Home World United States: Joe Biden’s insult to a journalist, new gaffe or controlled...

United States: Joe Biden’s insult to a journalist, new gaffe or controlled skid?

United States: Joe Biden's insult to a journalist, new gaffe or controlled skid?

It’s a little phrase dropped on the evening of Monday, January 24, in the hubbub of the end of a round table. A short sentence perfectly audible, and duly recorded. Asked on the fly by a Fox News reporter about the fact that inflation could constitute a political handicap, the President of the United States first replied in an ironic tone: “It’s a great asset…” before moving to a completely different register: “What a stupid son of a bitch!”

The insult is very unpresidential, and even if Joe Biden called the targeted journalist back an hour later to tell him that there was no “nothing personal” in its release, it caused an avalanche of comments across the Atlantic.

Did Joe Biden know his microphone was on? The question is difficult to decide, yet it is not insignificant: is this a new blunder or an assumed skid? In any case, these remarks are transcribed as such in the script of the meeting then sent to the press by the White House.

The targeted journalist, Peter Doocy, is a figure of the ultra-conservative channel Fox News. His question hit the mark: inflation, which is up 7% over one year, is at a level not seen in forty years, and it particularly affects the wallets of Americans, less than ten months before the mid-term elections. -mandate.

These elections promise to be particularly complicated for the Democrats because after a year in office, Joe Biden is struggling to revive, weighed down by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer, several key reforms blocked in Congress and a health crisis that don’t end. His popularity rating is at half mast, barely 40% of favorable opinions. Enough to make nervous a president who, until now, had kept himself from the verbal excesses of his predecessor, in accordance with his promise to “reconcile” America.

This nervousness was already manifested last week, during a major press conference devoted to the first year of office. Joe Biden qualified “idiot” question from another Fox News reporter, and he especially multiplied the approximations, in particular on Ukraine, raising the possibility of a “minor incursion” of Russia – to the point of worrying its Western allies.

The White House made a point, without putting an end to the controversy. It must be said that the verbal clumsiness of the “serial blunderer” Joe Biden has been the delight of political journalists across the Atlantic for decades.

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘1407895342825011’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);

No Comments

Leave A Reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Exit mobile version