A badly failing, flailing Joseph ‘Marionette’ Biden

Who is pulling Joseph 'Marionette' Biden's strings?

President Joe Biden is grappling with job approval poll scores that are so low he needs dive gear after less than nine months in office. And, as Mr. Biden may put it, "I'm not joking."

According to a Quinnipiac Poll issued Oct. 6, Mr. Biden's job approval rating is a pitiful 38 percent, with 53 percent disapproval.

It's not difficult to understand why he's so deep underwater. His calamitous policy failures, from Arizona (uncontrolled illegal immigration across wide-open borders) through Afghanistan, are first and foremost (the disastrous military withdrawal).

If those weren’t bad enough, there’s also a 30-year-high rate of inflation (5.3% for the year ending in August) that’s costing the average U.S. household an extra $175 a month on food, fuel (gasoline up more than $1 a gallon), and housing, according to Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Then there’s the spiteful “siccing” of the Justice Department on concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” for the “crime” of wanting a say in what public schools are teaching their children. It’s an utter misuse of crime-fighting resources at a time when the country experienced a year-over-year increase in the homicide rate of 29.4% in 2020, and which shows little sign of abating. That grim statistic, released Sept. 27, represents the highest rate of increase since the FBI started tracking it in the 1960s.

Former President Donald Trump summed up his successor’s presidency at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Oct. 9 this way:

“After just nine months under Biden, violent criminals and bloodthirsty gangs are taking over our streets. Illegal aliens and deadly drug cartels are taking over our borders. Inflation is taking over our economy. China is taking over our jobs. The Taliban has taken over Afghanistan. Lunatic leftists are taking over our schools, and radical socialists are taking over our country.”

It makes one wonder what the 38% who say they approve of Mr. Biden‘s job performance (including the 80% of Democrats polled) are smoking. They must be either utterly uninformed and oblivious to what’s going on around them or the yellowest of “yellow-dog” Democrats—or both.

That same Quinnipiac Poll found that, by a margin of 55% to 42%, those surveyed also said the Biden administration was “not competent in running the government.”

It’s gotten so bad that fellow Democrat Terry McAuliffe—the once and wannabe future governor of Virginia—is distancing himself from the president, admitting in an Oct. 5 video conference call with supporters that the president “is unpopular here in Virginia.”

In other words, don't expect Vice President Joe Biden to speak at a McAuliffe rally in the final two weeks of the 2021 Virginia governor's race.

Even The New York Times, which isn't known for its anti-Biden sentiment, is concerned, speculating on Oct. 1 if "Biden's drop with important voters" (particularly, women and minorities) is a "momentary glitch" or a "warning sign" for the Democratic Party ahead of next year's midterm elections. Mr. McAuliffe's candidacy may be a "canary in the coal mine," as the saying goes.

Some Democrats and more than a few independents who voted for Mr. Biden are doubtless experiencing buyer’s remorse. “Never Trump” RINOs whose tender sensibilities were vexed by Mr. Trump’s scathing tweets and donors to the execrable Lincoln Project are equally complicit for what they’ve inflicted upon America.

Mr. Biden pledged in his inaugural address that he would “be a president for all Americans” — presumably including Republicans — yet, there he was on Oct. 4 accusing Senate Republicans of playing “Russian roulette” with the economy over raising the debt limit and demanding they “get out of the way” so Democrats could do it themselves.

“You don’t want to help save the country?” the president for all Americans said. “Get out of the way, so you don’t destroy it.”

Meanwhile, Vice President Biden maintains that his $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend "Build Back Better" plan "costs zero money." With all due respect, you're as foolish as he thinks you are if you believe that.

Jimmy Carter, who turned 97 on Oct. 1, may be the only winner in all of this — if there is one, and it isn't the American people. Mr. Carter may yet live long enough to be disqualified from the title of worst president of our time.

In fairness to Mr. Carter, however, his failed presidency was the result of being in over his head and out of his depth in Washington after a single term as governor of Georgia, as opposed to malice aforethought. Mr. Biden doesn’t have that excuse. As a creature of nearly 50 years in the Washington swamp, he knows exactly what he‘s doing.

Or maybe not.

Mr. Biden's painfully obvious cognitive decline, which is manifested in his stumbling speeches — even when reading from a teleprompter — and his staff's severely limiting his engagement with the news media, where he would have to answer questions about his administration's disastrous policies, is the elephant in the room. He will turn 79 on Nov. 20, and his staff has severely limited his engagement with the news media, where he would have to answer questions about his administration's disastrous

To date, no Democratic lawmakers in Congress have been ready to accept Mr. Biden's cognitive decline — at least not as long as he continues to carry water for them on their far-left tax-and-spend and social-policy agendas.

The only real question then is this: Who is calling the shots behind the scenes of Mr. Biden‘s failing figurehead presidency, which is earning such deservedly low marks in job-approval polls?

The speculation centers on former President Barack Obama, who only half-jokingly told late-night TV host Stephen Colbert last Nov. 30 that he would welcome a third term, albeit one in which he played a behind-the-scenes role in someone else’s administration—presumably that of Mr. Biden, who had been elected just four weeks earlier.

“I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or frontman or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that,” he said.

As such, it’s entirely plausible that it’s Mr. Obama — through operatives such as his personal Svengali, Susan Rice — who is pulling the strings, not on Joseph Robinette Biden, but rather on Joseph “Marionette” Biden.

• Peter Parisi is a former editor of The Washington Times.

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