DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Slurring Biden abandoned Americans held by Hamas

In his final address to the United Nations in New York on Tuesday, President Joe Biden attempted one last shameless victory lap.

Tragically for America, there aren't many victories on the global stage to celebrate.

As our diminished commander-in-chief slurred and stumbled his way through his prepared text, allies and enemies alike couldn't help but see the resemblance of a weakened nation.

Most pathetically, Biden had little to say about his fellow citizens held by Hamas' gang of goons in tunnels beneath the rubble of Gaza since October 7.

At least seven Americans are believed to still be in captivity. Three of them may already be dead.

The leader of the free world won't say their names.

But I will.

Keith Siegel, 65, Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, Edan Alexander, 20 and Omer Neutra, 22, are thought to be alive.

Itay Chen, 19, Judith Weinstein, 70, and Gadi Haggai, 73, are suspected to have died.

23-year-old American Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin was executed by Hamas late last month as Israeli Defense Forces closed in on his captors. His parents spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

Didn't they deserve to be acknowledged?

When Biden did faintly mention the families of hostages, he said that they were 'going through hell,' before quickly adding that Gazans, too, are 'going through hell.'

This is the kind of mealy-mouthed equivocation that pervades the administration. 

And it is a habit taken up by the Vice President, a woman who claims to be ready to extinguish a world on fire yet refuses to say how she'll do it.

While Biden and Kamala Harris give lip service to Israel's right to defend itself, they won't say that the Jewish state has a right – even an obligation – to eradicate Hamas and Hezbollah from their borders.

The White House warns Israel against sparking a 'wider war' in the region, but they've been largely silent for months as Iran-funded Hezbollah rockets rain down on Northern Israel, driving tens of thousands from their homes.

Biden and Harris beg for a 'ceasefire' but fail to face up to Hamas and demand that hostages be returned. 

So, what has the Biden-Harris administration done?

They've signed off on a $320 million 'humanitarian' pier off the Gazan coast that collapsed without doing much of anything.

They've withheld arms from Israel and stopped short of imposing truly crippling sanctions on Iran.

At least Biden admitted on Tuesday what Democratic spinners have long denied: that abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban was his idea, not something Donald Trump forced on him.

'I was determined to end it, and I did,' Biden crowed, never mind the cost or the incompetence of how he did it.

Biden claimed that he thinks 'every day' of the 13 American service members killed during the 2020 withdrawal - yet during his disasterous debate in June he claimed that no American soldiers died on his watch.

Harris continued that duplicity by claiming in her TV debate with Trump earlier this month that America has no troops in combat zones – news to 40,000 deployed throughout the Middle East. The Pentagon announced last week that an additional 'small number' of U.S. military personnel will be sent over.

If you knew Biden's record before he was president, you could have predicted the scale of this disappointment. 

In 2014, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that Biden 'has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.'

Ten years later, Gates could revise that statement to 'five decades'.

Biden didn't talk to the UN about America's porous southern border, the cartels that traffic and abuse migrants, or the decline of Mexico into authoritarianism and warlordism.

He also apparently forgot about Chinese threats to Taiwan but did give weak thanks to the Communist regime for supposedly helping control fentanyl trafficking.

He trumpeted his support for Ukraine. But, of course, that country was at peace when Biden said he'd tolerate a 'minor incursion' by Russia into its territory; now, it's still locked in a bloody stalemate two and a half years later.

The President closed by talking about the importance of democracy and how he quit his re-election campaign because 'some things are more important than staying in power.'

Everybody in the room knows that he only dropped out of the race because he was going to lose.

Now Harris takes up the mantle of prevarication from the man she once vouched for even after his decompensation became clear to all.

This was Biden's last sputter.

But replacing this old motor with a younger model won't change the fact that they're driving in the same wrong direction.