The news this morning: “A source familiar with the inquiry told CBS News the total number of known sensitive documents found since November is between 25 and 30.”
Right after his infamous “by the way, my Corvette is in a locked garage. Okay? So, it’s not like they’re sitting out in the street” comments, Biden added, “as I said earlier this week, people know I take classified documents and classified material seriously.”
No, Biden doesn’t, because if he did, we wouldn’t have found four separate batches of classified materials in four separate insecure places.
This is just the latest example of how Biden believes he has certain traits – like being careful and serious in handling classified information – when the brutal reality is the opposite. (Ari Fleischer cracks that perhaps Biden meant, “I take classified documents and classified material. Seriously.”)
A couple of my favorite columnists, Peggy Noonan and David French, spent this weekend tearing into GOP congressman George Santos, and insisting that he be removed from Congress.
Santos, the guy who allegedly swindled a homeless vet out of money that was supposed to pay for lifesaving surgery for his dog, deserves every last ounce of scorn and denunciation. (Where’s John Wick when you really need him?) I don’t understand what any right-of-center person gets from having Santos remain in office. I get the benefit to Santos, but what’s the benefit to you or me? What value does he bring to the table?
More than a few voices on the right have argued that Santos’ pathological lying isn’t all that different than Joe Biden’s habits, and it’s not the craziest comparison to make. Particularly as he grows older, Biden is frequently telling us implausible and in some cases indisputably falsified tales – that he used to drive a tractor trailer, that he was arrested protesting for civil rights, that he was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela and that Mandela later thanked him, that he was shot at in Iraq, that he personally confronted Slobodan Milosevic, that Israeli prime minister Golda Meir wanted him to be her liaison to Egyptians about the Suez Canal, that as a high school and college student, he went to both Catholic mass and services in a black church every day, and so on.
Start with the supposition that Joe Biden isn’t the kind of person he wants to believe he is, and that he says he is. Envision Biden’s life in the past few decades as endless friction between the Walter Mitty-esque image of himself that he has in his head, and cold hard reality.
Back in February 2008, a helicopter carrying Biden, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel made an emergency landing in the mountains of Afghanistan because of a snowstorm. No one was injured, and the senators and their delegation returned to Bagram Air Base in a motor convoy and later flew to Turkey.
No doubt the emergency landing was a dramatic and likely briefly frightening moment, but here’s how Biden later described it:
“If you want to know where al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” said Biden. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.” In another speech, he claimed al Qaeda is “in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan … where my helicopter was recently forced down.”
He later referred to “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down.”
“John McCain wants to know where bin Laden and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where.”
Biden took one frightening emergency landing and made himself sound like Rambo – and he did it while jabbing at John McCain, one of the few figures in modern politics whose bravery and toughness were indisputable. Oh, and Biden’s interpreter from that trip was one of the Afghans left to the mercies of the Taliban after the U.S. withdrawal.
Biden is convinced he’s a really tough guy, saying of Donald Trump, “if we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” “Nobody f***s with a Biden,” he chuckled to a bewildered Florida mayor last year. Biden apparently convinced himself that his persona would be enough to intimidate the dictatorial, brutal, former KGB leader of Russia: “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny, and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe, are over.” During the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, even Biden fans at The New Republic couldn’t help roll their eyes and beg, “Drop the Tough Guy Act, Joe.”
He’s convinced everyone believes he’s legendarily honest – “I give you my word as a Biden.” He’s convinced everyone sees him as the salt of the earth, claiming other senators used to call him “Middle-Class Joe… it wasn’t meant as a compliment.” (The only person ever recorded referring to him as Biden “Middle-Class Joe” is Joe Biden.)
Biden speaks as if he’s always trying to convince others – or perhaps himself – that he’s tougher, smarter, more honest, more relatable, and just plain better than almost everyone else. In the end, Biden is as flawed as the next guy, and in fact probably worse.
Thus, when Biden learned about the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago, Biden had to believe he’s nothing like Trump, and would never remove classified documents from secure government sites.
Maybe Biden remembered taking those documents home, maybe he didn’t. Either way, Biden couldn’t admit that presidents and vice presidents deal with a lot of classified information, and papers can get misfiled or misplaced. Admitting such a flaw would interfere with his glorious self-image. So he shook his head in stern disapproval and asked how anyone could possibly be so irresponsible.
Indeed, Mr. President, how could you be so irresponsible?