Navy Seal Who Killed bin Laden: I'm a Patriot, But Putin Beat Biden
It turns out old age, guile and flashcards don’t beat totalitarianism and ice-water for blood. Who could have guessed?
Other than everybody, that is.
President Joe Biden’s first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t exactly a hit. In fact, it was bad enough that the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden thought that Putin was “winning” the summit in Geneva partway through this week.
Robert O’Neill’s Twitter profile is pretty blunt. It reads thusly: “I wanted to shoot bin Laden in the face. @joebiden didn’t. We won.”
He’s referring, of course, to the fact that our current president probably didn’t want to go after the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11. Ask Joe Biden whether or not he did and you’ll get a different response, at least now that bin Laden has been shot in the face (and other body parts, as well) and been given a proper burial where he belongs.
But I digress, since there was a different class of adversary for Biden to meet this week. So, how did it go?
You weren’t supposed to say it went badly. After all, to do so would imply that you were against the United States — or so said liberal pundit Chris Hahn.
Don’t call yourself a patriot if you’re rooting for Putin.
— Chris Hahn (@ChristopherHahn) June 16, 2021
O’Neill let him know how things were actually going: “I’m a Patriot. Putin is winning.”
I’m a Patriot. Putin is winning. https://t.co/c4j8ID3ibB
— Robert J. O’Neill (@mchooyah) June 17, 2021
How so? Let’s take a look at the scoreboard.
First, flashcards. Who needed them? This guy:
Telling. pic.twitter.com/knaUP7dx9Q
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) June 16, 2021
And then there were uncomfortable questions. Take this one, from ABC News’ Rachel Scott. She asked Putin, “What are you so afraid of?”
She was referring to, among other totalitarian faux pas, the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny in 2020.
Instead of answering this directly, Putin deflected to the United States’ own issues, talking up the “looting and violations and riots” that happened post-George Floyd.
“We sympathize with the Americans, but we do not want for the same thing to happen on the Russian soil, and we’ll do anything possible to prevent this,” Putin said.
When Scott pressed Putin for a further answer, he leaned into the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt during the incursion into the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“People went into U.S. Congress with political demands,” Putin said.
“Four hundred people are now facing criminal charges,” he continued. “They are facing prison terms of up to 20, maybe 25 years. They are called home-grown terrorists. They are being accused of many other things.”
Alas, Scott didn’t have flashcards to save her. If only, if only.
And then there was CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who asked as the president was walking away how Biden could describe his meeting with Putin as “constructive.”
Collins noted how Putin “downplayed human rights abuses” and “denied any involvement” in Russian cyberattacks — and, in fact, even “refused to say Alexei Navalny’s name.”
“Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?”
“If you don’t understand that,” Biden tells a reporter pushing him to explain how it was a constructive meeting with Putin if he still denies human rights abuses and cyber attacks, “you’re in the wrong business.”
pic.twitter.com/M4QmK7hKYd— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) June 16, 2021
Uncle Joe went off, but not before having his say. Or, well, trying.
“I’m not confident — What the hell? What do you do all the time?” Biden responded. “When did I say I was confident?”
“I said what will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I’m not confident of anything,” he continued.
White House reporter Philip Wegmann, of right-leaning RealClearNews, put it best:
Narrator: @kaitlancollins was, in fact, in the right business.
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) June 16, 2021
How dare you, sir? Don’t call yourself a patriot anymore — you called out the obvious.
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