When Vice President Joe Biden met with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing in 2011, the two men joked about their age.
"I note that we were born in the same year," Wen said when they made a joint public appearance. "You have spent about 35 years in public service, and I've been working in the government compound of Beijing for more or less the same period of time."
"What a magnificent place," Biden said of that facility. "Now I know why even though we were born in the same year, you look so much younger than I. You worked in a much more commodious environment than I do."
As this column has noted before, Biden then thanked this communist leader for China helping to fund the U.S. debt.
"We appreciate and welcome your concluding that the United States is such a safe haven because we appreciate your investment in U.S. treasuries," Biden told him.
On that day -- Aug. 19, 2011 -- the federal debt was approximately $14.639 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. At the close of last week, it was approximately $34.944 trillion. That is an increase of $20.305 trillion -- or 138%.
History will record that Biden himself oversaw a massive increase in the debt -- which as of last Friday had increased approximately $7.1923 trillion during his term.
That will not be the only negative mark on Biden's legacy.
Biden picked Sept. 11, 2021 -- the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks -- as the deadline for U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan.
"President Joe Biden ... officially announced the drawdown of all 2,500 U.S. troops in that country beginning May 1 and concluding by Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the war," the Department of Defense reported on April 14, 2021.
"I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again," Biden said in remarks delivered that day.
Then he said: "We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We'll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely."
About two weeks before Biden's 9/11 withdrawal deadline, an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members in an attack outside the Kabul airport. The Defense Department reported he "was one of thousands of ISIS-K members the Taliban released from a pair of detention centers in mid-August 2021."
Did Biden's withdrawal leave behind an Afghanistan that is free of terrorists who could try to attack the United States in the future?
"ISIS-K and its allies retain a safe haven in Afghanistan, and they continue to develop their networks in and out of the country," Gen. Michael Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March.
What about al Qaeda?
"Al Qaeda, while weakened, still enjoys safe havens in Afghanistan and Yemen," Kurilla said, as this column has noted before.
Then there is the surge of "inadmissible" Afghans caught trying to cross the southwest border. According to an inspector general's report, as this column has noted before, the Border Patrol encountered 932 "inadmissible" Afghans there through just March 5 of this fiscal year.
During fiscal 2019, according to data published by Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol did not encounter even one individual on the terrorist watchlist trying to sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border between the ports of entry. So far in this fiscal year, it has encountered 93.
When Sen. Joe Biden appeared on "Meet the Press" in 2007, he conceded that human life begins at conception -- but spoke of it as a religious principle, not a scientific one.
"Do you believe that life begins at conception?" host Tim Russert asked him.
"I am prepared to accept my church's view. I think it's a tough one," said Biden. "That is a tough, tough decision to me. But there is a point relatively soon where viability -- it's clear to me when there's viability, meaning the ability to survive outside the womb, that I don't have any doubt."
"Are you still opposed to public funding for abortion?" Russert asked him.
"I still am opposed to public funding for abortion," he said.
In this year's State of the Union address, Biden said: "If Americans send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again."
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Biden's Defense Department issued a policy that, as NPR put it, would "pay for service members to travel for abortion care."
"But the Biden DOD abortion travel policy forces taxpayers to pay the transportation costs for military members and dependents to travel to procure an abortion, for any reason, right up until the moment of birth," Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey said in a speech on the House floor.
So, Biden believes life begins at conception -- and that the government should force taxpayers to help fund the ending of that life.
Biden will leave the presidency after one term. But decades from now, history will recall the massive debt he accumulated, his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the border he did not secure, and the innocent lives his policies worked to destroy.
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