Biden is facing multiple crises of his own making

Our mainstream media largely ignored it, the world media did not.

Ascending the stairs of Air Force One on Friday, to fly to Georgia, President Joe Biden slipped and stumbled. Getting up, he slipped and fell. The scene was jolting and disquieting.

Adversaries abroad will use it as a metaphor for the decline of the last superpower to emerge from the Cold War. And while our major media may scoff at it, there is talk all over this town about what appears to be the visibly declining physical and mental capacity of this oldest of American presidents at 78.

Biden’s press conference Thursday — after the longest delay before a first full presidential press conference since Cal Coolidge — was as closely monitored as Ronald Reagan’s second debate in 1984, after he seemed to suffer a mental lapse in his first debate with Fritz Mondale.

But now, after his legislative triumph with the enactment of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, Joe Biden has some new problems, all of his own making.

The COVID-19 pandemic he inherited, as Nixon inherited Vietnam in 1969. But Biden and the nation were fortunate in that, by the time he took the oath, two vaccines had been approved and shots being given to Americans at rate of a million doses a day.

The new crisis on America’s border, however, with record numbers of children, teenagers and families arriving and asking for asylum, is almost entirely Biden’s doing.

What Gov. Andrew Cuomo did to the nursing homes of New York — send COVID-positive patients back into them — Biden is doing to the USA.

Of the thousands of illegal immigrants entering our country daily, few are tested for COVID-19 before being moved into the American heartland, carrying infection with them.

How do you control a pandemic when our 2,000-mile southern border is a crossing corridor for thousands of infected every single day?

Yet, it is not only on the domestic front that Biden and his people have created for themselves new and unnecessary crises.

Biden is only two months into his presidency but already has brought U.S.-China relations to the lowest level since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. And he has brought U.S.-Russian relations to the lowest level since Nikita Khrushchev blew up the Paris summit of May 1960 over President Eisenhower’s refusal to apologize for the U-2 spy flight over Russia that the Soviets had shot down.

Biden is himself responsible for the poisoned relations with Russia, after telling ABC that, yes, Vladimir Putin is “a killer” whom he once told to his face that he had no “soul.”

In chilling relations with China, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has played the lead role.

Before taking office, Blinken publicly charged the Chinese government with “genocide” in its treatment of the Uighurs. He then opened the two-day Anchorage meeting with a two-minute indictment of China for its actions in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan — and got back a blistering 20-minute Chinese counterattack. The thrust of Beijing’s response:

Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong are Chinese national territories, and how we rule there is none of America’s business. Nor do you Americans have any superior moral claim or right to sit in judgment on us, given your own record with indigenous peoples and Black Americans.

From Biden’s behavior in his first 60 days, we already seem fated to endure years more of deepening Cold War with Russia and China.

To what end this BidenBlinken in-your-face diplomacy?