Biden and the Bus

Biden's presidency is foundering. Unraveling like a cheap suit. Folding like a dime-store card table. Collapsing like a house of cards.

His Gunga Dins in the mainstream press are mostly keeping up a brave front, peddling the various "not his fault" narratives and echoing his nonsensical claims that things are much better than they appear, but cracks are starting to appear. As inflation persists and grows worse, as the price at the pump hits records and is expected to keep rising, as the economy and markets tank, and as Biden appears less in command of his faculties with each passing week, some on his side of the aisle are starting to say that which daren’t have been said not that long ago:

‘Biden should not seek re-election in 2024.’

I never expected him to, but I did understand that politics pretty much required him to insist that he's not a one-termer, destined to lame-duckery from Day 1 (this is an odd premise - Presidents in their second terms aren't seen as "lame ducks" by default - but I heard it too many times to ignore). I'm sure many others didn't either.

Thanks to the mess he had a big hand in creating, his party's very likely to lose both houses of Congress in November - and that's even with the over-amplified outrage over the presumed Roe overturn being used to whip the base into a lather. Those emerging cracks will widen very quickly. The Left loves a good bandwagon and a good dogpile.

Democrats, who've long demonstrated their willingness to abandon anyone who's no longer useful to them, seem to be setting the stage for blaming Joe for the upcoming wipeout. That the party totally (and deliberately?) misread the election results and ran hard-left off the starting blocks is an inconvenience that'll be ignored, of course.

The Party of Finger-Pointing, whose greatest forte is blaming others, is on the cusp of turning on its President.

It'll be carefully couched, of course. There will be much about the injustice of circumstances, how Trump and Covid and Putin and the GOP all unfairly overloaded the back of a near-octogenarian who, but for these unique circumstances, would have been a great President. The subtext will, however, be clear. Biden, alone, will be blamed for a mid-term wipeout.

Will he deserve that blame?

Absolutely. Decision after decision of his has contributed to this mess, and his refusal to course-correct only adds to the aptness.

The blame, however, isn't his alone. Even if we discount the effect of his handlers and inner circle, it remains that the policies bringing the nation to its knees were pitched, supported, and affirmed by a cadre of Democrats in both the White House and the Capitol. The massive spending packages that are feeding inflation didn't get passed by executive order alone - Congress wrote and passed those bills, after all.

Scapegoating is common in politics, especially when the scapegoat is to be left behind, and the Democrats have a long history of defenestrating those who’ve failed them, decades of loyalty notwithstanding.

The wild card in all this is Kamala Harris. Had Biden picked someone even a bit less unready for prime time, I'd have laid odds that he'd be talked into resigning "to attend to his health and for the good of the nation" after the mid-terms. As it is, though, everyone and their uncle-in-law knows Harris would be an even bigger mess than Biden, and she'd not be defenestrated so easily (the one thing she has by the bucketful is ambition).

It still may happen, but I expect another 2.5 years of Biden’s bumbling and “not my fault” self-pity, an open Democratic primary in 2024, and a carefully couched and choreographed laying of blame on the man CNN dubbed America's "Uncle-in-Chief" back in 2016.

Barf.

Biden deserves every bit of this, of course. His under-bussing will, unfortunately, be used to excuse the recklessness, stupidity, destructiveness, and policy-madness of the other culprits in this mess.

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Peter.