Our biggest question about President Biden’s nonstop lies in his CNN interview is this: Does he know he’s painting an alternate reality, or does he believe it?
Either way, he’s talking himself into a clear loss come November, and a larger Mideast crisis in the meantime.
Neither answer is great: He has a pretty sad view of Americans’ intelligence if he thinks anyone is taken in by, for example, his claim that inflation was 9% when he took office — when it actually was just 1.4% then.
It only hit the 9% mark on his watch, in June 2022, after he’d spent months denying it was a problem.
But his way of dealing with the unpleasant truth may be to talk himself out of believing it.
After all, just a month ago he told a vaguer version of this lie, “We have dramatically reduced inflation from 9% down to close to 3%. We’re in a situation where we’re better situated than we were when we took office where we — inflation was skyrocketing.”
As we’ve said before: Biden’s been a liar his whole career; it just never mattered nearly as much when he was one senator (and with a safe seat), or vice president.
So some of this is just that he’s too old to change his fibbin’ ways, even though it does show so badly now.
But along with the lies comes a pretty clear confusion: His staff regularly have to walk back his policy declarations, such as his repeated claims that the United States is fully committed to defending Taiwan if mainland China attacks.
His words on CNN on Israel may fall somewhere in that confused zone: He seemed to suggest that the IDF’s actions so far are OK because “they haven’t gone into population centers,” and just last month National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was suggesting a surgical approach to Rafah would be OK.
Yet the munitions the White House has already put on hold include precision bombs, which are surely important to any surgical approach.
Meanwhile, Team Biden still says it supports Israel taking out Hamas’ last intact battalions, which absolutely requires entering those “population centers” somehow.
In short, it’s not just the president who’s delusional, but the entire administration.
Plainly the bubble Biden & Co. live in has them convinced (falsely) that anti-Israel sentiment is so strong that they’ll lose the election if they support the IDF as it does the necessary.
So they’ve set ever-crazier limits on what IDF moves they’ll accept, to the point that a war that should’ve ended weeks ago still drags on (even though they’re also upset about the risk of famine etc., which the longer war worsens).
Worst of all, since Israel must go into Rafah and finish off Hamas, they’re setting up a visible Washington-Jerusalem rupture that’s all too likely to encourage others to attack Israel: If US weapons stop flowing, Hezbollah at least could seize the moment.
In short, Biden isn’t just betraying Israel for purely (misguided!) political reasons, he’s risking a much wider Mideast war just so he can tell himself it’s not his fault.