The impeachment of President Donald Trump has blotted out
lesser news stories. Journalistically, the impeachment circus has become the
sun that, early in the morning, hides the stars behind a veil of bright light.
But the stars twinkle, never-the-less.
According to most polls, former Vice President Joe Biden
will eventually become the White Knight facing the Republican’s Black Knight,
Trump, whom Democrats, during their somber impeachment process, hope to remove
from office before the 2020 elections. This fugitive “hope” is doomed to be
crushed by the numbers. Democrats simply do not have the numbers in the U.S.
Senate to boot Trump out of office before the national elections and, in
politics, numbers rule.
Polls show that most Americans are shrugging their shoulders
at the impeachment process but, at the very least, the clips of the hearings
may be fashioned into campaign howitzers before 2020. U.S. Representative Jerry
Nadler, the Danton of the impeachment hearings, already has accused Republican
members of the Senate of traitorous behavior by presuming to disagree with
Jerry Nadler. And clips of Representative Adam Schiff’s oratory scorch media
outlets even now. Schiff, who is managing impeachment proceedings on behalf of
Democrats in the Senate, is the long-winded Robespierre of the impeachment
heave-ho. But when Robespierre wound up an issue, none in his audience dared
slumber. If brevity is the soul of wit, Schiff’s long, sleep-inducing
performance has been deemed by some to be witless. And, perhaps worse, there
are no humorous punch-lines in his oratory. To be fair to Schiff, the austere and
humorless Senate frowns on displays of humor. On the Senate stage, one cannot
imagine a more somber actor than Schiff.
There is a downside to the festivities. The national media –
increasingly unable to chew gum and walk at the same time – is missing out on
Biden’s performances.
Before small groups of people who appear to be hanging on his
every word, Hunter Biden’s dad has now begun to flesh out his foreign policy
strategy. In the event, following his swearing-in ceremony as President, Biden
is not immediately impeached on a charge of bribery by the US House,
there will be foreign policy to conduct.
Throughout history, prudent foreign policy has been shaped
on a “friends and enemies” anvil. We now know that President of Russia Vladimir
Putin has belatedly been dumped by Democrats into the “enemies” trash bin. The
whole point of the seemingly endless Mueller investigation was to discredit
both Putin and his presumptive “friend” Trump. Democrats were dashed when Mueller
removed Trump “collusion” from his prosecutorial table. Putin, formerly on
relative good terms with both Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and her
immediate boss, President Barack Obama, has now been devalued. Clinton gifted
Putin’s emissary to the United States, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov, with a “Reset Button,” and Obama was caught on a hot mic imploring Dmitry
Medvedev, former Prime Minister of Russia, to tell Putin that problems
of missile defense between Russia and the United States might be solved if only
Putin would allow Obama more space. "This is my last election,” Obama
whispered. “After my election I have more flexibility." Medvedev was
sympathetic. "I understand,” he replied. “I will transmit this information
to Vladimir [Putin]."
It would appear that Putin was given a great deal of
flexibility during Obama’s second term, when he gobbled up Crimea in Ukraine
and firmed up his friendship with Syrian tyrant Bashir Assad and the mullahs of
Iran, who had been for decades enemies of the United States and Israel, the rarest
democratic bloom in the Middle east. Trump, during his first term in office,
moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem and grievously disappointed his friend
Putin by arming Ukrainians with tank destroying missiles.
In recent days, Obama’s second in command, former Vice President Biden, told his supporters on the campaign trail 1) that the United States no longer needs standing armies, and 2) that we should be helping rather than hindering China -- because China is our friend. It’s friendship with the Western world has recently been expressed by its attempts to suppress a pro-democracy insurrection in Hong Kong. With friends like this, friends of democracy might ask, who needs enemies?
Biden’s support among possible
Democrat voters in Connecticut appears to be solid, but Democrat politicians in
the state have not yet fulsomely endorsed Biden for president, nor has
Obama, who discouraged his own Vice President in 2016 from disturbing Hillary
Clinton’s march to the White House. “Gov. Ned Lamont,” a Hartford paper reported
in December, “who held a fundraiser for Biden at his Greenwich home in
October, is expected to campaign for him in New Hampshire ahead
of the Feb. 11 primary.”
At some point the question will
arise, though possibly not in Connecticut’s left of center media: Why do we
need military procurements supplied by Connecticut’s arms makers – Sikorsky,
Pratt&Whitney and Electric Boat – if the United States is to do away with
its standing army?
On with the impeachment then.
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