So this is what it is like, I muse to myself. The Visigoths battered down the gates, came in to have a look around, didn’t think much of what they saw, and decided to head on home.
I hear that Caligula made his horse a senator, and everybody thought it was hilarious.
The civic souffle has collapsed, my friend. Putting it back in the oven for another thirty minutes will not accomplish what you are hoping it will.
So here we are, living in a banana republic, and we don’t even have the climate for growing bananas. So what is the rationale of our big-think decision-makers? Why are they now using plastic bananas? Everybody can see what it is now. And so here we are, staring at this disintegrating spectacle bug-eyed. I mean, everything is disintegrating except for the bananas, which are plastic.
Not much that we can do about any of this at present, but maybe we can walk around and have a look-see. Maybe we can ponder a bit.
Some of the most important and best-connected people in the world, people who worked day-to-day with Joe Biden—and who therefore knew what kind of shape he was in—decided for some reason that it would be a bright idea to put him on one of the biggest stages in the world, making sure to get millions of sets of eyes on that man, in order that the top doctors involved could retest the half life of whatever meds they had used to get him all amped up for the State of the Union. It turns out they miscalculated. The half life is now actually something like six minutes.
As long as we are out there arresting our political opponents, perhaps it is time for us to place a call to Adult Protective Services in order to ask them to open a file on Jill Biden,
One post-debate poll indicated that 67% believed that Trump won the debate while 33% believe that Biden won the debate. Now of course those numbers spell electoral disaster for all the Biden operatives analyzing them—but that is just the obvious political angle. But there is another calamity lurking in those numbers. What is it like for you, mon petit frère, living in a time when a third of the people out there think that Biden won that debate? I mean, they just whizz past you on the freeway, and why aren’t more people dying? I don’t think that Biden needs to take a cognitive test, because I think all the sensible people know by now. But perhaps that 33% needs to take a cognitive test.
If Jill Biden is anything to go by, it appears that the boomers are going to be ardent disciples of Dylan Thomas, and will not go gentle into that good night. Rage, she maintains, rage, against the dying of the light. “You answered every question!” she declared, with the air of a diligent mother potty-training a toddler, being sure to lead with the affirmation. Affirmation is so important in these things.
One obvious theory is that the Democratic bigwigs decided that it was time for Joe to go, and so they orchestrated this as the big unveiling, the big reveal. And sure enough, it was as though a signal had been given because the next day there was a chorus of leftist voices saying that they loved Joe, but it was time for him to step aside for the good of the nation. Everything seemed arranged—the debate was quite early so there would be time for a switcheroo, and so on. But if they were all being that clever, it was too clever by half. They needed way more than time.
Obama tweeted that it was a bad night, but signaled continued support, and so that quelled the out-in-public panic, sort of. And then the White House announced the next day that Joe wasn’t going anywhere, and him voluntarily stepping aside is about the only way this could happen. The DNC had changed the rules after the last round in order to squeeze out primary challenges, and so if Joe stays in it to win it, his delegates are bound. They are also bound, if Joe goes, to hand the keys over to Kamala.
So removing Joe without Jill’s cooperation would be a complicated maneuver. Given the fact that the election is run by the states, all fifty of them, with different rules, requirements, deadlines and such, it more likely an impossible maneuver. There are good arguments for saying that if they removed Biden from the ballot in three swing states—Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin—he could not be replaced by anyone else on the ballot. This is quite a corner they all painted themselves into, and all of it was done by smart people.
Even if we pose an out-there thought experiment, with some really bad actors on that side who would be willing to cut the Gordian knot via assassination, that still just gets them Kamala. And if they took out Joe and Kamala, that gets them Mike Johnson. And if he were to die of natural causes, they get Kamala.
