Unfit Even If He Were Sane

The campaign to re-elect Bugout Joe Biden may, upon retrospection, conclude that it was a false economy to recruit as Biden’s makeup technician for last week’s debate a student from a mortuary college.

I have seen and perhaps you have, too, descriptions of the “re-animated” corpse of Biden, the notorious betrayer of America’s allies, for that debate. This is unfair. He wasn’t animated at all, re- or otherwise.

Taking a lesson from the Br’er Rabbit tale involving the brier patch, Donald Trump agreed to all the debate conditions set by the Biden campaign. It was better for Trump, it turns out, for Biden to be left to stumble all on his own, without any audience and without being talked over by the “Republican” megalomaniac, amid periods of pathetic moans and flop-sweat silence.

But we’re missing the big picture: Until he lost his wits, Joseph Robinette Biden was a malevolent dunce who danced to the tune the union bosses and political and financial betters called. In a less-dangerous world, a Biden paralyzed by dementia is preferable because he can do less harm. But the world is very dangerous. And it is now horrified.

Despite his claims (a phrase that applies to practically everything he has ever said), little Joey Biden Jr., began life in well-to-do circumstances. His father was, basically, a war profiteer, spending his time in Boston. There was a family financial downturn when the easy war money disappeared. His father became a car salesman and the family sent him to a private Catholic school. (It seems not to have taken.)

In a summer lifeguard job while he was in college, he threatened, he said, a local black fellow named “Cornpop” with a piece of conveniently located chain. (As a child he had stuttered and had apparently been bullied for it — children are cruel — and when it was still merely neurosis he liked as a grownup to cast himself as triumphant in all earlier encounters, real or imagined.)

He graduated from the University of Delaware at Newark, ranked 506 out of the 688 in his class. Despite his claims, he did not get three degrees — just one, in history and political science, and he barely got that. He then somehow got into law school in Syracuse, which he falsely claimed to have attended on a full scholarship. He also claimed to have graduated in the top half of his class. He in fact, he ranked 76 in a class of 85. Added to his budgetary claims in the last three years, we can only conclude that he is poor at arithmetic.

Obscured by his senility is the fact that he is a pathological fabulist, possibly for the reason mentioned above, with himself the hero of every story. He got caught plagiarizing a speech during his first of many attempts to be president, and a in party possessed at the time of a sense of shame that seems to have departed along with Biden’s cognition, he was forced to drop out of the race.

He had hoped to make his bones by torpedoing the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, but he learned about the sharp elbows of even a drunken Teddy Kennedy instead. And the fact is that even an inebriated Kennedy was smarter than Joe Biden. His intelligence has always been less than his honesty, and the latter was never noticeable. (The Clintons were able to get away with things that the Bidens can’t, because unlike Biden they are dishonest and smart. Their international shakedown scheme has been in the open. The Biden family operation, in contrast, has had all the finesse of a small-town gang of hoodlums. The mob would have taken Hunter for a ride long before now. And would have kept the cannolis. Bugout Biden didn’t do this, but the ice cream is melting anyway.)

In 1991, still chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over the fiasco that was the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing. When running for president in 2020, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get off the hook for failing to sink Thomas.

Every official defense of Biden today begins with his having endured tragedy, as if this is cause to cut him slack. It turns out that Biden has long exploited sympathy. In 1972 wife Neilia Biden and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a terrible collision with a tractor-trailer. Sons Beau and Hunter were terribly injured, the latter suffering a fractured skull. The future Bugout Joe capitalized on it by being sworn in to his first term in the Senate from Beau and Hunter’s hospital room. Biden has since claimed his wife and daughter were killed by a drunken driver, but there is no evidence to suggest this. (He would later claim that he had worked as a big-rig driver, which he never did. He also claimed that his great-grandfather was a coal miner, which he wasn’t. But these things are more in the nature of normal political falsehood from a puppet of labor unions, pretending to be “just like you” even though he wasn’t.)

He also exploits whenever possible the death of his son Beau. Only a cat has sufficient lives to have died in as many different places and of as many different things as Bugout Joe has claimed.

According to Biden, for instance, Beau was killed in Iraq. He wasn’t. Biden was criticized for turning the deaths of 13 soldiers in Afghanistan during the disastrous bugout into a tale about Beau. Later, he would say that Beau died as the result of trash fires while in the military. (Beau died of brain cancer in Maryland in 2015.) Biden, when it is not expedient to say it was the 2017 riot in Charlottesville, Virginia that caused him to run, has said that he sought the presidency because it was Beau’s dying wish.

