Joe ‘Up the Republic’ Biden

One has to pity Joe Biden’s aides. They are falling over themselves trying to dispel the malicious rumours that their employer is virulently anti-British.

That’s a bit like Hitler’s aides protesting in the 1940s that their Führer didn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. A tall task, requiring more spin than even Nadal can put on a tennis ball.

Anyway, if anyone can appreciate his aides’ conundrum, it’s Joe himself. And what better time to help them out than his pilgrimage trip to Ireland, supposedly to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Britain’s surren… sorry, Freudian slip. I mean the Good Friday Agreement of course.

And speaking of Freudian slips, the other day Joe visited a pub just south of the Ulster boarder. There he proudly invoked the name of his distant relation, the rugby player Rob Kearney, who, Biden announced, “beat the hell out of the Black and Tans”.

He meant the New Zealand national team nicknamed All Blacks that Kearney destroyed almost singlehandedly in 2016. Now everyone knows that Joe isn’t quite compos mentis. Never the sharpest chisel in the toolbox to begin with, with age he has added senility to his mental deficiencies.

Thus his gaffes and pratfalls are too numerous to mention, although some hacks do their level best to list the whole inventory. Yet not all gaffes are the same.

Slips of the tongue are often caused by a man talking about an unfamiliar subject and replacing a new term with a similar-sounding one lodged in the front of his mind. As an American, Joe knows nothing about rugby, the precursor of American football. Hence the term ‘All Blacks’, helpfully provided by his poor aides, meant nothing to him. The term ‘Black and Tans’, on the other hand, must always be in his thoughts. Hence the gaffe.

The Black and Tans was a British militia, 10,000-strong, recruited into the Royal Ulster Constabulary to quash the 1919-1921 Irish rebellion. They failed, but not before distinguishing themselves for atrocities against civilians. The Irish thus remember the Black and Tans with the same bitterness as they do Oliver Cromwell, who drowned Ireland in blood back in 1649.

Immediately after the island was divided into the British North and republican South, the unit was disbanded and has since sunk into oblivion. But apparently 100-odd years aren’t enough to erase its memory altogether.

That war and all its participants, including the Black and Tans, must still occupy a fair chunk of Joe’s mental capacity, to the exclusion of all those little problems that should typically concern the Leader of the Free World.

In his present state, he has a hard time trying to conceal his palpable hatred of Britain. Biden’s mentality is pure IRA, and I don’t mean Individual Retirement Account. Subterfuge is now beyond Joe’s faculties, which must be why, on the same trip, he also took a selfie of himself with Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Féin.

Now Gerry has always insisted he had nothing to do with the IRA and its terrorist activities. This in spite of numerous witnesses testifying to his past involvement. He was the IRA’s Chief of Staff in the 1970s and a member of its War Council until 2005.

Adams was arrested numerous times, although the prosecutors never managed to make the charges of terrorism stick. Nonetheless his IRA past isn’t so much a rumour as common knowledge.

That’s why he was denied entry to the United States on several occasions. But in 1994, following a campaign led by Senator Biden, President Clinton granted Adams a 48-hour visa to attend a conference in New York. However, he wasn’t allowed to travel farther than 25 miles outside NY, which kept him from South Boston, the hub of IRA fund raising in America.

In short, the case of Biden’s Anglophilia wasn’t helped by his choice of co-model for that selfie. Somebody ought to tell the president that he brings his office into disrepute by so blatantly meddling in the affairs of America’s most reliable European ally.

I’m not sure, however, that Joe would listen. All those tribal resentments so many Americans inherit from their distant European past are especially pronounced in people whose mental capacity is impaired either from birth or by age, or, as in Biden’s case, both.

Such resentments, by the way, don’t exist in Britain, not so that I’ve noticed anyway. One of my close friends is of French Huguenot ancestry, another had a German mother, yet another has roots both in Scotland and Ireland, still another’s descent has Welsh inputs. Yet they all consider themselves English, and their interest in their distant ancestral lands is no greater than mine.

Moreover, they eschew the double-barrel self-identification so rife in America. You can hear ‘French-American’, ‘German-American’ or ‘Irish-American’ all over the place there, but Englishmen remain just English, wherever their ancestors lived.

Mario Puzo of the The Godfather fame once described his clash with Frank Sinatra over the striking similarity between the singer and one of Puzo’s characters. The conflict, explained the novelist, was exacerbated by their heritage. Yes, both were Italian-American, but Puzo’s ancestors came from Sicily, while Sinatra’s from somewhere up north. Even though one of them was born in New York and the other in New Jersey, that sort of geography mattered to both.

Most of the time such particularism is benign and good-natured, although one may be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the glue binding the American nation together is thinner than similar substances in Europe.

But when a president of the United States bases his foreign policy pronouncements and even decisions on his great-great-grandparents’ nativity, that’s neither benign nor good-natured. It’s both pathetic and potentially detrimental to the interests of America and, in this case, Britain.

Those Americans who are horrified by the sight of a clearly incompetent man in the White House talk about compulsory tests of mental ability for all presidential candidates. I’d also add an IQ test to the mix, to exclude Joe for sure and a few others possibly. Dubya, anyone?