The United States cannot afford a 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. president

In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a book about religion called Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion). As a contribution to the understanding of religion, it is, like much of Freud’s work, both banal and outrageous. But it occurs to me that its catchy title as well as its main thesis — religion, Freud wrote, was invented to fulfill “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” — has a certain pertinence to the large-scale entertainment now being offered to the public by Democrats eager to salvage the reputation of President Joe Biden.

The narrative, according to which Joe Biden was “sharp and intensely probing,” had been assiduously maintained by mendacious Democrats and their sycophantic lackeys in the media since before Biden became president. Few people outside that circle of magical thinking actually believed in Biden’s cognitive competence. I and many others have been calling attention to his debility for years. But the illusion has been cynically cultivated by uniparty lieutenants much as the illusory nostrums of communist solidarity were propped up by the Soviets as their regime teetered towards is final, senescent collapse in the late 1980s. Few people believed the illusion; everyone in power said they believed it, even though they could taste the cynicism and disbelief among the masses they sought to control. That curious dialectic of disbelief and acquiescence was part of the corrosive rust that eventually precipitated the collapse of the regime.

Has the uniparty changed its song about Joe Biden? There are signs that it has. In the immediate aftermath of Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week, the narrative broke in two, or at least seemed to break in two. On one side there was horror and — word of the moment — “panic” among the Dems. The New York Times led the way in calling for Biden — for the good of the country — to resign. At the same time, there was considerable push back, encapsulated comically in the observation that dementia Joe “had a cold,” hence his gibbering incoherence. St. Barack weighed in with what appeared to be a supportive post of X: everyone has bad debate nights, he said, but “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary people his entire life [Obama meant Biden, in case you were wondering] and someone who only cares about himself [the bad orange man].”

Was Obama serious in his support? A day or two later Tucker Carlson cast doubt on that. “From an unusually good source,” he wrote. “Obama’s tweet supporting Joe Biden was disingenuous. In private, Obama is telling people Biden can’t win, and he is therefore in favor of an open convention.” 

I am not sure what that would mean.  In particular, I am not sure that the Dems have taken account of their outstanding black sheep, Vice President Kamala Harris. There is a lot of blithe talk about Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or even, God help us, Hillary Clinton stepping into the breach. In my view, none would be a plausible candidate. More to the point, I am not sure I see how we get to any other candidate than either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.  

My own view is that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment ought to be dusted off and applied to Joe Biden. Section One: “In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.” From Section Four: “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.” If there is a dispute, Congress decides by a two-thirds vote of both Houses.

As a preliminary, the audio tape of Robert Hur’s interview with Biden should be released worldwide the public can understand what Hur meant when he said this “elderly man with a poor memory” was unfit to stand trial (but he can continue as president of the United States?). Remember when Donald Trump vaporized Qasem Soleimani?  He did so after he was awakened in the wee hours of the morning to be informed that our embassy in Baghdad was under attack. “Who did this?” he asked. “Soleimani,” he was informed. Within forty-eight hours he was a heap of sodden dust. Can you imagine trying to rouse Joe Biden at 3 a.m. to make such an imperative decision? The United States cannot afford a 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. president.  

The prospect of a President Harris for even ten minutes is not exactly encouraging. She is out of her depth in a puddle and is nearly as incoherent as her boss. But the Dems chose her because she was the only ambulatory black female they could find. Were they to jettison her now, their black base would revolt — and they would lose. Doubtless the entrepreneur David Sacks is correct when he observes that, “It seems that Democrats are considering every option except one: run the most dignified campaign you can, with the candidate you chose — and lose. Democrats insist on holding onto power at all costs. Whatever they do next will be a dirty trick or a hoax.” 

Pre-warned is pre-armed. Whatever the future of the illusion that is Joe Biden will be, we should be under no illusions about the perilousness of our situation. Donald Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet as the Dems commit suicide in public. As I have noted elsewhere, he seems to be taking a page from Napoleon’s playbook: never disturb your enemy when he is in the process of making a mistake. The rats are cornered and can be expected to be as vicious as they are unscrupulous. But we know that. As the prefects used to tell us boys at school, verbum sapienti satis: “a word to the wise is sufficient.”