Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away …
— Hughes Mearns
January 20 will see the conclusion of the most extraordinary episode in the history of the American presidency. For the last four years, the supposed president, Joe Biden, has been the man who wasn’t there.
Bloody and historic events — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’ pogrom in Israel and the subsequent five-cornered Israel-Iran war — have shaken the world, yet Biden wasn’t there.
Millions of non-Americans of every description, including terrorists, criminals, and members of the Cuban Communist Party, have swarmed over the Mexican border and flooded into our urban centers, costing billions of taxpayer dollars to support — and still Biden wasn’t there.
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And speaking of money: Trillions were spent by a ramshackle administration that built nothing and achieved nothing, but did manage to trigger an inflationary spike, making food, cars and housing less affordable to ordinary Americans — though Biden wasn’t there for this, either.
The president of the United States is supposed to preside — I mean, it’s in the title.
Biden didn’t because he couldn’t.
From the start of this term, we are now told, old age had grievously enfeebled his body and dimmed his mind — and the latter, let’s recall, never burned with particular brilliance.
The controllers who manage Biden worked hard to keep him away from his job. He spent 40% of his time in office on vacation, much of it slurping ice cream cones on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach.
Great gig if you can get it.
But even when Biden was in Washington, he had "bad days" during which he wasn’t allowed to play-act being president.
Only seven cabinet meetings were held during his term — that’s 1.75 meetings per year, in case you’re counting. Did these people know each other’s names?
One can imagine that, rather than the coordination of policy, meetings were taken up with trying to figure out who the chirpy gay guy was, sitting two chairs away from you at the big table.
This was a cabinet that wasn’t there.
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The predictable consequence was an absolute policy vacuum. The US government ran on slogans: "arsenal of democracy" meant Ukraine, "immediate cease-fire" meant Israel, "equity" meant racialism, etc.
And once the slogans were uttered, we were stuck with them forever. It’s been impossible for a brain-dead government to learn from failure — for example, in our dealings with Russia and the Middle East.
Even when Biden was having one of his presumed good days and he was allowed out in public, he was liable to blurt out weird and shocking statements.
He said regime change in Russia was a necessity. He said the US would go to war with China if it invaded Taiwan. He said many things that contradicted past American positions and had never been part of his administration’s baggage — statements that had to be walked back, denied and spun by horrified White House staff.
When Biden said of his Republican opponent, Donald Trump, "The only garbage I see out there are his supporters," staffers waved their arms and jumped up and down, exclaiming, "No, no — you’re missing an apostrophe," which apparently made all the difference.
How does this happen? And who are these people? Who gets to tell the president that he’s a dotty idiot — that he’s said another no-no, and it’s back in the box with him?
Who is actually there when Biden isn’t?
Is it his wife, the splendid Dr. Jill? His sister, Valerie Biden Owens, described by Wikipedia as "an American political strategist"? Or his White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients?
While whole regions of the globe bleed and burn, who makes these awful decisions on behalf of the wealthiest and most powerful country of all? Is it national security adviser Jake Sullivan — or maybe the ineffable Antony Blinken?
For most of Biden’s tenure, staffers were represented as mere underlings cleaning up behind rare slip-ups by the boss.
After his cognitive incapacity was painfully demonstrated in the debate with Trump, and especially after he dropped out of the presidential race, the story changed.
Family and staff, the new line went, had overprotected the president. Out of affection and loyalty, they had "covered up" Biden’s now universally acknowledged decline.
This profoundly misrepresents the situation that has prevailed for the past four years.
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Whoever has been making decisions on Biden’s behalf criminally usurped presidential power. In 2020, American voters didn’t elect Jill or Valerie Biden, Sullivan or Blinken — they elected Joe Biden and invested him with the tremendous powers of the presidency.
If, in the way of all flesh, Biden had become too incapacitated to perform his duties, he could have resigned or been removed by invoking the 25th Amendment.
