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| Biden Inauguration |
American politicians suffer from two problems. They are, most of them, the victims of their past successes. And they are, in Nietzsche’s memorable phrase “all too human,” which means they are, in Shakespeare’s more memorable phrase, “subject to all the shocks that flesh is heir to.”
President Joe Biden, elderly and suffering from the
old age shocks all flesh is heir to, is also the long suffering father of
Hunter Biden, one of Communist China’s more notorious employees.
A US Senator from the state of Delaware for 16 years, from 1973-2009,
Biden was, most recently, former President Barack Obama’s Vice President, from
2009-2017.
The Vice President in American politics is, more or less, a
butler to the President, not a person who is, in American jargon, “his own man.”
Asked how he liked his job, Vice President during the
Franklin Roosevelt administration John Nance Garner III, known to his Texas
contemporaries as “Cactus Jack,” said it wasn’t worth “a warm bucket of spit.”
Most journalists who have quoted Garner on the responsibilities of his office
have, through misplaced delicacy, changed the original contents of the bucket
to “spit.”
Vice Presidential occupancy presents a problem to
presidential analysts whenever a Vice President moves into the presidency.
Richard Nixon was the only non-incumbent Vice President, other than Biden, to
ascend to the presidency. Would Nixon as president remain President Dwight
Eisenhower’s man after he ascended from Vice President to President? Would Franklin
Roosevelt’s second Vice President, Harry Truman, remain captive to the policies
and notions of Roosevelt once he had occupied the presidential office?
At such an early stage in the Biden presidency, one cannot
be absolutely
certain that former President Barack Obama’s foreign and domestic policies –
especially his Middle-East policies, warmly embraced and affirmed by Biden
while Vice President and thought by some to be recklessly eccentric -- will
carry into the Biden administration now that Biden has become his own man, so
to speak.
Biden has been a senator for 30 years, and the question –
Was he ever his own man? – is not impertinent. U.S. Senators tend to
follow in the highly partisan footsteps of their respective parties, and Biden,
who entered the Senate when he was 30 years old, has had a foreshortened life
outside of politics.
When the Democrat Party was liberal, slightly left of
center, in the manner of President John Kennedy, Biden was a moderate. His Vice
Presidential service under Obama, nudged him further to the left. The Democrat
Party is now playing butler to radical progressives who hope to change the fixed stars in
the traditional Democrat political firmament by radically altering cultural foundational
principles and traditional hierarchies.
Biden, whose lifetime liberal score from Americans for
Democratic Action was 72% up to 2004, has adapted to the times and is now regarded,
even by those who are certain that post- modern progressivism will be a vast
improvement over the liberalism of Kennedy’s day, as having moved further left, urged
forward by the relentless progressive tide that has swamped the familiar liberal
Democrat Party of Kennedy
The shadow of a leftist oriented Biden presidency was visible
before and after Biden had assumed office. Biden’s Democrat domestic platform
received an imprimatur from Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. Since assuming
office, Biden has implemented measures that have heartily satisfied radical
progressives within the Democrat Party.
In the Middle East, the nation may expect a revival of
former President Barack Obama’s failed foreign policies, particularly with
respect to Iran, nearly crippled by former President Donald Trump’s trade
impositions. Iran is the chief sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, and its
far-sighted national program – to become a Shia hegemonic power and decision
maker, displacing Sunni Saudi Arabia – will not be altered in the least respect
through diplomatic means. In diplomatic transactions with the Obama-Biden
administration, Iran received millions in hard cash -- hidden from the US
Congress -- that Iran then used to support its anti-Israel terrorist proxies in,
among other places, Lebanon, once a country in which Christian lambs had lain
down peacefully with Islamic lions, now lying prostrate under the hobnailed
boots of anti-Saudi Shia terrorists.
Ukraine and China are problems for the Biden administration,
largely because of the role played in both countries by both Biden
and his son Hunter.
Just now, Biden is enjoying a honeymoon period with a cooing
and appreciative media. But honeymoons end, as witness a near declaration of
divorce from the nation’s pro-progressive media involving the once sainted
Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, whose Coronavirus policy while in office
turned New York’s long term care facilities into death chambers for the state’s
most vulnerable population. In addition, three women have now accused Cuomo of inappropriate
behavior in the not yet moribund MeToo era.
Connecticut’s media, quick to hang a Trump albatross around
the necks of state Republicans who had not sufficiently denounced the titular
head of their party, twice unsuccessfully impeached, have not yet invited
Lamont to denounce his fishing buddy, Cuomo, and efforts to pry from
“scientific” bean counters in Connecticut the precise number of deaths that had
occurred in Connecticut’s long term care facilities have, so far, been
unavailing.
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