Quote:During the reign of Chris Licht as the CNN CEO, at least they said they wanted to be objective. Given all their hosts who weren’t, that was going to be a tall order, and some of them were shown the door.

But now with Licht gone, they seem to have dispensed with all pretense of objectivity. They seem to have fully gone back to parroting the Democratic line—if they ever truly had stopped.

CNN Fareed Zakaria’s interview with Joe Biden seems to have set new records for groveling softballs tossed at Biden. We reported on some of this interview earlier and Biden’s position on cluster munitions and Ukraine’s desire to join NATO.

But the start of this was truly something else.

“Mr. President, you’ve often said when people ask you about your age, ‘Just watch me,’” Zakaria said to the 80-year-old Biden. “And I think a lot of people do watch you and are impressed, and they think you’ve been a great president. You’ve brought the economy back. You’ve restored relations with the world. But many of these people do say — and these are ardent supporters of yours — the next thing he should do is step aside and let another generation of Democrats take the baton. Why are they wrong?”

Yikes, who is he watching? Not the same Biden who all the rest of us are seeing. Exactly who are all these people who are “impressed” and who think he’s been “great”? The problem is we have been watching him, and that’s why people have a bad opinion of him. Most question his fitness for office/age.

Seventy-four percent think the country is on the wrong track. That doesn’t sound like a lot of people think he’s doing a great job. An ABC News/Washington Post survey in early May found only 18 percent of Americans “strongly approve” of the job Biden is doing as president. Those are pretty dismal numbers.

Zakaria is also stretching reality into a pretzel with his take that Biden “brought the economy back.” No, Biden destroyed the economy by overspending, driving us into record inflation that we hadn’t seen in 40 years. He hasn’t “restored relations with the world”; he’s made everything worse with a horrifically handled withdrawal from Afghanistan, which helped to embolden our enemies. Then we got the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. He’s emboldened China as well with his weakness.

Biden couldn’t even give a good answer to that softball question, hemming and hawing that it wasn’t about whether that was “right or wrong.”

I think I there is one thing that comes with age, if you’re being honest about it your whole life, and that is some wisdom. I think we’re on the cusp of being able to make significant positive changes in the world.

I think we have enormous opportunities. And I think I just want to finish the job. And I think we can do that in the next six years.

Except the problem is he hasn’t been honest on so many things, and he’s been wrong about so much for decades.

Biden continues to be factually challenged throughout the interview.

He claimed, “The price of oil is actually down, not up.” That is not the case.

He again repeated a false claim he’s made in the past that he came up with “The Quad,” when in fact it was former president Donald Trump who did it.

Then he completely waffled and backtracked after calling China’s leader Xi Jinping a dictator, saying it’s not whether he’s a “bad guy or a good guy” and that the circumstances are “enormously complicated.”

I bet. He can’t say Xi, the oppressive Communist leader, is a bad guy? Didn’t they just spy on us? Didn’t they lie to us about COVID? And he can’t say whether he’s a good or bad guy? This is why people have no confidence in him — Biden just has no idea what he is doing.

Quote:President Biden appeared on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” Sunday and ruled out admitting Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—at least for now.

The president leaves for Europe Sunday and will attend a NATO summit in Lithuania where the top topics will include the Russia-Ukraine war as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s push to join NATO.

Asked if the war-torn Eastern European country should be admitted to the alliance, Biden said he didn’t think the time was now:

I don’t think it’s ready for membership in NATO. But here’s the deal. I spent, as you know, a great deal of time trying to hold NATO together, because I believe Putin has had an overwhelming objective from the time he launched 185,000 troops into Ukraine, and that was to break NATO. He was confident, in my view and many of the intelligence community, he was confident he could break NATO.

He thinks that while Ukraine is in the middle of a war, we can’t really discuss bringing the country into the bloc because then, effectively, we’d be at war:

So, holding NATO together is really critical. I don’t think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of a war. For example, if you did that, then we — I — and I mean what I say. We’re determined to commit every inch of territory that is NATO territory.

It’s a commitment that we have all made, no matter what. If the war is going on, then we’re all in a war. We’re in war with Russia, if that were the case. So, I think we have to lay out a path for the rational path for Russia — or — excuse me — for Ukraine to be able to qualify to get into NATO.

But Biden left the door open for the future:

…when the very first time I met with Putin two years ago in Geneva, and he said, “I want commitments on no Ukraine in NATO,” I said: “We’re not going to do that, because it’s an open-door policy. We’re not going to shut anybody out.”

NATO is a process that takes some time to meet all the qualifications, and from democratization to a whole range of other issues. So, in the meantime, though, I have spoken with Zelenskyy at length about this…

And so I think we can work it out. And — but I think it’s premature to say to call for a vote, in now, because I — there’s other qualifications that need to be met, including democratization and some of those issues.

Biden also discussed the controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, saying, “It was a very difficult decision on my part. And by the way, I discussed this with our allies; I discussed this with our friends up on the Hill. The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.”

Biden being Biden, he also said the United States is “low” on ammunition itself, something that, as my colleague Bonchie reported, he also blurted out to reporters. I’m sure that was music to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s ears.

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