Putin is a Bully? Is Joe in Seventh Grade?
Yesterday, the President of the United States referred to the Kleptocrat in the Kremlin as a bully.
He’s been doing it for years.
Like this video from 2019:
Really, Joe?
That’s the best you can offer? The corrupt murderous bastard who just invaded Ukraine is a bully?
Tell that to the people fleeing Kyiv in terror, you unserious clown.
Calling Vladimir Putin a bully is like the Black Knight calling his four severed limbs “a flesh wound.”
When I read that tweet yesterday, the first thing that popped into my head was Butch, the bully from Little Rascals.
Then again, Joe is the guy who repeatedly said he’d like to take Donald Trump out behind the gym and “beat the hell out of him.” So it isn’t exactly surprising to hear this perpetual seventh-grader in the White House call Putin a bully.
But Putin isn’t a bully.
Bullies will knock your lunch tray out of your hand and leave you to clean up the mess while the rest of the kids in the cafeteria laugh at you. They’ll yank your pants down when you’re walking to class or take your books from your hand and throw them in the toilet.
What bullies don’t do is invade a sovereign nation and bring Europe to the brink of war. That’s a bit beyond their field of expertise.
Now, to be fair, Biden isn’t the only idiot using this wholly insufficient adjective to describe Vladimir Putin. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also described Putin as a bully in his address yesterday.
Do these guys not realize that using junior high school terms like bully conveys a level of unseriousness that doesn’t match the present moment?
I started wondering if it was just me.
Maybe I’m getting too fixated on the use of the term bully.
But then this morning while having my coffee, I happened across a column in the New York Post by John Podhoretz titled “Biden offers sentimental hogwash against Putin – and doesn’t even suggest we’ll win.”
In addition to taking apart Biden’s brief, “dispiriting” address from yesterday afternoon, Podhoretz says this:
The best Biden could do rhetorically was to declare that “America stands up to bullies” — as though the most dangerous moment in the past 20 years on the planet Earth were some kind of remake of the old movie “My Bodyguard.”
I wish I’d thought of “My Bodyguard.” That line made me laugh out loud.
Come on, man. Putin isn’t a bully. He’s either a lunatic pursuing a nation-murdering delusion or a man possessed of a world-historical ambition to make himself an equal in Russian history to the Greats, Peter and Catherine, and Lenin and Stalin. Meanwhile, Biden thinks the country he leads is Adam Baldwin protecting poor Chris Makepeace against goonish Matt Dillon.
Neither Biden nor his speechwriters aren’t doing him or the country any favors by offering up junior high school-level pep rally nonsense like this.
At this moment in history, when America needs a Churchill or Reagan, we get stuck with the world’s only septuagenarian seventh-grader.
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Can you imagine the nations of the world in 1942 referring to Hitler as “a bully?”
It’s much more than that. They act like they need to delicately talk to us all like children.
Don’t worry, Biden will just have Kamala cackle at Putin. That will bring him to his knees.
P.S. Excellent Little Rascals image (though I’m sure some “fact checker” will have to claim that is an edited image).
Great image — one of your very best! I’m sure that was how Biden got his bona fides to handle Corn Pop later in life.
Your framing is very clever. Once mentioned, President Biden now does seem to be consistently a simple(ton) “septuagenarian seventh-grader.” We all, of course, are his grammar school playmates.
And there is about as much self awareness being cultivated in the Biden administration as there is on a Junior High playground
..
Junior high is overeating them. I am reminded of elementary school recess. Not Putin but the “west’s” response to his Hitlerian aggression.
Great analysis Dianny. Love your columns. God bless and keep you in His hands.