Does clueless slip-up Joe Biden mean a word he says?

In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Winston Churchill held a private debate in the British Cabinet of Ministers about what they might do if they captured Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

“If Hitler falls into our hands,” declared the tall man, “we will surely kill him.”

He meant it.

In fact, according to archived records of the meeting, he even knew exactly how he wanted to do it — fry Hitler like a run-of-the-mill gangster in a US-supplied electric chair.

“This man is the mainspring of evil,” Churchill snarled. “Execute the chief criminals as common outlaws.”

I’m sure most of us feel the same way about Russia’s barbaric dictator Vladimir Putin, the modern day Hitler, given his despicable, murderous rampage across Ukraine.

The world would certainly be a better and safer place without him.

But that is not the official US position.

In particular, America does not seek Putin’s death or regime change.

We know this because White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said so in response to Sen. Lindsey Graham’s appeal for his assassination.

“We are not advocating the killing of a foreign country’s leader or regime change,” she told reporters on March 4. “That is not United States policy.”

There is a very good reason for this.

Putin would seize any publicly professed US plan to either kill him or bring about the overthrow of his elected government as evidence of the West’s purportedly genuinely imperialist intent, and use it to rally Russian support for defense against the old Cold War enemy to win.

It is not difficult to say that this could lead to a direct military confrontation between the two countries and the possible third world war that everyone wanted so badly to avoid.

That’s why President Biden’s unwritten, nine-word conclusion to his speech in Poland on Saturday was so controversial.

“For God’s sake,” Biden roared passionately, “this man can’t stay in power!”

Its meaning was crystal clear, there was no ambiguity: America had just officially and dramatically changed its position and was now demanding regime change to remove Putin from office.

Understandably, this sensational impromptu comment became the only talking point in an otherwise impressive speech, albeit one that offered more rhetoric than action.

But like so many things Biden says these days, it turns out he didn’t mean it.

Or rather, his desperate White House staff rushed to insist he didn’t mean it.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” they clarified. “He didn’t talk about Putin’s power in Russia or regime change.”

Do they think we’re complete idiots?

We all know what Biden meant because he said it very clearly in his own words to the world media.

He wants Putin to lose power.

That’s called regime change.

And with chilling predictability, his trumpet call was immediately picked up by Russian officials and state media as the hard evidence they’ve been waiting for that their suspicions about America’s real motives were correct all along.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “It is not up to the President of the United States and not to Americans to decide who stays in power in Russia.”

This is, of course, breathtakingly hypocritical, given that Russia is doing just that in Ukraine, where it wants to depose President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a pro-Russian government. But there is no doubt that most Russians will find the idea of ​​the US President trying to dictate who runs their country deeply offensive, and it will therefore bolster support for Putin at a time when he is threatening them most needs.

If that was the only faux pas Biden committed during this war, that would be bad enough.

Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a series of dangerously inaccurate comments he has made.

Even before the war began, Biden suggested that NATO would not act if Putin mounted a “small invasion” of Ukraine, a ridiculously weak statement that infuriated Zelensky, emboldened Putin, and prompted Biden to state that he really meant that any invasion by Russia would be met with a “hard answer” – which, of course, he didn’t say at all.

Then, on Thursday, he said any Russian chemical weapons attack in Ukraine would be met with a “factual answer,” which could only mean that the US would also use chemical weapons.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was dispatched to address this specific threat, saying instead that the US “has no intention of using chemical weapons under any circumstances.”

So the opposite of what the President said.

And on Friday, Biden appeared to be deploying US ground forces to Ukraine, telling troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, “You’ll see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’ll see — you’ll see women, young people, who are standing – standing in front of a damn tank and just saying, ‘I’m not going. I’m holding my ground.’ You are unbelievable.”

Once again, a White House spokesman had to hastily clarify that the President did not mean what he had said, insisting: “The President has made it clear that we are not sending US troops to Ukraine, and at this position nothing changes.”

But he hadn’t been clear, had he?

In fact, nothing is ever clear to him.

I hate to say this because I think 79-year-old Joe Biden is a decent man, but he’s showing increasingly worrying signs of age-related cognitive decline. This is a major problem for America and the world at such a critical time.

As is the pathetic way Democrats and much of the mainstream media try to excuse his horrible lapses and hype his supposedly sovereign leadership.

They are so desperate to portray him as the calm, smart, wise, fact-based antidote to his predecessor, Donald Trump, that they can’t see the chaotic train wreck right before their eyes. Or they see it but ignore it.

However, the statistics don’t lie.

Joe Biden’s approval rating just hit a record low of 40% because Americans don’t trust him on the war or the US economy as inflation soars.

And the reason they don’t trust him is because he keeps saying things that he then denies saying.

When people’s lives and livelihoods are at stake, it is a deadly quality in a US President.