (that sits squarely with Winston Peters) but we can blame them for their fawning attitude towards her, asking only the easy questions and giving her, like Biden, a free ride.
Contrast that with their attitude to the opposition leaders. Whether it was Simon Bridges or Judith Collins, they can never get away with anything and have scorn constantly poured on them for the slightest of transgressions. Remember how Simon Bridges was treated when he began questioning the government’s approach to COVID last year – a question he was perfectly entitled to ask, seeing that he was chairing the COVID response committee at the time.
Ardern adds to this by avoiding the journalists like Mike Hosking who ask some of the more difficult questions, but again, the media lets her get away with that. She has the easiest of rides, compared to Judith Collins, who isn’t even in government, and so is not directly responsible for anything.
The British press has a very bad reputation, but they treat all politicians more or less the same. They blame government ministers for failures and do their best to hold the government to account. Our media don’t do that; neither do the US media; although with the debacle in Afghanistan and the likely reverberations to follow, that may all be about to change. Probably not though; all that seems to matter to the hopeless US media is that Biden isn’t the other guy. That’s it.
What the governments of both the USA and New Zealand are proving is that a lifetime in politics does not make for good governance. A bit of real-life experience goes a long way towards helping a premier understand real-world problems, but you won’t get that from either Biden or Ardern. Both of them seem to think that a few good slogans will solve big problems. They won’t.
Ardern may be exaggerating her government’s vaccine rollout by quoting the number of people booked for vaccinations rather than those actually jabbed, but most people can see through that… and there is quite literally no way that Biden can put a positive spin on the awful situation in Afghanistan. He’ll try though, and, like Ardern, will blame his predecessor, even though he is responsible for this crushing debacle… he and he alone.
Our media might be bought and paid for by this government, but it is their job to hold the government to account. You only have to look to the other side of the Pacific to see what happens when they don’t. What a disaster their new president has turned out to be.
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