PBS released a new Frontline documentary on Tuesday about President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race, but it was really more of an ode to his entire career. However, even PBS could not ignore the disastrous exit from Afghanistan, which it claimed overshadowed an “FDR-like first year.”
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The rest of the documentary was not much better. Earlier, the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher recalled the car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and daughter, “After the crash, he needed something to comfort him. He needed something to envelop himself in. He needed a place to be a part of that would sustain him and would give him a sense of purpose and give him a sense of achievement. And the Senate gave Biden a sense of belonging. Biden's instinct is to envelop himself in institutions.”
Osnos also compared Biden’s time in the Senate to church, “Here's a guy who had grown up within the Church, which is defined by this sense of ritual and ancient traditions. Things that are worth preserving because they provide order in a disordered world. And he gets to the Senate at a moment of tremendous chaos in his own life, having suffered this terrible loss, and all of a sudden, the rituals of the Senate, and the kind of clarifying effect of being a part of this institution, almost feels to him like an extension of these values and patterns that had made so much sense to him and his family as a young person. So the Senate became a, sort of, stand in for the Church for him.”
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