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Events Overthrow Political Certainties

Trump, Vance, globalastronaut

Events have a way of vetoing certainties.

“The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,” Robert Burns tells us, “Gang aft agley. An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!”

Or to put it in the modern idiom, the vicissitudes of life – what the Romans called the goddess Fortuna – can be a bummer.

In a front page, above the fold story – “State Republicans laud Vance” -- Hartford Courant reporter Chris Keating managed to include some anti-lauds from prominent Democrats: “In a fundraising email, President Joe Biden asked ‘How does a guy [the Republican nominating convention’s choice for vice president, JD Vance] who used to say that Donald Trump and his policies were “reprehensible” become Donald Trump‘s running mate?’”

Biden, of course, should know the answer to his own question because, during his primary campaign for president, he chose as his vice presidential running mate Kamala Harris, who had sharply criticized Biden concerning his lamentable past opposition to busing as well as favorable comments he made regarding his past association with segregationist senators.

Harris strongly suggested that Biden had in the past been soft on Democrat racists such as U.S. Senator Robert Byrd. According to his memoir, Byrd had organized and led a 150-member chapter, or "Klavern," of the Klu-Klux-Klan as an "Exalted Cyclops” in late 1941 or early 1942. Biden never-the-less chose Harris as his vice presidential running mate.

Few Democrats were surprised by Trump’s VP choice, and it is common in American politics for past political contenders to become warm political associates, as witness former President Ronald Reagan’s choice for vice president, George Bush.

Two recent events threaten to overthrow commonly accepted perceptions. One is the near assassination of Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, due to accept the Republican Nominating Convention’s choice for president on July 18. On July 17, the convention affirmed J.D. Vance as its vice presidential nominee. The Democrat nominating Convention is due to convene at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois from August 19 to 22, 2024.

At this point, we do not know whether the assassin, killed by snipers at the scene, was motivated by political concerns or whether he was mentally disturbed. It is not possible to interview a corpse, but various theories will shake the political universe for some time to come.

Most people agree that the shooter should have been interrupted by the Secret Service or some other agency of government before he pulled the trigger that resulted in a hit that easily could have thrown the Republican Nomination Convention into profound disarray. A continuing investigation will unfold slowly and deliberatively before presidential ballots are cast in November 2024.

In the meanwhile, the Democrat national convention has been disturbed by a confluence of various forces.

Current Democrat President Joe Biden is slipping in polls that measure Democrat dissatisfaction with the party’s choice for president. A slight 35 percent of Democrats think that Biden should stay in the presidential race.

The most recent report from CNN – “Trump triumphant as Biden descends into a deepening crisis”-- is dark with predictive foreboding: “A White House race that slumbered for months has suddenly erupted over a momentous three weeks bookended by Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance and the attempted assassination of Trump – a whiplash of events unseen in half a century… Republicans are lionizing a nominee who escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet and rose, bloodied, to raise his fist with a vow to ‘fight.’ Biden, by comparison, retreated from the campaign trail Wednesday to his Delaware home with a case of Covid-19.”

Covid-19 is the least of Biden’s problems, most of which have from inside Democrat Party precincts.

It is no news that both Democrat Party leaders and the party’s rank and file members have been concerned for some time with Biden’s evident infirmities, as yet unnamed.

The most recent poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research estimates that 65% of Democrats think President Biden should drop out of the race. The Hill reports “79 percent of Democrats approve of Harris replacing Biden if he steps aside.” And MSNBC provides “A running list of Democrats who have called for Biden to drop out.

At the top of MSNBC’s list is Adam Schiff and, we learn, the redoubtable former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, both unremitting critics of Trump.  Former President Barack Obama is somewhere in the gang of respectable Democrats calling upon his former Vice President Biden to throw in the sponge.

CNN, MSNBC and AP are widely regarded in Republican circles as having been friendly to the Biden presidency.

But now – change is in the air, the result of the influence of the fickle goddess Fortuna. Aware of the strumpet’s nature, Marcus Tullius Cicero (Born 106BC) warned Rome, “If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash.”

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