Keep in mind that Jill might have all sorts of reasons unrelated to personal vanity or a love of state dinners for refusing to go. As long as Joe is president, he has pardoning power. The egregious use of lawfare aimed at Trump destroyed the cultural precedent and expectation that the courts would not be used on political opponents, and they destroyed that precedent with some cooked up charges against Trump. What position does this leave the Biden family crime syndicate in? Does anyone believe that there are no actual Biden crimes and offenses when it comes to, say, Ukraine?
Of course, the Cabinet could assemble and invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, thus removing Joe Biden as the incumbent. The problem is that this leaves them with Kamala, and Kamala in her prime makes the same kind of sense as does Biden in his dotage. The only upside would be that the incoherence would be coming from a person of color, although this does seem to me like a weird application of affirmative action.
About the only way I can think of that they could do this—since they are the party of lawlessness—is just do it anyway, and then brazen it out by calling electoral deadlines white supremacy. Anyone who raised questions would clearly be a racist. This would be sort of a casino heist nomination, and it would certainly drive the ratings up. Late summer promises to be pretty gaudy—and the Democratic convention was already going to have riots.
So the word I have heard most often since the debacle on Thursday night is the word panic. Democratic operatives are in a flop sweat panic. But the reality of this panic—and it is very real—is not just because there is now the real prospect of losing an election. That is in the mix, sure, but a lot more is involved.
Our ruling elites, for the longest time, have enjoyed the sensation of always being the smartest ones in the room. One thinks of Thomas Sowell’s great subtitle for his Vision of the Anointed—Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Now if a wise person started to feel like he was always the smartest person in the room, what he should do is go and find a different room. But these elites enjoyed that particular sensation. It was warm and cozy, gave them a overall glow, and it was consistent with the flattering education that had wafted them up through the Ivies and into high-paying jobs inside the Beltway.
So the panic is not settling in because they are being exposed as those who might lose an election. That has happened to plenty of people. What is happening is this. There are in the process of losing an entire oligarchy. They have swathed themselves in self-congratulatory lies for so long—not admitting any evidence to the contrary, canceling out the voices of any possible critics—such that their looming exposure is going to be total. They are going to be exposed as petty, conniving, stupid, moronic, mendacious, corrupt, purblind, conceited, proud, and completely and entirely out of their depth. They will be revealed as elites who are not elite at all. Ruling elites need to be much more than well-connected mediocrities and highly credentialed midwits. Hence the panic.
The first tier are going to be exposed as liars who knew that they were lying, and the second tier are going to be exposed as liars who ought to have known they were being lied to by the first tier. They thought they were in the first tier, but ah. Apparently not. The true inner circle were those administering the meds and holding the wires. The thing that is astonishing right now is how astonished the second-tier people are acting. Consequently, there is a good deal of anger in the second tier as well—anger aimed at the White House insiders who knew, and who knew all along.
But out here in the hinterlands, we have known that Joe Biden was cognitively impaired for years now, and yet here we are, watching the television where people who have actually met him are slapping their foreheads and exclaiming, “Who could have anticipated this turn of events?!”
So the metaphor descends. The Democrats have chosen their titular leader. They have selected their man. He is their representative, and what he is doing encapsulates what they are also doing. What he does, they do. He teeters out on stage, and they have also teetered out on stage. He yells at a cloud, they yell at a cloud. He mumbles his way to a midway point in the sentence, rolls to a stop, and they do exactly the same. So at the end of the day, there is nothing left for any of the Democrats to do except finally beat Medicare.
Of course, if Joe Biden—in this now manifest condition—is elected by all the rest of us in November, then the metaphor has descended upon America. America will be teetering around, yelling at clouds, and rolling to a stop. Maybe, if that happens, and if we all pull together, coming together as one people, we can all of us finally beat Medicare.
So now, if Joe Biden wins in November, fair and square, we will then have to argue that America deserves to catch it in the teeth, good and hard. And if Joe Biden wins in November, by hook, crook, monkeyshines and shenanigans, like last time only even more open, and we quietly accept that, then again, we will deserve everything that will in fact be coming our way.