Each day, each comment or action from President Biden appears to bring the U.S. closer to a direct confrontation with Russia and the Ukraine war. After reports were leaked that U.S. intelligence was involved in the sinking of the Russian flagship and played a role in the Ukraine killing of top Russian generals, Biden expressed his displeasure with the leaks on Monday.
“The president was displeased with the leaks,” said White House press secretary, Jen Psaki. “His view was that it was an overstatement of our role, an inaccurate statement and also an understatement of the Ukrainians’ role and their relationship, and he did not feel that they were constructive.”
Biden’s specific remarks were not disclosed, but it was patently clear that he was concerned about “loose talk,” and insisted that it stop, lest “we end up in an unintended war with Russia.” Even so, the president himself in his description of the conflict as genocide and that Putin is a “war criminal” compounded the tension between the two countries. And lately, the president’s push to increase support of Ukraine with military assistance and $33 billion, will not reduce the possibility of hostility with a belligerent Putin.
The other leak on his agenda is related to Roe v. Wade, and the intimation that if the opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito becomes a reality it will mark the end of a law that has given women control of their reproductive rights. Biden said the law would have even broader implications and have a devastating impact on several other standing laws such as same-sex marriage. Immediately after the leak was disclosed, Biden blasted the leak but included his opposition to
Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, which his GOP adversaries are citing along with his comments made in 1974 that women did not have “the sole right to say what should happen” to their bodies. In effect, he felt that Roe v. Wade went too far.
He may have gone too far in his long-ago comments about his natural rights to being “a child of God.” The words were hardly out of his mouth before he was assailed by his critics, who dredged up the Bork incident, in which he stated that “Bork believed the only reason you had any inherent rights was because the government gave them to you,” he said. He went to say, as chair then of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I believe I have the rights that I have not because the government gave it to me, which you believe, but because I’m just a child of God, I exist.”
Bork, nominated by President Reagan, was rejected and Anthony Kennedy was confirmed to the bench. Loose lips and leaks continue to plague the Biden administration, whether now or in the past.