July 22: How low can poor Joe go?

In which, “it’s all downhill from here” means nothing good for the American president, flames literal and figurative lash Europe, and the bloom comes off the Ukrainian rose.

How low can poor Joe go?

I mean this honestly and seriously: Poor President Biden. As much as I criticize his administration, I ended this week feeling heartily sorry for the guy.

At this point, I don’t know how many hits the poor guy can take: to his health, or the health of his presidency.

As the polls continued their downward trend (with only 19% of support from Hispanic voters), Biden returned from his Mid East trip with precious little to show for it (more on that later), attempted a pivot to resuscitating some kind of climate agenda (before Senator Manchin shot it down), indicated he had (or had had) cancer in an apparent gaffe, before finally ending the week with a positive Covid test.

I mean, my goodness we haven’t even hit the halfway point of Biden’s term in office, and even the otherwise compliant media allies (along with the consistent critics) appear to be phoning it in on his presidency, and the intraparty rivals are starting to make their presences felt in anticipation of potential primary season.

Sucking the energy out of the EU

If the Biden presidency is finishing the week in a deflated state, the same can be said for the European Union. With temperatures soaring and fires roaring, the political climate also appears to be undergoing a certain shift in seasons from the warmth of a united front confronting Russian hostility to the frostiness of energy diplomacy between the haves and have nots.

EU leaders unveiled an energy roadmap to both reduce dependence on Russian gas and speed a transition to green energy.

Tempers flared in Spain and Portugal who appeared set to reject the roadmap while Germany (the EU’s center of economic and political gravity) appeared ready to accept it. The division over the future of energy production and distribution was quickly latched onto by Russia who threatened a turnoff of gas supplies to the bloc even as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany got turned back on after a maintenance shutdown. 

Germany finds itself in a bit of a pickle now as it tries to move the energy roadmap forward while finding a way to avoid reversing its earlier commitment to ending nuclear energy production AND reduce reliance on Russian energy. Perhaps that’s one diplomatic pretzel Angela Merkel could’ve managed, but it’s an open question if the government of Olaf Scholz can accomplish a similar trick.

Hot air in Europe (of the political and climatic variety)

The fires mentioned above deserve something of their own mention down here as the European continent spent the week getting baked, then burned, by an intense heatwave.

(Although, an important side note: the hot, dry air certainly drives the wildfires, but at least in one case, it didn’t start the fire. In Spain, a Dutch reforestation company accidentally started a fire… again.)