Amazingly enough, on the front page of the New York Times, the headline reads Biden Tells Governors He Needs to Sleep More and Work Less at Night. Which is akin to pretending to respond to a query about your worst fault during a job interview and answering that you work too hard.
Right below that humdinger, also on the front page, another headline reads: Should Biden Quit? Democrats Weigh Potential Rewards and Steep Risks. And right below that, a story update claims that Biden is spending Independence Day trying to tamp down calls for him to drop out of the race.
Note that together these stories lay out the following two hypotheses. (1) The real problem here is that the President had a bad day; everybody has them; it’s not a big deal; he is working too hard, and he just needs to get more sleep. (2a) And by the way, nobody believes him or the numerous variations of the story (he had a cold etc) and (2b) the principal if not sole driver of the calculations of Democratic Party pooh-bahs is electoral advantage.
Just think about that for a moment. The Grandees of the Democratic Party are content to deliver their presidential nomination, and quite possibly the presidency complete with the nuclear football, to a man whose neurological deterioration is so obvious that it has stirred a revolt. A revolt that the White House is desperately trying to tamp down. If press reports are to be believed that effort is being led by Jill Biden who never got elected to anything. And not to put too fine a point on it, this is the crowd that insists it is going to save democracy.
Meanwhile the commentariat uses dueling leaks by self-interested parties to report on the machinations of the players going on “behind closed doors”. This maneuver serves a couple of inadvertently transparent goals, one of which is misdirection.
The press reports as breaking news what for years has been patently obvious; namely that President Biden is unable to perform the duties of his office. What they don’t report is that they have been running interference for him for years. So as cover, we are treated to a raft of gosh-can-you-believe-this type of reporting as if this is all brand new. In the end it will convince nobody. It will inevitably be seen for what it is: a vain attempt to dodge the dishonesty of the mainstream press and the Democratic Party establishment.
While all this is going on let’s remember that we are involved in two shooting wars (Ukraine and Israel) and potentially a third (Taiwan). You would think that some candidate somewhere would attempt to introduce those topics into the conversation. But no.
Or perhaps some candidate would deign to mention the subject of the $34 trillion in debt that the U.S. has managed to accumulate. In 2017 the accumulated debt amounted to about $20 trillion; by 2021 it was $28 trillion, and now it is about $34 trillion.
Which means that in the Trump years we added about $8 trillion, and thus far during the Biden years we have added $6 trillion and still counting. But that doesn’t seem to matter either.
What we simply have here is two parties vying for power, and in the most irresponsible ways imaginable. Their calculations approach being exclusively electoral with little heed paid to the world situation or America’s role in it. Neither party is acting even remotely responsibly.
If it is the case that the President lacks the vigor and mental acuity needed to run for re-election, he should not be in the White House a moment longer. We have a mechanism for dealing with this. President Biden can simply resign and Vice President Kamala Harris can take the oath of office.
How the Democratic Party chooses to deal with the fallout is up to them. But by running Biden the way they did, changing the rules to shut off the possibility any real opposition, those protectors of democracy, the Democrats, made their bed. Now they can sleep in it.
Unfortunately, the rest of us have to plop in there beside them. Either that or the alternative, Donald J Trump, quite possibly the most ignorant man ever to seek (and gain) the White House. If either party had run a normal candidate (and I use that term advisedly) they would win in a heartbeat. Instead we are left with the blank stare of a senile old man running against a narcissist whose chief talent qualifies him to be a circus barker.
I, for one, would like to vote for an adult who understands the way the world works; who willingly states the premises underlying her beliefs, and who is willing to persuade rather than coerce. Accordingly, I will be writing in the name of Nikki Haley when November comes rolling around.
JFB
