Stealing The Silverware

In case you missed it, Joe Biden issued some preemptive pardons on his way out the door. I'm not talking about his son, who he promised not to pardon. Nor am I talking about the thousands of prison sentences he commuted (many of which were the result of his own draconian sentencing bill, decades ago, re crack cocaine).

Biden pardoned Fauci, Milley, and the people prosecuting January 6th rioters, in his last hours as President. In his final minutes, he pardoned all his family members, thus ensuring that there will be no further inquiries into “the Biden Crime Family.”

The narrative that his apologists will certainly believe and repeat, like the good, blindfolded Orwellian sheep they are, is that he is doing this in the name of justice and propriety. That Trump is such a petty and vindictive man, all manner of good and upright public servants would be unjustly persecuted by a weaponized Department of Justice once Orange Man Bad takes office, but for Biden taking extraordinary steps. Measures that should certainly not serve as a precedent for any subsequent President, of course.

I am simultaneously 'shocked, shocked!'

and laughing my ass off.

Anyone who is surprised in the slightest by this last move really needs to pull his head out of the sand. This was as predictable as the sunrise, as inevitable as the tides, as affirming of what we already knew as dropping an apple on your head, and as blatant an example of psychological projection as can be. Weaponized "justice" and selective prosecution (and non-prosecution) are hallmarks of today's Left, this administration included, and Biden & Co. have been routinely violating all the norms they accuse Trump of, and then some, for years.

This final insult stacks on top of the concerted effort to thwart the will of the voters by laying as many roadblocks as Biden and his handlers can manage via a sheaf of executive orders (at least some of which, maddeningly, cannot be simply undone by subsequent EOs because the underlying law doesn't provide for undoing).

So much for "saving Democracy."

I recently wrote that Biden's term, and with it the Obama-Biden-Harris (OBH) arc of American History, is ending with a whimper. The voters finally rebuffed the massive social and economic shifts our Best-and-Brightest attempted to impose on us, in a "Great Rejection" that surprised the supposedly smart people who insist they should run our lives on our behalf. If you want further proof that legacy media reporters and talking heads are morons, consider their shocked faces, pearl-clutching, and sky-screams after Harris lost. That they failed to see how hated their team was by the voters, that all their progressive hubris failed to win over the electorate, to the degree that someone broadly disliked by half the nation ended up shellacking their hagiographed candidate.

While we cannot know how successful Trump will be in what he hopes to accomplish, or how effective Biden's road blocks, land mines, and Czech hedgehogs will turn out to be in impeding the new administration, we can still celebrate the nominal end of OBH.

Nominal, unfortunately, because government lags culture, because government is designed to ratchet upward far more easily than downward, because there are thousands of Best-and-Brightest still infesting the halls of power and because the effects of what was enacted across the OBH span will persist for years or decades.

Regular readers know I used to run a restaurant. My brother and I were second generation, taking the reins from our father after his long tenure there. It being a family-oriented (and 24-7) operation rather than fine dining, we had to deal with some unsavory behavior on a too-regular basis. One such was theft of our flatware, and it was sometimes brazen. Our father once related to me a tale of a customer who came up to the cash register with a couple knives and forks sticking up out of his shirt pocket. When my father challenged the theft, the customer replied, "what do you care? Everybody does it."

Our father probably felt like a frustrated George Costanza, silently summoning “We live in a society!” at the affront.

People of a certain age might recall that the Clintons pillaged the White House as they departed, and ultimately had to return more than $28K worth of items they "mistakenly" figured were gifts to them. Biden isn't (unless he is, only time will tell) literally stealing the silverware, but his petty and petulant post-election behavior is a figurative equivalent.

In the movie Gandhi, Martin Sheen's (fictional) journalist character Vince Walker was narrating his report of the Salt March.

Whatever moral ascendancy the West held was lost here, today.

We have been told for years that our Left is populated with "better" people than any other political sector, that they care for their fellow humans more than the rest of us do, that "democracy itself" is at risk should they fall out of power, and that the only path to a good society is the one they tread.

Oops.

Some time back, I quoted the tagline of a forgettable cheeseball of a movie called Megaforce:

Today, I'll close with a quote from a somewhat more enduring source:

You will know these people by what they do. - Matthew 7:16 (NCV)

If someone steals your silverware on the way out, don't be so quick to invite them back.