When President Joe Biden disrupted one of his own events last week by scanning a White House crowd in search of a congresswoman who’d died two months ago, it was an embarrassment to the presidency.
When his press secretary stood on a podium the same day to lie flatly to the American media about the president’s faltering moment, it was a disgrace to the truth.
But when the late Republican lawmaker’s family met with Biden, he got the answer he was looking for, but the fact that he needed it isn’t much comfort to the rest of the country.
The incident started Wednesday, when Biden’s too-often confused mind clearly forgot about the death of Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana and began asking for her at a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health.
“I want to thank all of you here,” Biden said, according to ABC News, “including bipartisan, elected officials like representative of government Sen. Braun, Sen. Booker, Representative Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I think — she was gonna be here — to help make this a reality.”
Walorski wasn’t going to be at any White House conference. She died in a car crash in Indiana in early August — an event Biden had actually marked with a statement about how he and the first lady were “shocked” by tragedy.
On Friday, according to the New York Post, Walorski’s family met with Biden and told him right to his face where her daughter was.
“She said, ‘Well, Mr. President, we can tell you where Jackie is. She’s in heaven with Jesus,’” Jackie Walorski’s brother Keith Walorski told the Post.
“He could only agree. He’s a very Catholic person. He’s very strong in his Catholicism. So all he could do is say, ‘Yes, you’re right. I know.’”
(Set aside the whole “Catholic” business. A man’s faith is his own business, of course, between him and God, but there’s no denying that Biden’s vociferous support for abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June gives plenty of reason to question how “devout” Biden’s brand of Catholicism is.)
The whole exchange would be heartwarming, if it were just a story about an aging man, with an aging memory, forgetting a woman’s death and being treated kindly by her family anyway.
But this is a story about the president of the United States, a man who’s in the White House because the Democratic Party, the deep state and their accomplices in mainstream media and Big Tech colluded to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump.
So, a man who oversaw a thriving economy at home and promising steps toward peace abroad was replaced by an evident dotard who can’t remember matters of — literally — life and death.
The attempt by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to cover up Biden’s mental miscue as some kind of “top of mind” tribute to the deceased woman was so brazenly dishonest that even the normally docile members of the White House press corps were stirred to behave almost like they were reporters covering the White House.
When Biden met with the Walorski family at the White House on Friday, there was no media presence because Biden viewed the event as a “personal” occasion, Jean-Pierre told reporters, according to the Washington Examiner.
While visiting with the family, Biden signed a bill to rename a Veterans Affairs clinic in Mishawaka, Indiana, in Walorski’s honor.
He also apologized for last week’s very senior moment, according to the Post.
“He did apologize for the ‘Where’s Jackie?’ comment and our family assured him we have no hard feelings. We forgive him for his gaffe,” Keith Walorski told the newspaper.
“President Biden brought it up and basically said he was sorry that things went the way he went with his ‘Where’s Jackie?’ comment. We didn’t dwell there a long time.
“He basically put it out there and apologized and we basically accepted his apology.”
That’s decent of the family, of course. But the fact that it was necessary speaks volumes about the doddering figurehead who’s in charge of the federal government.
And the fact that media cameras and coverage were banned from the event speaks volumes about the lack of confidence the White House staff has that Biden could pull off a meeting like this without embarrassing himself and his countrymen and women even further.
They were probably petrified that Walorski’s family would make a public display of disgust.
That didn’t happen. And unlike his press secretary’s lie-to-your-face performance last week, it sounds like Biden didn’t try to minimize his blunder to the family. That’s something of a relief, since it showed even in his senescence, the president realized there was no sense trying to talk his way out of it.
That might have been a comfort to the family of the woman he inadvertently insulted. The fact that the whole situation even took place is no comfort to the country his mentally, intellectually and morally deficient administration is damaging so badly.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
