Introduction:

The question is not whether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden (Mr. Biden) is a great, or even good, President. The question is whether or not he is even barely competent; can he at least adequately handle the tasks that face him and our nation.

Afghanistan gives us our first real clues about how to answer this key question. 

We were never going to get an answer to that question until he became President. Mr. Biden has never worked in private industry where you are responsible for specific tasks, small or large, with bosses giving you feedback, rating you as competent, incompetent or perhaps even very good at your job. Biden has certainly never run anything, even a corner hotdog and hamburger joint, where he would have been responsible for staffing, inventory, accounting, meeting payroll and making a profit so he could give raises, hand out promotions–and just do what was necessary to stay in business. 

He was never a governor, or even a mayor. The United States of America is the first entity of any kind that Biden has ever run. 

That is the subject of today’s 10 minute episode.

Continuing:

Mr. Biden spent decades in Congress, then 8 years as the Vice President. In Congress, unless you are the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader, your vote, win or lose, is counted as part of a group, and you are never in charge of or personally responsible for anything. You may or may not be a contributor. You might be a leader or a follower. Your politics and policies might or might not make sense. What is certain is that you were always a committee member, never the CEO. Even worse, all American VPs do is go to funerals of second tier foreign leaders, and stand by in case the President dies. 

When Biden ran for President this last time, his third attempt, he did not stand on his record. During the primaries, his claim to fame was not being one of the progressive left. That claim may not hold up today, but it worked well enough to give him the nomination. When he ran in the general election, his platform was “I’m not Trump.” That claim is still true. So the campaign did not offer much to assess competency.

I want to be clear that I am not talking about his well publicized gaffes, mispronunciations and apparent brain freezes; those things happen to many people. I want to focus on his performance, his judgement, his decisions and results as our President. The leader of the free world. So far, in general what we have seen is a strong drift to the left, an orderly rollout of vaccines developed under the previous administration, and his following–not leading–Congress as it pushes to spend unheard amounts of money. All while claiming that the cost of living will not go up, and that the value of the dollar will not go down. No real leadership here, nothing to go by to judge competency.

But what about Afghanistan? He clearly led here, giving us the first real handle on answering the question about his competency. “I stand squarely behind my decision,” Biden said. And a month prior, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country [of Afghanistan] is highly unlikely,” President Biden confidently proclaimed in July.” Let’s examine what President Biden is standing “squarely behind.” First off, everyone gets it, everyone agrees, that leaving Afghanistan was the right decision. You can even make an argument that we should have left after a year or two, in 2002 or 2003, when we found that Bin Laden had left. “Mr. Bin Laden has left the country.” The only conversation to be had is how the leaving, the withdrawal, was handled. It was an embarrassing, domestically, internationally and militarily, unmitigated disaster. 

Today’s Key Point: Joe Biden is not competent. More than not being a great, or even a good President, he is simply not competent. And given how Biden is mismanaging a clear, simple situation where he...