It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

July 8, 2023

photo above: One of the photos Lunden Roberts posted on Instagram of her daughter during a trip to Washington.

WN: I am in agreement with this final statement in the article highlighted below:

The president’s cold shoulder — and heart — is counter to every message he has sent for decades, and it’s out of sync with the America he wants to continue to lead.

But, as this website constantly indicates, Biden’s “cold heart,” as with every preceding President, is the absolute norm: hidden in plain view, yet ignored/denied by Opinion writers all such as Ms. Dowd, a denial embraced by the vast majority of “liberal/progressive/enlightened” throughout U.S. history. Pot calling the kettle black is gargantuan understatement! For as I say in my An Open Letter To Joe Biden 06-11-2020:

Dear Mr. Biden.

If I might be so bold, I wonder about connecting some dots at this incredible kairos moment of U.S. and world history.

I was moved by your empathetic videoed message to the Floyd family during the funeral service in Houston. You have deeply suffered multiple losses as this article sensitively points out: “Joe Biden’s Secret Weapon Is Grief”.

I also appreciated your drawing on Catholic Social Teaching. With relation to that teaching, I wonder: Do you see any connection at all between the most basic Christian teaching by Jesus in the Gospels to Love your neighbour/Love your enemies, and Black Lives Matter/American international foreign policy past or present?

I wonder in that regard whether Arab Lives Matter? What about organized murder by your country of more than two million Arabs in Iraq, Syria, and Libya—more than a million in Iraq, 600,000 in Syria, and 30,000 in Libya? Many of these were murdered during your watch as Vice President.

I wonder whether at least in retrospect the three million Vietnamese Lives Matter, killed by your government, or whether you have ever spoken out against your country’s involvement in the Vietnam War that “ ‘was an atrocity from the get-go,’ [one veteran] said in a recent telephone interview. ‘It was that kind of war . . . There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted[/murdered].’ ” This from The New York Times article: “Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories”.

I wonder whether Non-American Lives Matter—when deemed “The Enemy”? What do you think of this?:

In 1948, George Keennan, State Department Director of policy planning, noted that the United States then possessed “about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population.” The challenge facing U.S. policy makers, he believed, was “to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.” [1. PPS 23, “Review of Current Trends, U.S. Foreign Policy” (February 24, 1948).] The overarching aim of American statecraft in other words, was to sustain the uniquely favorable situation to which the United States had ascended by the end of World War II. It’s hard to imagine a statement of purpose more succinct, cogent, and to the point. Judged by this standard, the stewards of U.S. foreign policy down to the present day have done more than passably well… (America’s War For the Greater Middle East: A Military History, Andrew J. Bacevich, New York: Random House, 2016, p. 358).

This premier American historian believes “The Enemy” is any people standing in the way of U.S. full spectrum dominance. Like all bullies wanting to pulverize their victims because they had what the bully wanted.

OR . . .

Did Japanese Lives Matter when 100,000 civilians of all ages were slaughtered in Tokyo during one night of conventional carpet bombing in March 1945 (perhaps a million all together in about 80 cities similarly bombed); or in the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilians of all ages in Hiroshima or Nagasaki that instantly slaughtered 120,000, and an additional 80,000 who died slow motion, agonizing deaths—not to mention the horrific environmental devastation?

OR . . .

Did Russian or Chinese Lives Matter during the Cold War when any number of nuclear war planners in Washington contemplated striking 295 Soviet cities, with an estimated death toll total of 115 million, and another 107 million dead in Red China, besides millions more in Soviet satellite countries (The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John W. Dower, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017, pp. 28 & 29; See also my post: Life Under the Bomb is a Life of Resistance.). When in some circles, as a kind of sick dark humour, the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to “only” 200,000 dead, came to be called “firecracker nukes (ibid, p. 29).” One strategist, Albert Wohlstetter, referred to this era, and such longstanding policy, as a “delicate balance of terror (ibid, p. 27).”

Or is “terrorism” by definition only what the “Bad Guys” do? As one of my wider family members stupidly, stubbornly argues. (He needs a good dose of the 1975 Academy Award-winning Hearts and Minds. One clip masterfully captures it!:

excerpts:

So I was surprised recently when I discovered my sister writing a letter to President Biden, a plea that she had started in the middle of the night, after mulling over the matter for quite a while.

“I watched as you told the nation that you had six grandchildren and you loved each one of them,” she wrote. “I believe that. What I cannot believe and what I find unconscionable is that you refuse to admit or accept the fact that there is a beautiful little 4-year-old girl living in Arkansas by the name of Navy Joan who is your seventh grandchild.”

Peggy wrote about Hunter’s high-priced lawyers going down to Arkansas to make sure Navy could not use the Biden name and to slash child support payments.

“She has the Biden blood running through her veins, and all she is going to have as a reminder of this are some of Hunter’s original paintings; sounds like a lousy trade-off, if you ask me,” Peggy wrote, referring to the agreement that assigned some of Hunter’s artwork to the daughter he has never met, even though DNA testing in 2019 established his paternity.

“I had no recollection of our encounter,” [Hunter Biden] said of Roberts. Yet he put her on the payroll of his consulting firm as a personal assistant while she was pregnant. About three months after Navy was born, Hunter took away Roberts’s company health insurance.

“As she grows up, knowing that her father and paternal grandparents wanted nothing to do with her,” Peggy wrote, “she will probably be able to see a video or two showing her half sister Naomi getting married on the South Lawn and you watching the fireworks on the balcony with little Beau. And if she misses that, there will be plenty of schoolmates to remind her that she wasn’t wanted. Kids can be mean that way.”

…

What the Navy story reveals is how dated and inauthentic the 80-year-old president’s view of family is.

Once you could get away with using terms like “out of wedlock” and pretend that children born outside marriage didn’t exist or were somehow shameful. But now we have become vastly more accepting of nontraditional families. We live in an Ancestry.com world, where people are searching out their birth parents and trying to find relatives they didn’t know they had.

Please click on: It’s Seven Grandkids, Mr. President