If you were to look at people speaking for the Joe Biden administration this past week in an effort to find any clarity at all on any substantive foreign policy issue, usually a fool’s errand, the week actually started with a glimmer of hope.

The White House, desperate to pacify the growing anti-Semitic wing of the Democratic Party, pushed all week for a temporary pause to the war between Israel and Gaza. They thought they had a deal for 50 hostages to be released by Thursday, only to see it delayed and downgraded to maybe 13 released in exchange for known terrorists turned loose by Israel over a 4-day truce beginning Friday.

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The pressure on Biden to press for the pause originated largely among the myopic calls from all over the world to end the “genocide” being waged by the IDF inside the Gaza Strip. Of course, in all these pleas for humanity, none of these people called out the genocide actually being conducted by Hamas on Jews inside Israel since October 7th. Nobody except White House co-Press Secretary John Kirby.

I am not a huge fan of Admiral Kirby. Despite appreciating his service to the country by wearing the uniform, which goes without saying, when it comes to politics, I usually put him in the weasel category of the greater genus Mustela, which also includes ferrets, minks, stoats, and polecats. But he was absolutely correct to shine a light on whom the bad actor in this entire affair is, and has always been, and it’s not the Israelis. Genocide indeed has been happening, and you have to only look at Hamas, and if you’re honest, to Iran as the state actor enable and financing Hamas, if you aren’t blinded by anti-Semitic Jew hatred.

The clarity did not last, however. A day later, Biden ’24 co-chair, Delaware Senator Chris Coons, who essentially in this clip is playing the Andrew McCarthy role in Weekend At Bernie’s, offered up this laughable claim about the power of Joe Biden’s foreign policy.

So how’s that stronger place on the world stage look? Well, later that same day at the Pentagon, deputy DOD press secretary Sabrina Singh offered another truth bomb that actually surprised me…for a second.

And that was before another few attacks that finally caused the United States to attack Iranian-backed assets in Iraq.

For a brief moment, I thought there might be hope at the Pentagon, that there’s someone in front of a microphone that might actually be able to offer some clarity. Nah. Here was the very next exchange.

There are some days Iran doesn’t attack us, so Singh implies that means those are days of Biden’s deterrence strategy working? Hoo boy.

2023’s Atlantic Hurricane season is winding down. As of Friday, there’s only a week left in it, and the transom is quiet. After dire predictions of this being the worst season of hurricanes ever due to the climate changes, we had one month of increased activity in June, July was lower than normal, August and September were above normal in activity, while October and November were way below normal. That’s three up months, three down months. Seems pretty average-y to me. But if I were to claim that because New Orleans, or Houston, or Miami didn’t get hit by a hurricane today, that’s evidence that we’ve finally turned the corner of global warming, you’d think me an idiot.

If I told you that in California, after two different Santa Ana wind events blew in the last two weeks, and there were no substantive wildfires anywhere in the Southland, that’s evidence that climate change is subsiding, the left would come unglued by my flawed deductive reasoning. Yet that’s exactly what Singh offered up to defend Biden’s Iranian deterrence strategy.

20th Century Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider crystallized the self-serving bias and attribution theory in his 1958 book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. In short, the theory says that people will often take credit for things that have absolutely nothing to do with them or their efforts, and then when things don’t work out so well, immediately blame external forces instead of looking in the mirror at their own culpability.

Singh was implying Biden could take credit due to his policies for each day passing with no dead or injured Americans at the hands of the Iranians. That is much more aptly attributable to luck than policy. It remains to be seen whom she’ll blame early next week after the necessary retaliatory strikes were delivered Wednesday in response to further attacks on U.S. interests in the region. You can be assured she won’t blame Biden’s deterrence strategy for it. It’ll be someone else’s fault.

The Heider attribution theory is certainly not new to mankind, and if it were a disease among presidents alone, it would be way worse than COVID.

Barack Obama began taking credit for stuff he had nothing to do with on the night he got elected in November of 2008.

The seas would quit rising, because of this moment. And when things didn’t pan out exactly as planned over the first term and into the second, Obama had a natural scapegoat to pin things on – George W. Bush. So much so, in fact, that after his reelection in 2012, he appeared two months later at the Nerd Ball, also known as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He roasted himself over his constant Blame Bush mantra.

It was self-deprecating and funny, and everyone in the room laughed at the joke, because like all good jokes, there’s a strong element of truth in it. Bush got the blame for everything on which Obama couldn’t deliver. If Heider’s attribution theory were a college major, Obama would at least have a Masters’ degree.

Donald Trump, love him or hate him, took, and still takes the Heider theory to a whole new art form. The possible examples on both ends of tenets of Heider offered up by the Former President are endless. Here’s just a recent example.

Of course, Chuck Grassley has been winning elections since before Trump first got sued in his real estate transaction decades ago as a baby real estate developer. The idea that Trump is taking credit for a Grassley Senate win in Iowa is fall down funny.

And when things don’t work out so well, there’s no one around Trump that he won’t throw under the bus. But his favorite regular target when he was president was Barack Obama.

If Obama had the Masters’ degree in Heider, Trump held a PhD.

Joe Biden, I suppose, would have to be the Yoda of the Heider theory, because he’s literally and figuratively forgotten more about taking credit for stuff not due to him while simultaneously blaming others for his failures than anyone else ever to sit in the Oval.

Just this claim alone, he’s repeated dozens of times. He’s claimed to have reduced the budget. He hasn’t. He’s claimed he’s reduced the deficit. He hasn’t done that, either. He’s claimed to have reduced the debt. Look at the debt clock recently? It’s never not gone the wrong way for decades. Whatever reduction in the rate of growth of the deficit was due to sunset provisions in Congressional pandemic relief spending measures that were implemented before Biden ever came into power. Biden’s not only taking credit for something he had nothing to do with, not even as a Senator, he’s taking credit for something that technically didn’t even result in the claim for which he’s trying to take that credit. It’s such a whopper of a lie that even Glenn Kessler had to throw it into the bottomless Pinocchio category.

And we all know who the bogeyman is for Joe Biden on everything. It’s his only hope for reelection in ’24 – Donald Trump. But for the purposes of Heider, when faced with skyrocketing gas prices in the United States, with the national average hitting around $5 a gallon, instead of facing the reality of his decisions to restrict oil production in the States and scuttled any future increased refining capacity, Biden blamed Vladimir Putin.

Easy scapegoat, but an inaccurate one. And if you were to follow that premise to its natural cause and effect, Putin wouldn’t have even been a possible strawman for Biden to use to explain why gas prices were soaring if the President hadn’t committed the biggest foreign policy disaster in the modern age with his botched withdrawal in Afghanistan a year earlier.

I’m still laughing at the photo released by the White House that more than one person apparently thought a good idea – the one of Joe Biden sitting down with a death grip on a table in order to stay upright as a cake with 81 candles ablaze, shining as a beacon vessels could use to navigate the Potomac. The photo caused a meme of very funny captions online, my favorite being this one.

White House staff celebrated the day by presenting President Biden with his foreign policy. pic.twitter.com/auANt8gQjY

— Robert Greenway (@RC_Greenway) November 21, 2023

If Joe Biden had a deterrence strategy on Iran more than just on some days, perhaps Ayatollah Khamenei wouldn’t be laughing as well in Tehran.