This brief Insight highlights two moments in time, separated by several decades. To some, the anecdotes below may be a cause for legitimate concern regarding the helmsmanship of Western national security.
Under the mantle of the elected President of the United States of America, Joe Biden enjoys the associated title, Leader of the Free World. The quality of that leadership has been called into question, notably through an Impeachment Inquiry launched by Congress. Within the context of that Inquiry a Special Counsel, Robert Hur, was appointed to investigate allegations of the President’s mishandling of classified documents. The Special Counsel’s Report is now in the public domain.
It contains explicit details of the investigative interview by the Special Counsel with the President. Within that five-hour, revealing and very serious interview, transcripts of which have been made available to Congress, the President reportedly moved far off point on more than one occasion. For example, he talked about how much he enjoyed driving his Corvette sports car. At the same time, he complained that his Secret Service protectors would not allow him to go driving on public roads and so he was limited to sitting in the car and driving it up and down his driveway. He capped off his story by saying how much he loved the “Vroom, vroom” of the car’s engine.
His unsolicited statement surprised me. “Shocked me” would be a better way to put it.
I thought back in time to when the then Taliban Leader in Afghanistan, the one-eyed and now deceased Mullah Omar, used to sit inside the wreck of a car in his house’s garden and take great pleasure from sitting behind the steering wheel pretending to drive and, as he did so, making appropriate “Vroom, vroom” noises.
Simple pleasures, you might say. But in the context of the Leader of the Western World giving formal testament to a congressional Inquiry, more than a trifle worrying.
Sharkey.