Focus Shifts Back To Biden

With the US trucker convoy in Washington as President Biden is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address, the US media, at least, has shifted its attention back to Washington, although US media reporting on Ukraine has been bad across the spectrum anyhow, legacy or independent, left or right. A few things have been lost in the confusion, such as the remarkable sequence above in which Biden has no answer to the question of whether he underestimated Putin and variously smirks, stares blankly, and picks his teeth.

The establishment media figure George Stephanopoulos asked Press Secretary Psaki over the weekend about Biden's mental capacity:

"The president is approaching his State of the Union in a pretty difficult political position right now, 37% approval rating, Democrats trailing badly in the midterm polling," Stephanopoulos said. "A majority in our recent poll out this morning even question the president’s mental capacity. How is he going to turn that around on Tuesday night? And how much has his State of the Union been changed by this war in Ukraine?"

Psaki did not respond to accusations on Biden’s mental capacity but instead focused on Biden’s State of the Union address.

I continue to think that whatever Biden's problems, they aren't a result of any medical conditon but instead, they're a result of being dumb as a rock. In the video clip, you can see his sheer exasperation at the idea of anyone questioning his judgment over Putin, to the point that this shouldn't even warrant an answer. But right now, he's in the same boat with Putin himself, with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice saying,

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears "erratic" and is "descending" into something she’s never personally seen before.

"He was always calculating and cold. But this is different. He seems erratic. There is an ever-deepening, delusional rendering of history, it was always a kind of victimology about what had happened to them, but now it goes back to blaming Lenin for the foundation of Kyiv … in Ukraine," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."

Rice has met with Putin at least a half a dozen times across her career and said he is "descending into something I haven’t personally seen before."

The problem right now is that with the former standup comic Zelensky turning into the most charismatic figure on the world stage, people seem to be looking for ways to bypass both Biden and Putin. Clearly the EU, NATO, and even neutrals like Sweden and Switzerland, forced to recognize the Russian threat, suddenly realized they had to act independently of the US and get ahead of the problem.

The political hot button with the truckers' convoy in Washington is going to be the price of fuel. I've noted that increasing fuel prices is central to the leftist agenda, and it looks like Biden will continue his existing policies of discouraging domestic production and allowing Russia to increase prices. This hasn't gone unnoticed.

The US has mostly followed the EU in its sanctions, but Biden has left one thing in Vladimir Putin’s pockets — American energy purchases. “It’s ridiculous, totally ridiculous,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) declared yesterday, that “we’re buying over 600,000 barrels a day of crude from Russia.” Manchin wants an immediate end to such purchases — and more importantly, an immediate plan to increase American production to return to self-sufficiency.

But it isn't going to happen.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the U.S. needs to decrease its reliance on foreign oil by switching over to renewable energy, not increasing domestic production.

"We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general, and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others," Psaki said during an interview with ABC This Week Sunday. "We've seen over the last week or so... a number of European countries are recognizing they need to reduce their own reliance on Russian oil."

So the response to the US truckers' convoy is going to be let them buy electric cars. This will set up a confrontation. The problem for Biden before the State of the Union is that every time he opens his mouth it's a disaster, but it's a disaster even when he keeps his mouth shut.

The real problem isn't in Ukraine.