The Patriot Post® · Biden 'Passes' the Torch

Tell me something I don’t already know, Joe.

That was certainly my sentiment, and perhaps yours, as we watched Orange Joe Biden deliver a slurring and uninformative pseudo-State of the Union speech last night from the Oval Office, four full days after having bowed to the pressure and dropped out of the presidential race via tweet.

The hostage-video speech had been teased by Team Biden as somehow important, somehow revelatory. We were told that he’d tell us why he decided to drop out of the race after having all along insisted that he wouldn’t. But he didn’t. All he said about it was this:

In recent weeks it’s become clear to me that I need to unite my party in this critical endeavor. I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term. But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.

This is a hoot. But it’s likely as close as Heroic Joe will ever come to admitting that so deeply damaged is his brand that he bowed out of his rematch with the Original Orange Man to let an untested incompetent Marxist “save our democracy” on his behalf.

Our democracy is in peril, he seemed to be saying, so I need to slink away and let someone else save it. No explanation for dropping out. Just. Out.

But, hey, wildly unpopular incumbent presidents just quit for no reason all the time. What’s the big deal, right? Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese fighters were near Alaska while he was speaking. Our enemies are laughing at us, trolling us.

“I promise to always level with you, tell you the truth,” Biden said. So much for that. Clearly, that promise was conditional. Or perhaps freshness dated.

And as for that passing of the torch, is there anyone else out there who thinks the torch wasn’t so much offered up as wrested away?

Why, yes, it seems so. As House Speaker Mike Johnson said this morning on Fox News, “He didn’t heroically pass the torch. They ripped it out of his hand. And for the party that professes to be the party of small-D democracy, they did exactly the opposite. They disenfranchised 14 million voters that they have, that worked through their primary systems to make Joe Biden the nominee.”

It was thus a graceless and inglorious end to the Biden presidency, even though he still has six months left. We call it the end because nothing good can come from the remainder of his term. He’s officially the lamest of lame ducks in both the physical sense and the political sense, and not a single Democrat running for reelection this cycle will want The Second Coming of George Washington anywhere near one of his campaign events.

Yes, George Washington. Such is the foul-smelling gruel being ladled out by Democrats and leftist “historians” like Jon Meacham, who in a New York Times op-ed called Biden “my friend and an American hero.” We don’t think the word “hero” means what he thinks it means. Nonetheless, Meacham one-upped himself, adding, “His decision is one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history, an act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington, who also stepped away from the presidency.”

Yep, the same Joe Biden who reflexively tells the most awful lies, the same Joe Biden who promised he’d “work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did,” is now being compared to George Washington.

Whatever, dude.

Funny, but we don’t remember the Indispensable Man being kicked to the curb in favor of his second in command.

Whether you saw this coming from 22 months away or only more recently is beside the point. What we now know is that the years-long ruse that Joe Biden was cognitively fit for the presidency is the largest cover-up in American political history. And while it may have been perpetrated by his family and his handlers, the woman to whom he bequeathed his candidacy, Kamala Harris, is up to her eyeballs in it.

Amid a laundry list of State of the Union-type accomplishments, Biden slipped in this insulting claim: “We’re also securing our border. Border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.” Even if that wordplay is technically true — and we have no reason to trust that it is — Biden somehow expects the American people to have forgotten the Ohio’s worth of illegal immigrants who invaded our nation in the interim.

“Does character in public life still matter?” Biden asked.

Yes, it does. And it’s funny that he should ask.