Every president has observed 9/11 at one of the terror targets or the White House. So why the hell will Biden insultingly be in Alaska… en route from Vietnam? No wonder, rages MAUREEN CALLAHAN, Americans don’t think he gives a damn

Joe Biden is about to hit an all-time low: For no good or explained reason, he has decided to skip Monday’s 9/11 ceremonies.

Yes, our self-styled Empathizer-in-Chief, who revels in ruminating on his personal tragedies constantly, has decided to sit this one out.

After a summer spent dozing on the beach, grudgingly rousting himself from a Lake Tahoe vacation to finally view the devastation in Maui (before comparing that horror to a small kitchen fire in his Delaware mansion), then wandering out of a Medal of Honor ceremony Tuesday and leaving an 81-year-old Vietnam vet alone — a vet he awarded while maskless despite Jill Biden’s COVID diagnosis — the president will be in Alaska when the first bell rings at 8:46 am eastern time, marking the moment that first plane struck the North Tower.

Given that it’ll be 4:46 am in Anchorage – it’s fair to ask if Biden will even be awake.

The president is not always present at one of the three memorial sites in New York, Pennsylvania, or Virginia. G.W. Bush and Barack Obama have observed the day from the White House, but never has the president been so far out of touch – clear across the county.

It’s beyond disgraceful. It’s a dereliction of duty and a heartless affront to the nearly 3,000 American civilians who died that day, the heroes who ran up the stairs in the World Trade Center to their certain deaths, the passengers who stormed the cockpit on United Flight 93, the surviving family members and friends, and those who still suffer and die from the effects of that day.

September 11, 2001 is still very much with us.

Joe Biden is about to hit an all-time low: For no good or explained reason, he has decided to skip Monday’s 9/11 ceremonies.

Yes, our self-styled Empathizer-in-Chief, who revels in ruminating on his personal tragedies constantly, has decided to sit this one out.

The president is not always present at one of the three memorial sites in New York, Pennsylvania, or Virginia (Pentagon crash site shown above). G.W. Bush and Barack Obama have observed the day from the White House, but never has the president been so far out of touch – clear across the county.

Nearly 10,000 first responders on or near the World Trade Center site have cancer. Over 5,000 have died from WTC-related illnesses. More people have died, and will continue to die, from the effects of the attacks than those who perished in them. It remains a national crisis, not that the Biden administration treats it as such.

Let me frame it in a way that might land with the president or any of his advisers: If a Biden had been in one of those towers or on that plane or in the Pentagon that day, we would never, ever hear the end of it. That may sound harsh, but it’s true.

Why will the president be in Alaska, you might ask?

His pit stop at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson military base comes after a one-day trip to Vietnam on September 10 to discuss, among other topics, climate change.

One wonders if the carbon emissions are worth it. Perhaps this could have been a Zoom?

More crucially, the decision to put Biden in Vietnam on the eve of Sept. 11th is baffling. We have just marked the two-year anniversary of Biden’s biggest foreign policy blunder: America’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul, which resembled nothing so much as our catastrophic withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.

You know, the thing Joe Biden promised would definitely not happen.

‘There’s going to be no circumstance’, Biden said in July 2021, ‘where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of a [sic] embassy’.

Well, at least he was right about the embassy part.

Instead we saw thousands of frantic Afghans crushing to break through at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Americans left behind gone into hiding, Afghans who worked with the U.S. targeted for torture and death by the Taliban with no organized response from the US federal government, former Navy SEALs working as self-appointed extraction teams, desperate mothers yelling, ‘Save my baby’! and tossing them in the air to horrified military.

‘Some of the babies fell on barbed wire’, a British soldier told the UK Independent during the withdrawal. ‘By the end of the night, there wasn’t one man among us who wasn’t crying’.

Terrified Afghans clung to the wings and wheel covers of an American C-17 plane as it took off, falling from the sky to their deaths. One was a 17-year-old boy who was found in pieces.

When asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about those terrified Afghans falling from a U.S. military plane, Biden snapped.

Let me frame it in a way that might land with the president or any of his advisers: If a Biden had been in one of those towers or on that plane or in the Pentagon that day, we would never, ever hear the end of it. That may sound harsh, but it’s true.

The decision to put Biden in Vietnam on the eve of Sept. 11th is baffling. We have just marked the two-year anniversary of Biden’s biggest foreign policy blunder: America’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul, which resembled nothing so much as our catastrophic withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975.

