Mike

Biden, Scandals, and His Place in History: A First Look

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I was going to write a post a few days ago regarding the historical legacy of the Biden administration, but I had a sense that the scoundrel wasn’t quite done yet and so I held off.

With the news this morning that Biden has pardoned Milley, Fauci, and the J6 Committee members I’m glad I did.

That old villain Lenin once said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Well four years is a bit more than a few weeks, but in one very important respect this has been one of the most consequential administrations in American history.

That one respect I am speaking of is scandal.

We’ve had presidential scandals in the past: presidents obstructing justice over flings with interns, presidents obstructing justice over second-rate burglaries, presidents selling arms to Iran in order to run guns to the Contras. Note those are just the ones we know about. I would argue that the way Carter treated the country as his moral possession was an underappreciated scandal.

However all of those scandals (that we know of) constitute the JV team of compared to record of the Biden years. With Scranton Joe and friends we are talking about historical, shaking faith in the constitutional system to the core type of stuff. Things that you find only in a Third World country or maybe a Mel Brooks movie.

I’m going to take a historian’s view and list five scandals that not only constitute things that are hard to square with the notion of a republic governed by laws and beholden to a free people with inalienable rights, but have damaged our political norms for decades to come. These should fall both Biden and those who enabled him throughout history.

These are not the abusive actions of some faceless bureaucrat in the CIA or subterranean troll toiling away in the bowls of the EPA, but rather deliberate and active conspiracies at the highest levels of the Biden administration and government. The enormity of the scandals lie not just with Biden, but with all of those in the DC establishment who enabled this and who will remain when Joe leaves town.

You can add others such as other fiscal insolvency, immigration, the hollowing-out of the military. However those while possibly dramatic in their future effect are policy blunders and their effects as of yet unrealized. Don’t think so? We’ll see but several thousand years of empirical evidence shows that’s hard to predict things, especially the future. We’ll just have to keep playing the game and find out about those.

The Cover-Up of Biden’s Physical and Mental Disabilities

The fact that Biden was in mental decline has been obvious for years, even during the 2020 Election. That decline seemed to accelerate once he took office and the alarming nature of his various missteps were rivaled only by the political establishment closing ranks telling us to ignore our lying eyes. Even when Biden’s disastrous debate performance last June finally allowed the story to break cover, they still tried to cover it up.

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What We Must Remember

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I understand that 10/7 seems like an eternity ago, but as we watch the ceasefire in Gaza unfold there are some things we need to remember.

While there is an “exchange” of people between Hamas and Israel, it is not an equal trade. Israel is releasing from its jails blood-thirsty killers, members of a group that has sworn to destroy it. Hamas is releasing men, women, and small children which it had kidnapped on 10/7.

Those who were kidnapped on 10/7 were the lucky ones that day. Hamas invaded Israel and killed more than 1,200 civilians. These dead were not the collateral damage of war, but deliberately targeted by Hamas as it overran Israeli towns to commit mass torture, rape, and murder.

Those civilians kidnapped by Hamas were as targeted as those which it so cruelly tortured and killed. They were kidnapped to be used as bargaining chips, both to escape destruction by the Israeli military and to inflict psychological torture against the Israeli population at large. Much as Hamas cynically uses its own civilian population as human shields, fortifying its positions with so much living concrete, it uses Israeli civilians to weaken Israel’s will to resist through the implementation of horror and pain.

The recently implemented ceasefire is merely the logical extension of that psychological campaign as Hamas uses those innocents it kidnapped on that awful day as the means to escape (for now) its richly deserved destruction. Every released hostage is for their families, and for Israel itself, a cause for celebration. It is also a cause for all civilized people to refill our hearts with a determined resolve.

Never forget.

The Conspiracy of the Trump Prosecutions

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Yet another thing here in the dying days of the Biden administration.

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past few years regarding the Biden administration’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against Trump. However, we need to remember that it wasn’t just the Biden administration launching these attacks, but Democrats throughout the country

There was Alvin Bragg’s prosecution in Manhattan. There was Fani Willis’s prosecution in Fulton County. Bragg’s case secured some convictions, but it is doubtful those will survive on appeal. Willis’s case has largely collapsed over ethics.

Before we sweep those cases into the dustbin of history, we need to take another look at what the Democrats have been doing over the past two years. Specifically, the active coordination between the Biden administration and the local prosecutions of Trump constituted a larger conspiracy against one of key foundations of a republic governed by law.

The fact that the various prosecutions were historic is well-trodden ground, but we need to remind ourselves that we are dealing with the unprecedented prosecutions of not only a former president but the man who was running to unseat an incumbent of the same party as the local and federal prosecutors. When you attempt things like what the Democrats were doing, your case had better be clean and tight.

Those local cases were anything but clean and tight.

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The Lawless Actions of Lloyd Austin

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As the Biden administration closes up shop, the scandals keep coming. The following, regarding Lloyd Austin, might seem like small potatoes but that’s only in comparison to all of the rest, and speaks to a larger pattern of mismanagement and lawlessness.

Anybody remember this from last year?

“Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was released from the hospital on Monday, the Pentagon announced, two weeks after he was admitted for complications from prostate-cancer surgery. Doctors treating Austin, whose absence went undisclosed by the Pentagon for nearly a week, assured that the Defense Secretary was expected to make a full recovery but would work remotely ‘for a period of time’…

“…. Austin entered Walter Reed National Military Hospital on New Year’s Day but failed to notify the White House of his hospitalization until January 4. During his absence, Austin transferred authority to Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who was then in Puerto Rico on vacation and unaware of her boss’s health problems.”

There are two scandals here. The first is that Austin never informed the White House that he was out of action and had transferred authority to his deputy. That’s a major no-no in any organization, but especially with the Secretary of Defense given his place in the presidential succession, his possession of nuclear codes, and the fact that the various US combat commands report directly to him.

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Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

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One of the many benefits of growing older is that when people tell you a self-serving lie about the past, you can call them on it by reminding them that you lived through that part of history.

A case in point was the recent death and state funeral for Jimmy Carter. I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, especially when their coffin is still settling into the earth, but I’m the type of a guy at a funeral who would raise their hand during the eulogy and ask for equal time.

Carter was a man who while given a state funeral for his public life as president, was largely eulogized for his post-presidential life. The man was a disaster as a president and not just because of the condition of the country after he left office. The man did not understand at a fundamental level the job he held. Instead of being the chief executive and leader of a great republic and nation, he thought his job was to act as a puritanical scold. Instead of seeing his office as a public trust of leadership, he saw the moral authority of the office as a private possession.

While I wish the current occupant of the White House a long and healthy life, the past week reminds us that some day Joe Biden will also be given a state funeral, and that more than likely his many faults (let alone his evil) will be interred with his bones.

I was also reminded this week of the final days of the Clinton presidency, when outgoing Clinton White House staff engaged in “damage, theft, vandalism and pranks” designed to troll the incoming Bush administration.

Given the vandalism the outgoing Biden administration has been doing during its final days, those acts of 24 years ago seem almost cute.

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