Bob Woodward, a past master at the art of marketing bestsellers by reflecting the Democrat zeitgeist, tries his best in his latest offering, War, to put a good face on Biden-Harris incompetence in the Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel conflicts. Although Donald Trump was not a government actor during these events, War inserts vignettes purporting, unsuccessfully, to contrast Trump’s unfitness with Biden’s putative steadiness.
Woodward tries but fails to claim that it is Trump’s alleged instability that threatens our fragile world, and not the ineptitude of the senile, perpetually unintelligent Biden. But to his great credit, the dogged reporter in Woodward overcomes the mediocre polemicist. He simply cannot hide Biden’s abject, foolish incompetence in these conflicts, nor can he conceal, try though he might, Trump’s commonsense assessments of the same events. While hoping to help Biden’s political fortunes, his book is a thinly-veiled but strangely ineffective diatribe against the “fascist” former President he awkwardly stumbles to depict.
Before delving into Biden’s actions, we should recall the wise assessment of the well-respected Robert Gates, former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration. Biden, Gates wrote in his 2015 book, had been consistently wrong on every national security and foreign policy issue throughout his long tenure in D.C. Moreover, Biden had long been reputed by his colleagues to have been the least intelligent legislator in Congress.
Given Biden’s recently acknowledged mental incompetence, Woodward tries to contextualize it as a recently-developed condition, with only isolated “early markers” in preceding years. But, again, Woodward’s solid factual recitations are far more skillful than his partisan shadings of them.
In June 2023, in the midst of world turmoil, War describes Democrat fundraiser and Microsoft CFO Kevin Scott’s shocked reaction to Biden’s “frighteningly awful” mental wanderings, “like your 87-year-old senile grandfather.” Days later, at a New York fundraiser, its host Michael Gelman called Biden’s performance “painful,” observing, “he never completed a sentence.” While Woodward gamely covers for Biden, the depth of Biden’s incompetence in 2023 is easily inferred to reflect senility throughout the prior thirty months of his Presidency.
What is so frightening about these vignettes, when viewed together with the chaotic international conflicts, is that our world order has been subject to the influence of an elderly man who should be in assisted living quarters, not the White House. And the Woodwards of the media deliberately concealed his scary condition.
Well before Woodward in mid-book slips in this shocking, incontrovertible proof of senility, he tries to portray a steady captain of the ship of state. But viewed through our present informed prism, we should be thankful that our tinderbox world has not yet exploded more widely than it has.
Woodward, to his credit, pulls no punches about the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Stupidly, Biden pulled all troops from the Bagram Air Base before securing either the remaining American citizens and military or protecting billions in advanced weaponry and equipment.
Aiding, abetting, and executing this disaster were the highly political General Mark Milley and Vice Admiral Mark Whitworth, along with the callow, not-ready-for-prime-time National Security Advisor Jake Sulivan and trembling Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, he of the dishonest “Russian disinformation” claim about the Hunter Biden laptop. In the midst of his Afghanistan failures, Biden begged Vladimir Putin to meet with him in Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss Russia’s potential invasion of Ukraine, with over 100,000 troops massed at the border. The reader is compelled to ask: how could this possibly go well?
Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.
Image: Simon & Schuster
