Beau Biden is, by all rights, the man of the family who should have one day become president. In fact, until his premature death from glioblastoma, the Iraq War veteran and Delaware attorney general seemed much more likely to reach the White House than his septuagenarian father.
But we all know how the story goes. The Biden heir dies, giving Barack Obama the perfect excuse to force his vice president out of 2016 contention. Hillary Clinton has the nomination fall into her lap, and she goes on to blow it.
After four years of relitigating the 2016 election, the only Democrat capable of unseating the Republican was indeed Uncle Joe — now an elder statesman armed, not with the sharpest mental acuity, but with an admirable capacity for empathy developed through years of overcoming personal tragedy.
In fact, many people voted for Biden over Donald Trump because the latter seemed incapable of such empathy. Not even a year into his presidency, Biden has failed in this regard, weaponizing his son’s death for political expedience.
The White House repeatedly invoked Beau Biden as a blanket defense since its appalling botch of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
After ISIS-K murdered 13 U.S. service members in Kabul, Biden randomly mentioned Beau. He said he was “the father of an Army major who served for a year in Iraq and, before that, was in Kosovo as a U.S. attorney for the better part of six months in the middle of a war — when he came home after a year in Iraq, he was diagnosed, like many, many coming home, with an aggressive and lethal cancer of the brain — who we lost.”
He said it as though the loss of a son to a natural bout of cancer — however tragic that may be — is comparable to the avoidable deaths caused by Biden’s own decision to empower terrorists.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki brought up Beau’s death again when pressed about Biden looking at his watch multiple times during the dignified transfer of the remains of the service members killed in Kabul.
Now Psaki has done so again, this time to deflect from the horrifying fact that, in retaliation for the ISIS-K attack, we executed a strike that killed innocent Afghan civilians, including seven children.
Joe Biden brought up Beau Biden dying of brain cancer in the context of the 13 U.S. service members killed by ISIS-K in Kabul, and Psaki is apparently referencing Biden’s family tragedies in reference to a U.S. drone strike meant for ISIS-K which killed an aid worker & his family https://t.co/dxKIFkgJZH
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) September 20, 2021
Beau’s death was a tragedy, but the White House’s incessant references to his loss as a form of political cover dishonor his name.
Sure, it was perfectly appropriate when Biden used Beau’s death as his motivation to spearhead the Obama administration’s Cancer Moonshot Project. It was appropriate to discuss his loss on the campaign trail as part of Biden’s promise to empathize with people in a way that Trump didn’t.
But this use of his name to distract from a possible war crime is simply vile.
The Biden administration is currently committing a sort of stolen valor against Beau, as though a cancer fatality gives Biden cover for laying waste to 20 years of efforts in Afghanistan.
This killing of innocent civilians on the way out will inspire an entire generation of radicalism and terror. The invocation of Beau Biden’s name is, at best, an act of intellectual dishonesty and, at worst, an unacceptable degradation of Beau’s legacy.
