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| 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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