There have been 46 occupants of the office of President of the United States of America. Some of them have been great, many have been good, some have been revolutionary and extremely active in their policies and some have been lazy time servers. Other presidents have been a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state whilst some have been disruptive controversialists. Some presidents have gone down in history as considerable successes whilst others languish near or at the bottom of lists of presidential failures.

However I don’t think that in my lifetime I’ve seen an American President who is such an embarrassment to his country as Joe Biden. I’m old enough to recall the mockery dished out by the world’s media at the policies and behaviour of Nixon, Carter and Reagan, the horror felt in some sectors about the military adventurism of George W Bush, the disgust at the sleaziness of Bill Clinton and the disappointment of Barack Obama’s presidency.

For all their faults I don’t think that any of these presidents have been as consistently embarrassing and gaffe prone as Biden. I’ve watched footage and coverage of Joe Biden’s visit to Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic to mark the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Peace Agreement and it makes me dreadfully sorry that my American friends are led by this man. At a time when the world is in economic, political and social turmoil, the greatest since the Fall of the Berlin Wall in my opinion, America should have a leader who is on top of their intellectual and political game. Instead they have Joe Biden. Here is a man who is clearly suffering from some intellectual decline due to age so much so that if Biden was anyone else other than the President of the United States it would be woefully cruel to mock him. But he’s the President and his decline has caused him to make verbal errors of enormous significance such as calling the All Blacks rugby team the ‘Black and Tans’ which was a pretty brutal British auxiliary police force used to suppress Irish Republicans in the early 1920’s prior to the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Biden makes the sort of gaffes that increase the possibility of conflict, conflict that might have been suppressed in part due to American might, as parties to such conflicts now see in Biden an America that is weak and unable to project the necessary power to stop conflict. Biden’s behaviour also gives comfort to the enemies of America and the West in general who look at the Biden administration’s weakness and wish to exploit it for their own ends. Neither America nor the Western world have any advantage over its adversaries because of the presence of Joe Biden in the White House, but the adversaries and enemies do.

I’ve little doubt that there will be those who will be angered by my assessment of Joe Biden and point to Britain’s own history of piss poor heads of state, who’s rule has been either soaked in blood such as that of Henry VIII or who are weak willed individuals enamoured of faddish and dangerous ideologies as was the case of Edward VIII. They might also point out that there’s the distinct possibility that our current head of state Charles III might turn out to be a wrong ‘un in love with the sort of salon socialism that doesn’t affect the class system, but concentrates on virtue signalling about stuff that really does not matter or affect existing power structures. They would of course be at liberty to do so. However the difference is that we in the UK have no say about who our head of state is, we get what the genetic lottery gives us, whereas the Americans voted for Biden. They saw this man Biden for decades in the political system, they saw his gaffes, his dodgy family, his plagiarism, his cynically shifting political statements and despite that still voted in this man to the position of the President of the United States.

I don’t believe that the visit of Joe Biden to the island of Ireland has done any diplomatic good nor helped the peace process in the province of Ulster. It has however shown those in Britain and the Irish Republic what a disreputable and decrepit individual that the American people have chosen to lead them, despite the best efforts of the dishonest mainstream media to make Biden look like a statesman rather than the confused old man with questionable personal morals that he really is. Whilst I agree that it is right to respect the office of President of the United States, there’s very little that I can find to respect about the current occupant.