I can remember back in the days when our current president was a senator running for President. It was not unusual for him to come out with one of his famous “gaffes.”
At the time most people just shook their head, had a laugh and thought that it was harmless, because not many people cared. He was just good old funny “Uncle Joe” doing what he does best, running for President and saying strange things … again.
It became a little more serious when he became Barack Obama’s running mate, and they won. Now what he said sort of mattered because he was Vice President, and it fell on his press people to try to walk back and clarify some of the outrageous things he was saying, just as poor Jen Psaki tries to do today.
At the time it was not a big deal because most people paid little or no attention to what he said anyway, and he was still kind of funny. Even President Obama joked about it from time to time.
After the end of the second Obama term most of us pretty much thought that it was the last we would see of funny old “Uncle Joe.” Besides, by then we had the grandmaster of the outrageous who filled up the airwaves and social media with a daily barrage of incredible statements, so little or no thought was given to the former Vice President.
That all changed in 2020. Joe was running for President one more time, and he was once again on the gaffe trail. There was a stage full of candidates, some pretty good ones, and most people didn’t think he had much of a chance, but thanks to the support of Congressman Clyburn, Joe came out of the South Carolina primary a winner with lots of momentum. Now the party was faced with a tough choice of who could win in 2020, Joe or “Crazy Bernie.” In other words, no choice.
That year, as most of us will remember, we had the strangest presidential campaign in the history the country. We were in the middle of a pandemic with most of the country was in lockdown; Joe was campaigning from his basement in Maryland with little opportunity to be seen or heard from in person. President Trump was doing what President Trump does, and the states were trying to come up with ways to get people safely to the polls to vote, all in all not a good environment for selecting a new president. In the end when it was all said and done Joe Biden was declared the winner and now for the first time his words did matter.
The list of Joe Biden presidential gaffes are too long to list, we have all heard them played out on the nightly news, and sometimes they are funny, but not lately. With the tragedy that is going on in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war a possibility, what the President of the United States says does very much matter.
When he says that if Russia uses chemical weapons that the West would respond “in kind”, or referring to Putin “For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power”, those words matter and they have serious consequences’! For a man as paranoid as Putin, there is no amount of “walking back” that will help.
For better or worse we will have him for the next three years, and I think we all know V.P. Harris’s qualifications, so for the sake of the United States and the rest of the world, President Biden needs help from someone like a latter day Jim Baker, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, George Marshall, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, or George Shultz to name a few good ones. If you are out there please step forward, we need you now.
Born, raised and educated in the Southwest, Jim Dickson served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in Vietnam before a 35-year business career. Retired to St. Helena Island, Dickson and his wife are fiscally conservative, socially moderate and active in Republican politics, though they may not always agree with Republicans. Having lived around the country and traveled around the world, Dickson believes that the United States truly is the land of opportunity.
