# Can I be the only person stunned at just how badly President Joe Biden is doing? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 31, 2021, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-be-the-only-person-stunned-at-just-how-badly-president-joe-biden-is-doing/949851 "2021-08-31T19:33:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 908
**Author:** ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2022, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-be-the-only-person-stunned-at-just-how-badly-president-joe-biden-is-doing/949851/908 "2022-03-27T12:58:55Z")
[long. Coffee’s kicking in] I’ve been thinking about the Biden line – delivered in Poland, and said _about_ Putin: > For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power. The White House walked it back, saying (probably faster than the words _could have_ reached the White House, traveling at the speed of sound): > The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change, Maybe this one is a Rorschach Test like the “**[Let’s Go Brandon](https://deadline.com/2021/12/joe-biden-agrees-lets-go-brandon-shout-out-prankster-claims-joke-1234901688/)**” thing on the NORAD Christmas call. My gut tells me that we _cannot rule out_ that this combination of an incendiary (and valid) statement, followed by an immediate walk-back by the folks back home, may all have been wired. It doesn’t give much credit to Biden to believe that he has people working for him who know how to play the game, maybe practiced law and understand the value of asking an inappropriate question at trial only to have the other side object, and then withdrawing the question (the value is in the bell having rung, and the bell cannot be un-rung). Biden went there. He raised the concept of regime change without having raised the topic of regime change. He had his people insert an asterisk of plausible deniability that may have taken the hard edge off of something profoundly volatile. What Trump used to do (as I often put it): he took every conceivable position on every possible issue. He affirmed and disavowed every position he’s ever held. He was both deadly serious and totally kidding. The strategy ? No matter the outcome, he can point to ‘evidence’ that he called it right from the beginning. As in every other conceivable way, Trump was a boorish amateur … a loose cannon … a fragmentation grenade of a ‘leader.’ Maybe what Biden did in this case was infinitely more of a well-crafted and well-executed surgical strike. We’ve all been thinking about it. Early in the month, Lindsey Graham – wittingly or unwittingly – stuck a toe in those gator-filled waters by **[suggesting](https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084548984/lindsey-graham-putin)** that Russians should assassinate Putin. That rang a big heavy-handed, but may have been a rhetorical recon mission, by design or by default. No idea where any of this is going, but there is some value in deftly planting seeds in the hopes they may bear fruit. There are myriad ways of doing this. Maybe this is just another example. There’s generally a lot of Kabuki behind the scenes. And it doesn’t particularly come from a place of Biden Fanboyism. It’s entirely possible that it _was_ nothing more than one of his legendary gaffes. But maybe not. The whole thing _could_ have parallels to Reagan’s famous, “**[Mr. Gorbachev: tear down this wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tear_down_this_wall!#Background)**” line. [ETA: I wasn’t sure where the line was on a breaking news thread, so I chose not to put it in the ongoing Ukraine thread] --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-i-be-the-only-person-stunned-at-just-how-badly-president-joe-biden-is-doing/949851)._