Yesterday, Joe Biden met with many of the families of the US service members who lost their lives in Afghanistan last week. Since that time, reports have started to emerge exposing just how badly things went. The president ended up causing great offense for some of the parents, spouses, and loved ones involved.
RedState has reported on several of those accounts (see here and here), and now another one has come forward, and this one may be the most disturbing yet.
There are several parts to this that show that Biden is either incapable of handling this moment or doesn’t care enough to even attempt to handle it properly. Whatever reality actually exists, it’s not good news.
To start, it’s apparent that Biden went into these meetings with a scripted response ready to go whereby he would bring up his deceased son Beau as a connection point. Every family member that has spoken out about what transpired has revealed that the president took that tack. Yet, anyone who has suffered a loss knows that equivocations, even if well-meaning, are just not comforting in a time of suffering. That’s especially true when the circumstances of a specific death are so different from that of the one being brought up in comparison.
In this case, while Biden’s loss of an older son to cancer back in 2015 is tragic in its own right, it’s just a completely different situation than a father losing a young son to a suicide bomber. That difference becomes even starker when coupled with the fact that these specific deaths result from decisions Biden himself made. At that moment, the last thing a family member wants to hear is a generic claim by the president that he knows how they feel. Biden does not know how they feel, and to walk into these meetings with the supposition that he does is obviously going to come across as arrogant and offensive.
Even still, you might be able to write off Biden’s initial insensitivities as sloppiness. Yet, you can’t do that with the claim that he got angry and bristled when challenged. If the president actually did that, it’s a disgusting move that offers more evidence of his lack of temperament for the job he holds.
In short, these families want one thing, and it’s the one thing Biden won’t give them – accountability.
They do not care about Biden’s empathizer-in-chief act, something that’s worn very thin over the last seven months of his presidency. Rather, they want answers. Further, they want the people who left their sons and daughters in the hands of terrorists to pay a price for that dereliction of duty. Biden, whether he realizes it or not, is in that number.
That he went into these meetings without an understanding that these family members wanted him to take full responsibility is mind-blowing.
Author: Bonchie