Pirate's Cove

Here’s Biden

Fist bump between President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at Al Salam Royal Palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. pic.twitter.com/37Oz5EwwIB

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 15, 2022

And here’s the NY Times

Biden’s Fraught Saudi Visit Garners Scathing Criticism and Modest Accords

President Biden exchanged the shaken fist for a fist bump on Friday as he abandoned his promise to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and sat down with the crown prince he deemed responsible for the grisly killing and dismemberment of a columnist who lived in the United States.

In the most fraught foreign visit of his presidency to date, Mr. Biden’s encounter with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gave the de facto Saudi leader a measure of the international rehabilitation he sought, while securing steps toward closer relations with Israel and an unannounced understanding that the kingdom would soon pump more oil to relieve high gas prices at home.

Mr. Biden’s discomfort was palpable as he avoided a handshake with the prince in favor of a fist bump that in the end proved no less problematic politically. While cameras recorded the opening of their subsequent meeting, the president made no mention of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist assassinated in 2018 by Saudi operatives, and the prince smiled silently when a reporter asked if he owed an apology to the family.

Now, imagine it was President Donald Trump fist bumping MBS. Would there be outrage at the NY Times? Might this be a top of the page, huge headline article? The graphic is what the front page of the web version looks like. A bit of pouncing. Props to the Washington Post for having it be the second big story, but, even they do not go hard after Biden. They even have a smaller piece entitled “once again we obsess over a fist bump”, which is surely a reference to the Obama fist bump. I don’t know, behind a paywall, and, do not care. It was their reporter killed, and they cannot even express outrage because it’s a Democratic Party president.

But Mr. Biden later told reporters Mr. Khashoggi’s murder was “outrageous” and said he had confronted the crown prince privately. “I raised it at the top of the meeting, making clear what I thought at the time and what I think of it now,” he said. “I was straightforward and direct in discussing it. I made my view crystal clear.”

He reported that Prince Mohammed, often known by his initials M.B.S., had denied culpability. “He basically said that he was not personally responsible for it,” Mr. Biden said. “I indicated that I thought he was.”

Saudi officials contradicted his account. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, told reporters that he did not hear Mr. Biden tell the crown prince that he was responsible, describing instead a brief and less contentious exchange that focused on human rights without dwelling on the killing.

There are many NY Times articles where they excoriated Trump on MBS.

Human rights activists and those who had been close to Mr. Khashoggi expressed outrage. Hatice Cengiz, his fiancée, tweeted what she said Mr. Khashoggi would have thought: “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victims is on your hands.”

Fred Ryan, the Post’s publisher, was equally scathing. “The fist bump between President Biden and Mohammed bin Salman was worse than a handshake — it was shameful,” he said in a statement. “It projected a level of intimacy and comfort that delivers to MBS the unwarranted redemption he has been desperately seeking.”

Pouncing! Very few Credentialed Media outlets are bothering to attack Biden for this, when they would have been apoplectic had Trump done this.

Meanwhile, what was the result of the trip?

(Breitbart) During an interview aired on Friday’s edition of CNN’s “Situation Room,” Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir, who was inside President Joe Biden’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, refused to commit to boosting oil production, denied Biden pressed them on the issue, and argued that “The problem of gasoline in the United States is more a function of the lack of refining capacity in the United States than a shortage of actual crude oil.”

al-Jubeir says Biden didn’t even raise the subject in specificity. Wasn’t that the whole point of going hat in hand? al-Jubeir is correct that it is a lack of refining capacity. More crude won’t matter if it can’t be refined.