“I think he (Joe Biden) has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue for 40 years,” said former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2014.
I genuinely do not believe Joe Biden is suffering from mental decline. He has always been this obtuse. And the Democrats and the media know it. They just play along as though suddenly he has been struck with early-onset dementia. It paves the way for them to justify what was a coup, as they read the polls that he was going to lose big time to Trump. When Harris is asked when she first noticed the cognitive decline in Biden, she blathers on about what a sharp man he has always been. Really? So why did you replace him?
How else can you explain the utter failure of almost any one of Biden’s policies? People forget that in less than three months after Biden took office, Hamas started lobbing missiles into Israel. Israel reacted and the world naturally condemned Israel. This was followed by violence against Jews that broke out in the streets of Manhattan. (Remember Joey Borgen?) Hamas was emboldened by what they knew to be the weak leadership of Joe Biden and his overtures to Iran.
Biden stopped the Alaska Pipeline on day one. That caused a major hike in oil prices and the devastating inflation to follow. Gas, mortgages, eggs, beef, and poultry all skyrocketed. His fleeing from Afghanistan was probably the most shameful surrender in US history. It came at the cost of at least 13 lives, plus some of our most advanced military equipment.
Then he decides to totally open the borders. He appoints Kamala Harris as Border Czar (which, of course, now she denies). How did that work out? Ask the mayors of sanctuary cities, including New York. Ask the police of border states how it has affected crime. Biden really has the opposite of the Midas Touch. Everything he touches turned to dust.
The problem is that Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz are equally imbecilic, if not worse. She cannot answer the most basic questions, such as what would you do to improve the economy (“I grew up in a middle-class family, etc., etc.”). She can’t think of a thing she would do differently than Joe Biden, yet looks to move forward. She is a reputable chef in the kitchen. I believe it. She makes a real mean word salad. And her running mate, the self-proclaimed “knucklehead” (liar), ran a state rampant with crime, police defunding, and boys’ rooms with feminine amenities.
The genius of Biden-Harris managed to totally mess up the Middle East. First, he falls into the Jimmy Carter/Barak Obama trap of believing that if you’re nice to Iran, they will show love to you. In the beginning, following October 7, Biden was great. He flew to Israel to show “ironclad” support. Later, when he realized there’s a city in Michigan called Dearborn with many Palestinians, he changed course and handcuffed Netanyahu. And then he wonders why the war is taking so long.
Harris, for her part, is just awkward and clumsy. While she validates the need to show solid support of Israel, she also sympathizes with the “just cause” of the innocent victims in Gaza. At one point, regarding Israel’s entry into Rafah, she childishly tells an interviewer on ABC’s “This Week,” “I have studied the maps – there’s no place for these folks to go…”
Maybe she should ask a pre-Wazer to show her how to study a map. Does Egypt not exist on the Rafah border? Why is that not an option? Besides, Netanyahu and the IDF proved her and her boss woefully wrong. They invaded Rafah and managed to find a safe passageway for tens of thousands of civilians. They also found the October 7 mastermind, Sinwar, stowed away in a stolen house in Rafah. Of course, Harris professed glee over the extermination of this vermin.
Harris and Biden managed the very difficult feat of disenfranchising both the Jewish and the Palestinian population in the United States.
In 1992, James Carville, Democratic strategist for Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush, famously turned around the fortunes of the once very popular Mr. Bush by coining the campaign slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid!” During this election, we can loudly proclaim to the Democrats: “It’s the stupidity, stupid!”
In this final weekly article before this most consequential election for Jews, Israel, the United States, and the world, I beg all Jews – yes, even the ones who are tied to the hip of the Democratic Party – even the ones who hate Donald Trump in their columns and their letters to the editor to this paper: Please… Don’t be stupid!
Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld is the Rabbi Emeritus of the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, former President of the Vaad Harabonim of Queens, and the Rabbinic Consultant for the Queens Jewish Link.
