“The dumbest person is the one who knows it all,” said Malcolm Forbes, the late American entrepreneur.
He must have had Joe Biden in mind. Our Pinocchio president has always operated under the arrogant illusion that he is the smartest person in the room. That is true only when the room is empty.
It is well established that Biden is an inveterate fabulist, serial plagiarist, and chronic gaffe machine. These are a given. But it is Biden’s inherent intellectual deficit compounded by a blinding sense of superiority that poses the gravest danger to our nation.
Instead of competently meeting the challenges that inevitably confront any president, Biden has managed to mangle everything he touches. He has manufactured, all on his own, one arrant disaster after another —border chaos, energy insufficiency, economic stagnation coupled with inflation, labor shortages, spiraling debt, pandemic misjudgments, racial disharmony in the spirit of uber-wokeness, and feckless action in the face of exploding crime.
However, no amount of bungling compares to the catastrophic mishandling of his Afghanistan withdrawal where he achieved a new (and shameful) level of incompetence and stupidity. Thirteen courageous members of the U.S. military died as a direct result of his blundering retreat. Their blood is on Biden’s hands.
Americans remain abandoned and stranded there, the equivalent of hostages to the whims of medieval theocratic murderers known as the Taliban. Our humiliating surrender left NATO allies fuming and our nation’s enemies happily emboldened.
But in the twisted, demented mind of Joe Biden, it was all a wonderful success. In a televised address afterward, he bragged about it. No honest person believed him. He was clueless. His combination of spin, rationalization and blame-someone-else was incoherent to anyone with a functioning brain. But there it was in the teleprompter, so old Joe just read it. Then he took a nap.
This invites the question: what will Biden blow up next when he awakens from his slumber? What train wreck of toxic policies and rank ineptitude will he engineer as an encore? What excuses will he deploy to camouflage his blundering? The possibilities are both infinite and frightening.
Americans who voted for Biden were naive and gullible. They mistakenly thought they were getting a calming presence and a moderating force. They were played for suckers. What they got was a pedestrian intellect with delusions of grandeur and a propensity for mucking up whatever is in front of him. As Victor Davis Hanson observed, “Biden is non compos mentis. He has no idea what he is doing.”
Against this backdrop and his disgraceful dereliction of duty in the Afghanistan debacle, it is tempting to embrace the demands of some Republicans that the president resign. He won’t. To the extent that he is cognitively conscious, he has no sense of self-awareness.
Nor will he be impeached since Democrats hold a majority in the House, while the Senate is split with Vice President Kamala Harris casting any deciding vote. Yes…under Nancy Pelosi’s tortured impeachment standard that was corruptly applied twice to President Trump, Biden could certainly be impeached. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Bastardizing the Constitution is never the answer.
Invoking the 25th Amendment to evict Biden from the Oval Office is also improbable. Incompetence and senility is not the same thing as incapacity. Neither is buffoonery. Not yet, at least. Moreover, gaining the support of a majority of Biden’s cabinet and his VP to remove him is unrealistic despite his obvious unfitness for office. But not all is lost.
The wheels of democracy in a constitutional republic provide a corrective course. The mid-term elections are a little more than a year away. Biden cannot run from his abysmal record of self-induced failures. If past is prologue, he will continue to screw up in spectacular fashion and his approval ratings will nose dive even further than they already have over the last few weeks. Currently, it stands at 43%, according to the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. It’s heading south fast. And his Vice President’s dreadful approval numbers don’t help. Most Americans consider Harris to be utterly unqualified to be president.
The concomitant effect will drag down Democrats who are up for re-election, as independent voters gravitate toward Republican challengers. History shows that presidents with approval ratings below 60% suffered major losses in the House during their first mid-term elections. Obama lost 63 seats in 2010 in a notorious thumping.
Given Biden’s calamitous eight months in office, he’s poised to match that record or exceed it. The inexorable trouncing next November will hobble his presidency and solidify his fate as an enfeeble one-term president.
In electoral politics, buyer’s remorse can be both cruel and cleansing.