by Patrick Lawrence, The Unz Review:
I honestly do not think Joe Biden ever had a chance to make sense of his four years as president. It is not merely his native stupidity, and Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s execrable record on the foreign side seems evidence enough that he is through and through, all-over stupid. This does not distinguish Biden among American presidents, after all. No, the matter to hand is larger. If you assume the task of running an empire and the empire has profligately abused the world’s once-considerable reservoir of goodwill, anyone short of a philosopher king was bound to fail as America’s No. 46.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
But American presidents do not fail and America altogether never fails. We all know this. The Success God has always reigned supreme in our republic, and it reigns without mercy now, even as our republic teeters. This creates a big problem when a president who has failed so miserably as Joe Biden takes his leave. You have to change the subject. You have to distract the great broad masses with matters of no consequence. You have to make things up and keep making them up at least until No. 46 is back home playing with his Corvette.
It becomes a little ridiculous, but Americans, of course, are well used to ridiculous at this point. We are not, I strenuously insist, a ridiculous people. It’s that those purporting to lead us, ridiculous themselves, have made the nation wherein we dwell act ridiculously and, so, look ridiculous.
Ridiculous! I come upon the word I seek. I read somewhere the other day, and if my editors will excuse me, I am not going to waste time looking it up, that Nancy “Look At All My Ice-Cream” Pelosi remarked that Joe Biden now “takes his place in the pantheon of American democracy.” See what I mean by making things up? See what I mean by ridiculous?
Joe Biden has hankered ardently after a “legacy,” the leaving of some lasting mark on America, something to get him some lines, maybe a chapter, in the history texts. He has succeeded on many fronts, even if this is upside-down to his intent. America is now complicit in a genocide that has us invoking President Jackson’s Trail of Tears. He bequeaths the danger of nuclear war and an economy—near to a magic trick, this—that clocks well in the statistics but has most of the citizenry in one or another way desperate.
These are the big, obvious features of Biden’s legacy. But, awful as they are, America’s plunge into unreality during Biden’s watch seems to me just as consequential for its enduring consequences. Joe Biden has led our nation so far out to sea we can no longer see the shore. We have lost contact with the world — a thought so inconceivable even a few years ago I find it odd to type these seven words.
The myths of America’s success and supremacy and goodwill collided head-on during Biden’s years with failure, America’s malintent, and the reality of a multipolar world neither Biden nor the policy cliques he commands (or that command him) can accept. Again, no other White House occupant could have done any better these past four years. Biden’s stupidity simply made the mess worse.
And so we witness Biden’s farewell amid a parade of ridiculousness.
■
David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, wrote a notable piece the other day under the headline, “We deserve Pete Hegseth.” He was remarking on the confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee of President-elect Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. Right up top Brooks lists the questions with which the next Pentagon chief will have to contend: the threat of another world war; the prospect of fighting multiple conflicts at once with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea; America’s hollowed-out industrial base; the military’s overall “insolvency,” a RAND Corporation term for the armed forces’ inability to match the tasks policy sets for it.
“Now, if you are holding a hearing for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues,” Brooks writes. “If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearing, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.”
Wow.
Brooks continues with piercing acuity:
We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.
Brilliant, especially given it appears in The Times’s ordinarily wooden opinion pages. A soap-opera country is a country out of touch with reality, just as I say. It is a ridiculous country, the soaps being famously such.
Pete Hegseth, who failed to answer the most elementary questions about how the world is organized, is preposterously unqualified to serve as defense secretary. But never mind all that. His attacks on wokery, along with his boozing and dalliances with women, whatever the nature of either, made him the perfect blackboard for all the Bidenites on the Armed Services Committee to scrawl their credentials as virtuous culture warriors.
