by Jeff Childers
We have wandered so far off the political map at this point that the boy scouts are crafting rough spears from local bamboo and starting to date the native women. Regardless of how our unprecedented and unimaginable political scenario ultimately plays out, Thursday’s debate will almost certainly become one of those global psychological demarcation points when the world changed forever in a single moment, like that time you ignored your wife’s advice and climbed the ladder to clean the gutters in your flip-flops. In other words, we will forever remember what the world was like before the Great Biden Debate Disaster, and marvel at how different it is now.
At 6pm Eastern Standard time last night, the Editorial Board of the New York Times launched a journalistic SCUD missile at the Democrat’s presumptive nominee, eloquently headlined “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.” It began with the hysterical, hand-wringing claim that Democracy will Die if Trump gets re-elected. Since no weapon is off the table in the mission to “save Democracy” (for future drag queens), the Times’ Editors did the unthinkable and previously unforgivable: they called Democrat Resident Joe Biden unqualified for office:
If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards, and so the editors also had it both ways. No matter what, they still ain’t voting for the Orange Man. “If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden,” the Editors two-facedly gassed, “the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick.” They darkly warned NYT readers, “That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses.” It’s even worse than the terrifying risk of carbon monoxide detectors running out of batteries in the middle of the night.
The Times’ vow to vote Biden but hopefully not Biden describes the sort of profound spiritual crisis now facing the Democrat party. It’s Democrats because they were the only folks surprised by what happened Thursday night. Compliantly gaslit by media, they had believed Biden was “at the top of his game” and “sharper than anybody,” capable of eating mint chip ice cream and performing complex quantum mechanical calculations at the same time. Now they aren’t even sure he can eat the ice cream by himself.
Democrat certainty in Biden’s mental qualifications was only possible through ceaseless cognitive dissonance. But not everyone bought the media’s “cheap fake” lies. If anything, after Thursday’s debate debacle, Republicans felt vindicated.
Amidst all yesterday’s hot takes, wild speculation, conspiracy theories, and a full spectrum of terrible opinions, one truth emerged: the denial phase is over. The Democrats can no longer pretend their octogenarian candidate is anything other than, as the Times put it, only a flickering shadow of a public servant.
In other words, yesterday, the country experienced a political earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter Scale, and the national conversation surged over the cliff of willing disbelief and headed straight down into Surreality Canyon.
To say the awful reality of Biden’s diminished capacity shattered Democrat world views too-narrowly skates over the even more profound implications. For just one example, everyone just found out, beyond any legitimate argument, that the White House and the entire media have been covering for Biden, lying in other words, about the single most important fact about the single most important decision facing the entire world: can Biden put on his pants one leg at a time like everyone else?
Beyond the confirmed disclosure of coordinated media dishonesty, there are a thousand thousand more implications, all exploding from the debate in slow motion like shards of shattered glass.
The debate over replacing Biden is a red herring. It is not at all clear that a Biden switcheroo is possible. He’s not like a blown fuse. Well. Maybe he is like a blown fuse, but not in the sense he can be just switched out with the spare from the bottom of the fuse panel. First of all, yesterday Biden doubled down, and said sorry, he’s not going anywhere. In other words, Biden and his handlers responded to calls for his resignation with an offended, “over Joe’s dead body:”
The Democrats also face some intractable legal quandaries. Biden has already been “democratically” elected as the party’s nominee in every state. Changing him out would, by definition, violate the will of the voters, not to mention fifty different state ballot-qualifying laws. Nor under federal campaign finance laws could the Biden campaign just stroke a check to transfer their financial war chest to a new campaign. So it’s no secret that any replacement candidate would instantly be mired in pesky Republican lawsuits.
Days before the debate, for instance, the UK Daily Mail ran a story headlined, “How conservatives could make it very hard for Democrats to replace Biden on the 2024 ballot if he has a disastrous debate or steps aside.”
Nor do Democrats have a clear replacement. The Democratic bench is thin. There are many possibilities, but no obvious front-runner. To replace Biden, they must endure a painfully accelerated period of compressed primary campaigning, focus group testing, and market research. The Democrats face a difficult, divided base: Should a new candidate support or oppose Israel? And don’t forget Biden loyalists, who will be racing around behind the scenes trying to sabotage and undermine the process at every step.
At his own rally yesterday, Trump said he doesn’t think they’ll replace Biden, because Biden out-polls all the possible alternatives. President Trump —who has better polling data than anyone except the Biden campaign— remarked, “It’s hard to believe, but crooked Joe Biden polls better than any of those people.”
If it doesn’t end the discussion, note that former President Obama —and thus his entire political apparatus— supports Joe. It was just a bad debate night:
My opinion, worth no more than anyone else’s, is that the current public controversy over Biden’s nomination is just another narrative shell game. The debate about needs to happen to ease Democrat voters into Biden’s therapeutic hot tub. And that debate needs to happen quickly. The goal, as the Times Editors promised, is for Democrat voters to vote for Joe Biden anyway, purely to block Trump, even if the nation dissolves into a dementia-addled nightmare and World War III.
It’s the ultimate protest vote. All or nothing.
I remarked yesterday that the fallout includes harder questions soon emerging. It didn’t take long. Yesterday, historian and scholar Victor Davis Hanson asked whether Biden’s fragility will fuel our enemies to act quickly and take advantage:
Similarly, the New York Times ran an article originally headlined, “U.S. Allies Watch the Debate With Shaking Heads and a Question: What Now?” Same as the rest of us.
The article’s sub-headline noted, “Across Asia and Europe, the debate stoked concerns about American stability, both domestically and on crucial foreign policy issues like Washington’s commitment to alliances.” In other words, can our allies trust a president who’s likely to forget they even exist? What you really don’t want is being four months out and experts invoking “terminal decline:”
Famed independent journalist Seymour Hersh called up his many Democrat contacts, who seemed just as confused about what to do as everyone else. Hersh ended his Substack yesterday wondering: who is really running things at the White House? Since it’s obviously not Biden. And he ended by invoking the same 25th Amendment question I predicted yesterday:
To wrap up this segment, electing a creaky 82-year-old president would be another historical breakthrough as well as an apt metaphor for “terminal decline.” Compare that awful possibility with previous presidential ages: Teddy Roosevelt, 42; John F. Kennedy, 43; Bill Clinton, 46; Ulysses S. Grant, 46; Barack Hussein Obama, 47; and George W. Bush, 54.
So.
As I said, we’re off the map and GPS is on the fritz. I’m not even going to try predicting what happens next.