The coterie around Biden knew exactly what was happening. It wasn’t subtle. "Joe Biden is, like, dead. Not literally. He can’t, like, say a sentence," observed Henry Appel, a national security staffer.
Those closest to the president must have seen him at his worst.
Yet they chose to perpetrate a fraud in which Biden was turned into a scripted sock puppet and they got the thrill of running the world.
"Blind ambition" is a banal phrase — but the kind of blindness to consequences involved in this scandal would make Lady Macbeth blush. The entire federal government, all that time, was flying blind, like an aircraft eternally circling on automatic pilot.
I have, as you can tell, too many questions, but I will limit myself to the two big ones.
The first one is: What actual persons in the administration — names and addresses, please — made the calls in the persistent trampling on our citizen rights?
Someone ordered for Catholic groups and anti-transgender parents to be treated as terrorists by the FBI and Homeland Security. Someone erected and allocated funds for a tentacular online censorship structure that silenced or downranked opinions distasteful to those in power.
Someone "debanked," or cast out of the financial system, persons lawfully working on artificial intelligence and crypto. Someone perverted the prosecutorial authority to hound and persecute political opponents, particularly of the Trumpist variety.
We know Joe Biden didn’t commit any of those unconstitutional acts. He was too far gone.
So who did? And what should be their penalty?
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My second question is: Where the heck were the news media while this clown show was going on?
Everyone with eyes to see could tell that Biden had slipped to a far place, from which there was no returning. Most of us have had a parent or grandparent who arrives at that sad hour — suddenly, the parent is the child, and the child becomes the parent.
The condition was already visible from the beginning — from before the beginning, or else why did Biden conduct the 2020 campaign from the comfy couch in the basement of his Delaware home?
The media are supposed to speak truth to power. They’re supposed to have many sources, deep connections. Journalism’s noble purpose, we are told, is to inform the public, to make better citizens out of the ignorant masses.
None of that, of course, was ever true — but it now stands exposed as a laughable falsehood.
Reporters have special passes to the White House. They accompanied Biden on his trips, often on Air Force One. They saw what Appel saw: a president who "can’t say sentences."
And they chose to think nothing of it, to say nothing, to remain at best incurious and at worst to lie and so curry favor with the mighty.
The news media’s corruption is too evident to need elaboration. But there ought to be consequences.
Here’s a modest proposal: Disband the White House press corps. Cast them out like money-changers from the temple. Select those American citizens entitled to question the president by lot, the way the Athenians chose their public officials.
Frustratingly, what we have come to call for convenience’s sake the "Biden administration" has decided to go out in style.
Hundreds of pardons and commutations have been awarded just because they could be.
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Hunter Biden is now immune from prosecution for every crime, high or low, he committed between 2014 and 2024. What crimes are we talking about? Maybe Jill Biden knows.
Foul murderers sitting on death row have been preserved from execution and will live on the taxpayers’ largesse until the end of their days. Why was this done? Maybe someone in the White House can explain.
Medals were also dispensed like candy to political allies. Liz Cheney, of all people, got one.
Cheney lost her last primary by a margin of 30%. Her vast unpopularity, I suppose, made her a hero to the establishment.
On Monday, Biden "permanently" banned offshore drilling, one of the reams of allegedly irreversible regulations that have been issued. On December 3, Biden surpassed his former boss, Barack Obama, for regulatory obesity added to the Federal Register in a single year: 96,088 pages.
Who directed this pointless last-minute frenzy? One nanosecond after Trump enters the White House, those irrevocable mandates, even if carved in stone, will be wiped away with a single stroke of the pen.
Led by the president-elect — who is, if anything, too present — a host of rebels and reformers is approaching Washington, DC. A distant rumble can already be heard.
Never in my lifetime has there been greater need for change.
The new crowd will attempt to put the bureaucracy on the Stone Age diet. I wish them luck. But what I want at the moment is credible answers about their predecessors — who did what to whom, and why.
Change can only follow in the footsteps of truth.
That process of discovery will begin in a few days, after the president who was never there has finally gone away.
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