Tuesday, May 12, 2020

What Does Joe Biden Mean for America?

Consider this post to be a continuation of the prior post. It concerns Victor Davis Hanson’s article about unbearable truths. You might do well to read the prior post before this one.

As for the question of why China or anyone else would consider America to be weak and decadent, what better evidence could there be than the simple fact that one of America’s two major political parties is about to nominate for the presidency a man who is a decadent sexual predator with severely limited mental capacities. How do you think that makes us look to the world?

So, Hanson address the predator issue:

Consider also Joe Biden. Most Democrats have long known that Biden was a blowhard, a plagiarist, and a serial fabricator. Take Bernie Sanders out of the race, and Biden would have offered little utility, and his candidacy likely would have sputtered to an end.

“Handsy” Joe Biden was also creepy. Most prudent associates in his social and business circles kept their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters as far away from his breathing, probes, and squeezes as possible.

The truth is not that any complainant, such as Tara Reade, who makes a career-ending accusation—fraught with contradictions and well beyond any fair notion of a statute of limitations—should be believed automatically. She shouldn’t at all ruin a life without compelling evidence.

Nor is the Democratic dilemma just that the progressive write-off of Tara Reade has essentially destroyed the #MeToo movement, and exposed left-wing feminism as a cynical method of obtaining power, unconcerned with gender justice for the oppressed.

Truth be told, Tara Reade has exposed the #MeToo movement as a fraud. It is not and has never been concerned with women. It is using threats as a way to bring down powerful men, most especially, but not entirely, men of a conservative persuasion. After all, it was launched in the name of the nation’s leading enabler of sexual harassment. What more do you need?

The point instead is that Joe Biden’s accuser should be believed—but according to Joe Biden’s prior own standards, statements and sermonizing. Tara Reade, playing a stronger hand than Christine Blasey Ford, has lodged a sexual assault charge against a far more likely suspect offender than Brett Kavanaugh. Biden, in most other circumstances, would be cheering her on to pursue her charges and pursue her truth were it not against himself.

The Democrats know all this, but the truth too is unbearable. In other words, so what?

What is the remedy? Have a long inquiry in which women come out of the woodwork to describe Biden’s squeezing, sniffing, breathing, and whispering with dozens of victimized young and teenage girls? There are many.

Does the donor class abort Biden’s candidacy to avoid hypocrisy and save its feminist credentials—so buffeted by Harvey Weinstein and fallen liberal media superstars?

Or do they appoint investigators, as they did for months in the manner of the Mueller investigation, to examine and to leak to the media Reade’s accusations and supporting testimonies, as Joe Biden daily bleeds out, nicked by a thousand cuts as a sexual pariah?

So, the truth is again intolerable. The fact is that Reade could be privately believable, given what one knows of Joe Biden’s wayward hands and unbridled narcissism. But such a reality certainly is publicly unpalatable.

So watch as Tara Reade disappears into a media decompression chamber, designed to let her vent to mute walls, and thus be contained until she is recalibrated, exhausted and inert and the danger passes.

Of course, Hanson is right. Reade will be disappeared by the media, hellbent as it is on putting Joe Biden into the White House, and stopping the prosecution of Obama administration officials.

And it does not matter that Biden is suffering from senile dementia. No one cares. And yet, as nations around the world-- think China-- look at the evidence of Biden’s declining mental status, they must conclude that America is weak and decadent. As for hypocrisy, those who have been ranting about Donald Trump’s narcissism-- a dubious diagnosis-- have nothing to say about Biden’s dementia.

There is another unendurable truth: Joe Biden himself is not cognitively able to run a presidential campaign. Even if successful, he is not prepared to serve as president.
Biden proved more exhausted in seclusion at home than in public on the campaign trail. He is neither seen nor heard much anymore.

His planned series of fireside snarky critiques of the president’s handling of the virus imploded when he could speak neither with or without notes, nor with or without the teleprompter, nor with or without friendly media prompts from his progressive interlocutors, nor with or without his wife’s encouragement at his side.

His party pros know that if turned loose on the campaign trail, Biden will give us another spooky squeeze, one more bizarre Corn Pop or hairy legs story, still more biographical myths and plagiarisms, and daily lying dog-faced pony soldier incoherence.

Names, dates, places, things?

They have become shapeless ripples in Biden’s mental river of Lethe, flowing by and changing shape, before finally disappearing in a nothing stream of forgetfulness.

The Democratic Party also knows that Biden cannot schedule a rendezvous with Dr. Bandy X. Lee and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, given the result would terrify his handlers.

On any given day, at any given moment Biden can say something not just controversial in the manner of Donald Trump, but something that simply cannot be deciphered or translated into any known language.

So, what does one do with kryptonitic truth?

Nothing.

What would one instead suggest? Hand the nomination over to the runner-up and, in theory, most deserving candidate Bernie Sanders—and see the Democrats lose the presidency, the House, and the Supreme Court for a generation?

Or do they keep Joe in the basement, outsource his campaign to future cabinet picks, his vice-presidential candidate and his family? Do they cancel the debates, seek to postpone the election or do it all by mail—and thereby confirm the albatross around their necks?

Or still again, do they have a therapeutic “intervention” and tell Joe to take one for the team, stand aside and allow non-candidate free-riders like Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, or Michelle Obama to usurp his delegates? Do they simply shaft the runner-up, nutty socialist Bernie Sanders and his legions of true believers?

No, of course, not. The truth is simply too foreboding even to contemplate.

Instead, we will hear that Joe is fine, in the manner that FDR was in great shape in November 1944. He will run not against Trump and his record, but against a fantasy who, they will say, fiddled while an unfettered and non-quarantined America was consumed by viral fires, and yet somehow as Herbert Hoover incarnate also fiddled while America ossified in an amber lockdown.

When the legend of a hale Biden is belied by the fact of his impairment, print the legend—but first get the necessary holograms, photoshopping, and testimonials to get him across the November 3 finish line.

5 comments:

trigger warning said...

I believe it's not necessary, or even necessarily desirable to the DNC, that Biden be cognitively capable of executing the duties of a chief executive. President "Lightworker" Obama certainly was not, albeit for different reasons. The point of having an Empty Suit elected is to enable the burrowing of carefully selected Progressive bureaucrats in pivotal bureaucratic roles, who are then capable of running a Proglodyte-friendly shadow government. The Trump Administration has discovered this the hard way.

And, of course, there's the fact that Biden will be 78 at the Inaugural, with a womyn (hopefully "of-color") VP, so there's the chance....

Unknown said...

Terrific essay as always Stuart.

UbuMaccabee said...

I agree with trigger. The system runs itself and the institutions run themselves. They do not want an executive or any kind of oversight. That is exactly what Trump has discovered.

#metoo was always a fraud. Anyone who took any part of that seriously hasn't paid attention in life and has certainly not read Fielding, Thackeray, or Evelyn Waugh. It never had any credibility except with people who know nothing of human sexuality or human nature. It only made sense to people who lecture at, and listen to, university classes. Mass unemployment is about to make it a footnote.

Sam L. said...

I'm sure the Chinese would LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE to have to deal with a Democrat President. They're on the same side! What side? The HATE AMERICA side, silly!

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Maybe Dr. Fauci will be the VP pick. He'll be even more of a media darling when he announces he's transitioning to meet Ol' Joe's VP criteria.