Time for Consequences

The "Cabal" who bragged about rigging the 2020 election stuck us with an incapable president at a time of crisis. Examples need to be made.

The bloom is off the Biden presidency.

In 2020, we were told that he would bring about a return to normalcy.  Bring America respect abroad.  Calm down our “chaotic” domestic political scene.  And make government respectable again.

How’s he doing?  Well, let’s review some headlines from this weekend’s New York Times, normally a reliable booster of Democratic presidents, good, bad, or indifferent.

“The Challenges of an Aging President.”

“Mr. President, Ditch the Stealth About Health.”

“The Question Is Not If Biden Should Step Aside.  It’s How.”

This isn’t news to Americans, of course.  As an ABC News poll,  also out this weekend, illustrated, an overwhelming majority of Americans think that Biden is too old for another term.

The bloom is off the Biden presidency.

(This is an official White House photo. It’s supposed to make Biden look good. It’s the best they can do now.)

Last week’s Special Counsel report over Biden’s mishandling of classified documents basically found the same thing.  While the Special Counsel recommended that Biden not be prosecuted for what seemed like clear violations of the law governing secret papers, the reason for his recommendation was that Biden is too old and out of it to be put on trial.

Biden didn’t help himself when he turned down the traditional Super Bowl interview, presumably – as James Carville helpfully pointed out – because that would have called attention to his inability to string two sentences together coherently.  Carville called it a “sign” that Biden’s own administration doesn’t have confidence in him.

And Hillary Clinton even twisted the knife, calling Biden’s age a “legitimate issue.”

As reliable Democratic weathervane Maureen Dowd observed in her NYT column, “Jill Biden and his other advisers come up with ways to obscure signs of senescence — from shorter news conferences to almost zero print interviews to TV interviews mainly with fawning MSNBC anchors.  But many Americans are quite concerned about the 81-year-old president’s crepuscular mien. It’s the elephant in the room — except that elephants never forget.”

Well, elephants are Republican.  As the Special Counsel noted, Biden forgets a lot.  He couldn’t even remember when his son Beau died of cancer (Biden often says, falsely, that Beau was killed while fighting in Iraq) or even when he, Biden, was Vice President.  Indeed, as long ago as 2017, when Biden was working with the ghostwriter for his memoirs, he had serious memory issues.

But Biden was propped up and protected through the 2020 election process by the media and tech moguls and “deep state” operatives who were desperate to get rid of Trump.  Shortly after the election, they were even bragging about what they did.

As Time magazine reported shortly after the 2020 election, a “cabal” — Time’s word — of “left-wing activists and business titans” worked to get rid of Trump. It pushed mail-in voting. It moved to block election fraud suits brought by Trump and supporters. It employed social media censorship to mute pro-Trump arguments and amplify anti-Trump arguments. It sponsored protests.

Time called this a “conspiracy to save the election,” but in truth it was a conspiracy to save the election for the Democrats. The consequences in terms of lost faith in democracy have been severe, but the worst effect is that the winning ticket was never seriously vetted by the media or the campaign process. 

Now we have that president in office, and he’s manifestly unfit.  (In the event of the nuclear attack, a President is supposed to attend a “missile threat” teleconference that has roughly 15 minutes to decide how to respond before it’s too late. Sometimes he will only have six minutes.  Does anyone think Slow Joe could do that?)

He’s so unfit that not only have Americans noticed, but the Democratic and media establishments (but I repeat myself) have started pointing it out, instead of concealing it.

They want to replace him, but it’s awkward.  His Vice President, Kamala Harris, also seems unable to string sentences together coherently, and she lacks even the excuse of senility.  Ditching her will be hard, because she’s a black woman.  There’s some talk about replacing her with Gavin Newsom, a white man with a terrible record as a governor, or with Michelle Obama, whose race and gender are convenient but who has no actual record.  That would reek of desperation.

But whatever the Democrats do about 2024, I would like to see some accountability for the election of 2020.  A cabal of insiders colluded to control the outcome, through all sorts of underhanded tactics.  (Tech companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by The Post, and retired intelligence officials falsely claimed it was fake, Russian disinformation).  The press allowed Biden to campaign from his basement, covering up the truth that he was already unfit for office.

Now we’re in a pickle.  Whatever happens in this election, I would like to see some consequences for the games played with our democracy in 2020.  Elections belong to the voters, not the insiders.  Or at least they should.

To get that point across, we’re going to have to impose some costs on the folks who rigged the last one.  Suggestions on how to go about that in the comments, please.

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