The question of the day is not “What makes President Joe Biden run?” but rather ‘Should Biden run?”
Both Democrats and Republicans will be confronting a similar
problem in 2024. Should their leading presidential candidates – Republican
former President Donald Trump and Democrat President Joe Biden withdraw from
their races? Just now, national polls are screaming they should withdraw,
according to The Hill: Majorities
don’t want Biden, Trump to run in 2024: survey.
No less a liberal eminence than Maureen Dowd of the New York
Times, not a MAGA supporter, has argued that Biden should bid us all a fond
farewell. And National Review
magazine appears to be dusting off its old bromide in time for the upcoming
elections. To its credit, National Review -- which devoted a whole issue of its
magazine, “Never Trump”, to a stern warning that conservatives should not
support Trump, the magazine later allowed dissent and published, among others, a repentant piece by Dan McLaughlin, I
Was ‘Never Trump’ in 2016. I’m Still a Conservative. Here’s How I’m Voting.
Assuming the real-world choice in 2024 is Trump vs Biden, McLaughlin will vote Trump. Joe Biden, McLaughlin writes, “a notorious fabulist… is at best a mediocre man, well past his
prime, whose ideas are bad, without the courage or strength of character to
stand up to a party chock-full of far worse people with far worse ideas and a
pitiless contempt for constitutional limitations or elementary respect for
their fellow Americans in implementing them.”
The swelling anti-Trump, anti-Biden crowds plausibly argue
that campaigns revolving around personal vindication are not what the nation
needs at the moment. The presidential baton, they advise, should be passed to a
new generation.
Not at all oddly, far left revolutionists such as New York U.S.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have thrown their support to Biden,
though it must grieve them that Biden, if he can be persuaded to engage in
meaningful debate at all, appears to be marketing his present campaign as a
traditional left of center Democrat.
At this point, the far left has been pressed into service
because there is no place else they may go to relieve their leftist itch for more
– more government, more spending, more empathy, more Bidenomics.
To be sure, Hunter Biden, Joe’s prodigal son, appears to be
a drag on his father’s lofty ambitions, but presidents have always relied on
the administrative state to pull their chestnuts from the fire.
Traditional moralists, citing a bill of particulars, would
argue that Hunter has shown himself to be a scoundrel of the first water. But
Democrat marketing is in the process of tagging the beleaguered Hunter as a “victim,”
and we all know that the angels presiding over our politics unreservedly support
victims, except when they are the illegitimate wastrels of Hunter Biden who,
having consulted with his father, has decided not to sully the Biden escutcheon
through a formal and honorable admission of fatherhood, thus incurring the disfavor of
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: NY
Times columnist rebukes Biden’s ‘cold' heart for denying existence of
granddaughter: ‘It’s seven grandkids’.
The Bidens have decided to cast Hunter’s illegitimate child into the ousted darkness by refusing to bestow on her the Biden name, though she has been given several of Hunter Biden’s overpriced paintings.
Hunter, though, may be the least of Biden’s problems. A true
neo-progressive politician, Biden has concluded that there is no problem on
earth, or in the heavens, that cannot be settled through vigorous executive
action. And if one must cross the great divide between our three branches of
government – executive, legislative and judicial – to right a perceived wrong,
it would be immoral not to do so.
Moral claims, pagan or Christian, must be paramount. U.S.
Senator Dick
Blumenthal, heavily indebted to abortion facilitators for campaign
contributions and assistance, has declared, rather in the manner of a Pope
ruling on matters of faith and morals, that any resistance to
abortion at any stage of a pregnancy, however reasonable, is immoral.
The notion that the pristine purity of the environment must
at all costs be maintained – and the costs, including massive restrictions on
the production of natural gas, are considerable – is an ipse dixit of the burgeoning environmental movement, at
least on this side of the oceans that divide the U.S. from, say, China, India
or Russia, all notorious pollutant states.
The national border
of the United States may be penetrated with impunity.
The judiciary may be
used with impunity by in-office neo-progressive legislators to spare themselves
the necessity of writing laws that may be unpopular among their constituents.
Lately such appeals have fallen out of favor with the U.S. Supreme Court, which
has argued in recent decisions that political matters should, in keeping with
the constitutional “separation of powers” doctrine, be decided by legislators
rather than justices.
The above
operational strategies are all part of our new neo-progressive movement,
embraced passionately if not morally by an emerging secular priesthood for whom
political restraints on the centralization of power in an increasingly
autocratic executive department are ruinously unnecessary.
Caesarism, the bane
and ruination of small “r” republican government will always reject those who
reject the accumulation of political power in the hands of a “moral” autocrat.
The neo-progressive
Biden, implausibly claiming to be a centrist Democrat, unexposed and hidden by
our media in the nation’s centrist woodwork, is the perfect executive Caesar
for our unreflective and robotic age.
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