A Tale of Two Presidents

Last week, almost simultaneously and in real-time, we got to see the stark contrast between two presidents: Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. And it wasn’t a great look.

Compare and contrast.

Early last week, we learned that Tucker Carlson was in Moscow, apparently to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. Before the interview dropped last Thursday, the commentators in the news media went into full-crazy mode, especially on MSNBC and CNN. Others, like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, called Carlson a traitor… not a journalist doing… God forbid, actual journalism. At the time I posted this meme on my Facebook page to make the point about journalists doing journalism.

For more than two hours, through an interpreter, Tucker conducted a probing interview with Putin. For the first 30 minutes, Carlson allowed Putin to speak about the more than 10 centuries of history between Ukraine and Russia. It is a conflict that unless you took an undergraduate course in Russian History (which I did more than four decades ago), you probably had no idea of the history between Ukraine and Russia. Of course, Putin’s answers were framed from the Russian perspective with a heavy dose of self-serving propaganda.

But after Putin was done setting his agenda (it was after all Putin being interviewed by Carlson, not the other way around), the two sparred over the next 90 minutes with Carlson posing confrontational questions to Putin. At first, Putin did dodge Carlson’s question of who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022. This before responding that the CIA, the Biden Administration, and the United States was responsible, possibly through its proxies, implying Ukraine.

What I thought was interesting was what occurred at the end of the interview. Carlson tried, on several occasions, after inquiring about imprisoned US journalist Evan Gershkovich, to close out the interview. But Putin continued. (I think that Carlson harbored hope that Gershkovich might be allowed to return with him back to the United States. But that didn’t happen.) But it seemed Putin was leaving the door open as a possibility. I certainly think that exchanging Gershkovich with no strings attached would have been far better than the precedent President Biden set by exchanging a convicted terrorist arms dealer, Viktor Bout, for WNBA player Brittany Griner,

(If you missed the entire interview, instead just watching the parts cherry-picked by the anti-Carlson mainstream media hacks designed to make him seem like a Putin apologist, especially by outlets like MSMBC or print outlets like the New York Times. View the entire two-hour interview and draw your own conclusion.)

Now contrast Putin over those two hours with Joe Biden’s angry, gaffe- and lie-filled 15-minute press conference last Thursday. His team thought it was a good idea to let the president to address the charges of the special prosecutor about how he had mishandled confidential and top-secret documents.

This is the same charge that his Department of Justice, led by Merrick Garland, has pursued against former president Donald Trump except for one minor detail. As a US Senator and as Vice President, Biden was not entitled to take classified documents with him. Unlike Trump, he lacked any authority to declassify and take the documents with him after he left the vice presidency in 2017 and store them at the Penn-Biden Center or in an open box at his home next to his Corvette.

The special prosecutor, Robert Hur, summarized in the full 345-page report here in this way.

“While the special counsel has concluded that no criminal charges are warranted, (the report) also says that the probe uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

(It seems that Hur applied the same “Comey Standard” that applied to Hillary Clinton with her willful destruction of more than 30,000 subpoenaed emails, many connected to the now discredited Steele Russia Gate Dossier. This is the same Hillary Clinton who over the weekend called Carlson a useful idiot in one of the least self-aware interviews ever.

This was followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session. In the briefing room, many in the press, led by Fox News’ Peter Doocy, questioned President Biden, pointing out lie after lie on his part. Biden was combative, often looking dazed and confused, several times stopping in mid-sentence as he pushed back at the “journalists” in the room. It was almost as if Biden was shocked that the journalists didn’t simply let him get away with lying to their faces.

It has been characterized by several political commentators, including Ben Shapiro, as the worst press conference in US presidential history.

Biden’s terrible weekend concluded on Sunday, with a Super Bowl broadcast. Instead of appearing in the traditional presidential pregame message before the Super Bowl to field softballs from the network broadcasting the Super Bowl from its leading journalist, Biden closed out his week of gaffes and misfires with his exceptionally cringy and laughable Shrinkflation commercial complaining about the price of snacks and soft drinks.

So we have a stark contrast between two of the three most important world leaders (the third being Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party). In it, we see Putin, for better or worse, in full command of his faculties. In contrast, our president comes off as a mean-spirited old man, someone who has lost more than a step cognitively, and whose memory about important dates leaves something to be desired. What we saw last Thursday evening was an 81-year-old president who will be 86 when he leaves office in 2029, if he serves out his full term.

Do you think that this is a good thing for our country? Should we even consider risking that possibility?

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.