‘That was four days ago, five days ago’, he said.

It had only been two, but the message was clear: Get over it. Move on. S**t happens.

That boy’s father, Mohammed Rezayee, told the Sunday Times of London that his older son was also missing and that he blamed the Americans.

‘I’m hurting, I’m angry, but there’s nothing I can do’, Rezayee said. ‘I’ve buried one son and I don’t even know if the other one is dead or alive’.

One might think Biden could relate. But really, if it doesn’t have to do with him, it’s just not that important.

That’s now a sentiment held by more than half of America: 55 percent say that they don’t believe that Joe ‘cares about people’ like them.

This is the stuff of a U.S. president?

It seems that party insiders and Biden sympathizers have finally begun to ask that very question. Most interesting, to my mind, about ‘The Last Politician’, the new Biden biography by the admiring Franklin Foer, is the book’s concentration on Afghanistan.

Covered here is Biden’s execrable behavior at a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base, joining the families of 13 fallen servicemen and women killed in a suicide bomb outside that airport in Kabul. Mark Schmitz, the father of fallen 20-year-old Jared Schmitz, was enraged upon Biden’s approach and clutched a photo of his son.

‘Don’t you ever forget that name,’ Schmitz told the president. ‘Don’t you ever forget that face. Don’t you ever forget the names of the other 12. And take some time to learn their stories.’

‘I do know those stories’, Biden insisted.

His smugness was repulsive to those families.

‘I hope you burn in hell’, the sister of another soldier yelled at Biden. ‘That was my brother’.

Biden, according to Foer, didn’t get it.

‘Did I do something wrong’? he asked then-press secretary Jen Psaki. ‘Maybe I should have handled that differently’.

Left out of Foer’s account is the most damning detail: Biden checking his watch 13 times, one for each moment a casket was unloaded from the aircraft onto U.S. soil.

The Afghanistan catastrophe is the heart of the book, its centerpiece, yet Joe Biden is absent from most of those pages — except when he’s refusing to listen to military advisers urging him to slow down, make a real plan. 

Or when he’s getting bossed around by the Taliban. Or addressing the nation and instead of invoking the Afghan people speaking instead of his late son Beau.

‘Some of the babies fell on barbed wire’, a British soldier told the UK Independent during the withdrawal. ‘By the end of the night, there wasn’t one man among us who wasn’t crying’. 

Covered here is Biden’s execrable behavior at a dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base, joining the families of 13 fallen servicemen and women killed in a suicide bomb outside that airport in Kabul. 

Left out of Foer’s account is the most damning detail: Biden checking his watch 13 times, one for each moment a casket was unloaded from the aircraft onto U.S. soil. 

Or when he’s finally deciding to loop in Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani the night before his announcement, or White House frustration that Hillary Clinton is running her own rescue efforts to get high-target women out of Afghanistan because the Biden administration has dropped the ball, believing these were ‘fancy people’ who could get out on their own. 

Or Biden’s proclamation that the U.S. would be out by September 11th — a date, Foer reports, that Mark Milley, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hated for its symbolism: Had the sacrifices made by the American men and women who fought and died meant nothing?

Recall the assessment of Joe Biden by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2014: ‘I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades’. Recall Joe Biden telling then-President Obama not to greenlight the raid on Osama bin Laden in 2011 — a fact Biden denied while running in 2020.

Kabul was Biden’s Saigon. Which member of his brain trust thinks it’s wise to put him in Vietnam on the eve of 9/11? A date bound forever with Afghanistan.

It begs the question: Why has there been no public pressure, no outrage, no real coverage in the media about Biden’s decision to skip the major 9/11 ceremonies?

To act as though a stop-over in Anchorage cuts it is a disgrace. It feels cowardly.

Why would Joe Biden, in the run-up to an election year, that Joe Biden would miss the opportunity to look statesmanlike. To be seen as a uniter. Strong.

Here’s what’s likely going on: The president’s advisers are probably worried about an optic they can never walk back — Biden dozing off during the ceremony, or falling on his face or getting confused as to where he is or why or simply wandering off, as he did to that poor Vietnam veteran in a controlled setting at the White House.

If that’s the case, we have yet another very good reason Old Joe should pack it in. If he lacks the stamina or the mental cogency for a 9/11 ceremony — truly, how is he fit to serve?

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