President Barack Obama gestures during a meeting with Vice President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, Aug. 27, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Think Barack Obama doesn’t have a sense of humor? Not so, writes Roger Kimball in Spectator.us. With his best “I’m being serious and sincere” expression, the former president, in a better-late-than-never moment, endorsed his former vice president with a straight face.
Mr. Kimball suggests you try it yourself. Grab a mirror, he urges, and try saying out loud that Joe Biden would bring “leadership guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace” to Washington.
Obama packed a lot of disingenuous moments into his brief endorsement, but none more emetic than his claim that good ole Joe ‘helped prevent the Ebola epidemic from becoming the type of pandemic we’re seeing now.’ Right.
There were a total of 11 cases of Ebola in the US in 2014, only two of which were contracted in the US. It wasn’t an epidemic but a minor health scare. The coronavirus, by contrast, is more like the seasonal flu, probably (much) more contagious if not, in the end, more lethal.
But it has claimed some 23,000 lives so far, and the number would have been far higher had Donald Trump not had the foresight to end flights from China on January 31. It was an action that Biden initially slammed as ‘fear-mongering’ and xenophobic.
In fact, as Sen. Tom Cotton observed, it was probably “the single most consequential and valuable thing” done to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