He exaggerates, repeatedly, the tale about a minor kitchen fire at his house.

Guess what. Life can be tough and many people have experienced tragedy, without their thinking it qualifies them to be president.

Though in a rally attempting to revive his candidacy after last week’s debate he read words written by someone else from a teleprompter which included the claims that he knows how to tell the truth and knows right from wrong (to avoid those things?), the fact is that if Joe Biden says he’s Joe Biden it’s best to ask for ID. His opponent in the presidential election this year is known to be a tremendous liar, but Biden probably lies as much.

“Liar” is how “lawyer” is pronounced in some parts of the south, and Biden is both. It happens, especially in politics. But there’s more to it than that. When you scrape away the senility, the stupidity, and the prevarication, what’s left is a thoroughly reprehensible excuse for a human being.

Sorry old Joe claims to be a Roman Catholic, and in this unhappy day it is possible to find a priest who will administer the sacraments even to someone who campaigns for the killing of babies right up to the point of birth. (The current occupant of the Chair of Peter has allegedly praised Biden. This will get sorted out definitively for all involved before many more years have passed.)

“Doctor” Jill Biden (her doctorate is in education, which is to say pretty much useless) was married when she and Bugout Joe began to date in 1977, 20 years before she got her doctorate. Poor old Joe accents the “doctor” part when introducing her. He is in awe of his intellectual betters, a group that comprises pretty much everybody. This is sometimes manifested in aggression, as aides have recently admitted, and he famously challenged an Iowa voter to an IQ test, which is only slightly less absurd than the debate veering off into an argument about golf. (If it had lasted 5 minutes longer, they probably would have boasted to the point of dropping their pants. Or maybe not, if their claims were bluffs, which given the characters involved is likely.)

Of course “Dr.” Jill doesn’t want Bugout Joe to drop out. Today she gets to travel the world, wear expensive clothes, eat fine food, and be treated as royalty, all on someone else’s nickel. If Joe leaves the campaign, it becomes life with what’s left of an already hollow, now diminished man in Rehoboth Beach, living on Bugout Joe’s share of whatever his son and brother have been able to scam from shady foreign businesses. Would Joe enjoy the perquisites that accrue from his being a former president? Would he be in demand as a speaker? Would he be a powerful part of what media types call “the national conversation”? You’re kidding, right? No, he would be like Thomas Mitchell’s final scenes in “Gone With the Wind,” a drooling old deluded man. Jill didn’t sign up for this.

Of course Hunter Biden doesn’t want his father to drop out. The fellow that Bugout Joe calls “the smartest man I know” is under several serious indictments and has already been convicted of felonies — actual, identifiable crimes — that could result in substantial prison time. Dispassionate investigation would clearly lead to more. Through the presidential power of pardon, Hunter could get off the hook. But there’s a problem. Daddy Joe has promised not to pardon Hunter (for what Joe’s promises are worth). Everyone expects the pardon to come November 6, the day after the election. But that would require Joe to still be in office November 6. It is tough to drop out of a presidential candidacy due to senility and remain as president. (Remember, the reason special prosecutor Robert Hur gave for failing to indict Joe on documents charges is, basically, that he’d be found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.)

If Joe dropped out, there would be immediate calls for him to resign the presidency. If Joe then pardoned Hunter a priori any current or future indictments, he would have shackled his successor and added to the likelihood that Trump would win. (And Jill would spend the rest of Joe’s life hearing him say, over and over, every day, that he would have won, at least until she scraped together the money to phony up an imitation oval office, at which the then-former president could pretend to have won re-election for a few hours — the same as his current schedule — each day.)

Hunter Biden’s only hope is for Joe to hang on until November 6. What’s more, it is difficult to make money selling access to a cranky old man — people can get plenty of that for free, so the money train would be permanently derailed, unless Hunter went into the blackmail business, with former clients as his “customers.” He could do that even from prison.

Everybody in Biden’s life, including what’s left of himself, is concerned solely with his or her own interests. So yes, it’s all a tragedy. But we must remember that Bugout Joe has not just been the victim of tragedy but has proudly forced tragedies on many others. We might say it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, but perhaps it would be better to say it wouldn’t happen to a nicer guy.