Democratic presidential candidates,vformer Vice President Joe Biden, participate in a Democratic presidential primary debate at the Gaillard Center, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020, in Charleston, S.C., co-hosted by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Last night’s Democrat debate contained a great number of bizarre moments. In my view, Joe Biden stood out from the crowd. Not only did he claim that nearly half the population of the United States has been killed by firearms since 2007, he claimed authorship of a bill that was written by Amy Klobuchar after Biden left the Senate. But one of his strangest moments took place when he seemed to pull up just short of saying he would go to war with North Korea if they did not disarm. Here you not only get to hear blather, which if translated into action would result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, dead, but you get to see Joe Biden at his peak ‘sundowning’, ‘where am I and how did I get here’ best
Video of the moment Biden is about to threaten North Korea, loses his train of thought, and then claims he’s just being respectful of time constraints pic.twitter.com/EyfXrcrTtd
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 26, 2020
Mr. Vice President, how would you deal with North Korea?
BIDEN: You don’t negotiate with a dictator, give him legitimacy without any notion whether he is going to do anything at all. You don’t do that. Look what happened. He gave this dictator — he’s a thug — legitimacy. We’ve weakened the sanctions around the world against holding us — committing people not to trade, if anything from oil to parts — that can deal with providing missile technology. And what’s happened? It’s been weakened.
I would be in Beijing, I would be calling to — I would be speaking with Xi Jinping. I would be reassigning the relationship between the Japan and South Korea, and I would make it clear, I would make it clear to China, we are going to continue to move closer to make sure that we can, in fact, prevent China — prevent North Korea from launching missiles to take them down.
O’DONNELL: OK.
BIDEN: And if we don’t — why am I stopping? No one else stops.
There is a lot wrong here. A lot.
We negotiate with dictators all the time. As the Bush administration proved in Libya, you can actually do it successfully. There is nothing wrong with such negotiations because, as Winston Churchill said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” Negotiations buy time which gives the more powerful party a chance to change the landscape in their favor. What the much maligned negotiations with North Korea has accomplished is significant. North and South Korea have entered into confidence building measures. North Korea has not conducted cross border provocations under President Trump. The defection of North Korean officer Oh Chong Song did not spawn retaliatory attacks against South Korea. There have been no IRBM or ICBM or nuclear tests since President Trump made his first gesture to North Korea. That, as much as the left tries to down play it, is a tangible success because absent testing there is no way for North Korea to improve its designs of either. North Korea has not received sanctions relief. What North Korea has received in return in a minor curtailment of the FOAL EAGLE exercises.
Biden also doesn’t have the authority to order South Korea and Japan to fix a very fraught and baggage-ridden relationship. He would be no more able to make Xi hop-to when he gave an order than any other American president. And attempting to push military forces closer to North Korea in order to make them feel more threatened doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea because nukes.
This bluster is what Joe Biden has always been until the rubber meets the road as in the case of the decision to kill Osama bin Laden and then he becomes a timorous little…let’s just leave it at timorous.
In 2000, Joe Biden said he would support unilaterally bombing North Korea and starting a war "to take them out." pic.twitter.com/4y1rBa7p1K #DemDebate
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 & get the APP (@TrumpWarRoom) February 26, 2020
What is really interesting, is that Biden, in a failed attempt to look like a tough guy rather than a doddering oldster, disavowed the strategy of the administration in which he served.
Biden's answer re: meeting with Iran & North Korea without pre conditions is actually at odds with Obama's stance: https://t.co/Nh6ivHz19E
— Wes (@wgobar) February 26, 2020
Biden is not a harmless old grandfatherly figure with a penchant for hair-sniffing and unwanted smooching. He’s obviously mentally impaired. He obviously is out of touch. Worse than that he thinks we are all stupid and don’t see it.
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