A friend whatsapped if I had tuned in to watch the Thursday night (Atlanta time) debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I replied why would I want to watch the two faces which I behold with great revulsion on the TV screen? Of course, I did read the commentaries that appeared in the media subsequently. The result should not have surprised anyone, or should it?
America has wasted eight good years – four under an emperor who does not know he has no clothes on, and another four under an emperor who needs someone to help put his clothes on.
And they were trying to use the debate to size up a Hobson’s choice?
I have written variously that Biden was no longer lucid much of the time. For months, he was being paraded in and out of the White House, possibly with some kind of drug to help induce temporary lucidity. Everything that came out of his mouth was not his; he had been coaxed to say them. His team had a field day! I always suspected the greatest puppeteer is Jake Sullivan, the “still water runs deep man” who operates from the White House. Now I understand there are in fact several of them.
Americans have been fooled by these puppeteers for at least the past one year!
Biden’s wife Jill heads the list. She is perhaps the one who would do anything to keep Biden in office. Apparently, she loves the trappings of his office: Airforce One and what-have-you. Despite his condition and his disastrous performance in the debate, she is still insisting that he is totally fit to seek re-election in November.
There is also the “Jewish Money, Military and Industrial and Media” Deep State which needs Biden to sign blank cheques to fund (a) Zelensky to fight the Russians, (b) measures to sabotage and provoke the Chinese, and (c) weapons to destroy Hamas in Gaza.
Another man who has strong influence over Biden is said to be his former boss Barack Obama. But Obama may spring a surprise on Jill this time. November is just around the corner. If Biden remains the Democrats’ candidate, Trump will certainly triumph. And for sure Democrats will lose heavily in the Congress too. Trump will also be 79 next year. (Incidentally, we do not seem to see much of Melania, Trump’s Slovenia-born trophy wife. I do not suppose he is “functional” at this age now.)
Is this the outcome Democrats want to see?
Time to consider my dear wife, Michelle, suggests Obama. Michelle is certainly a solid candidate compared to the two nincompoops.
It is not that Americans do not have choices; they are simply being conditioned to vote either Democrats or Republicans. One who has offered himself as an independent is none other than Robert Kennedy Jr. His campaign stops have drawn large crowds of supporters. Kennedy is also not young, though. He is 70. Kennedy has built a reputation of his own as a truthteller, activist, author and lawyer who fought for just causes. But the US electoral college system is so complicated that his effort may prove futile.
Another mainstream possibility is California governor Gavin Newsom. But he is friendly to China, which is a liability.
America’s decline was ushered in by Trump and Biden accelerated it. Americans need someone like Kennedy to change course.
Stop Press:
US
Supreme Court has just granted Trump partial immunity in respect of the charges
of his “attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election” (aka the Jan 6
case). I do not propose to go into the justices’ logics but suffice for me to
say that if this is the way justice is meted out in America’s highest court of
law, then I am totally convinced that this country is no longer capable of
being ruled by common sense law.
And I was surprised by Biden’s eloquence in this response. He said that the judgement undermined the rule of law and was a terrible disservice to Americans. How did he become all of a sudden so clear-headed? Selective lucidity?
The 2024 US presidential election is a farce. One candidate is a felon and the other one is a doddering idiot with one foot in the grave who doesn't know what is happening around him. This is democracy for you. In a democracy it's not the most competent person who becomes the leader of the country but the one who is best in conning the voters.
ReplyDeleteI like your use of Emperor's clothes as a metaphor on Biden and Trump. It's pretty funny.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with Terence. I laughed out loud on reading your parody of the two emperors and their clothes
ReplyDeleteThe pot-kettle picture is also apt; each tried to preen his own feather while tarring the other however without acknowledging the beams before his own eyes.
ReplyDeleteIf the debate shows anything, it is that the world's hegemon is having a leadership selection system that is inherently faulty for not installing the ablest who can sustain long-horizon multi-dimensional worldviews that can disentangle knotty problems on the world-stage.
Biden's performance away from his teleprompter has also presented his Democrats with a dilemma. If anything, it only validated the special counsel report that he is hazy, a report which was however rejected by his White House whose reputation is now tanking.
His Democrats are now scrambling to find a replacement but the time-line is short for the candidature process which must ensue before the next debate.
Meanwhile and on a higher dosage of time-delayed, memory-enhancement pills, Biden seems adamant to stay on, if only to try and stave off a Trumpian onslaught. It won't help Biden when his campaign donors will also be holding back their funding.
The divisiveness has now metastasized. Within the Democrats and between the Democrats and the Republicans, the latter are likely to gain more swing-state voters that come January will see the former losing critical seats and thus throwing a spanner into the Congressional policy-making process for years to come.
To the world, the US-built world order is bust. Which is also why the puppet-masters behind both will create more international tensions to bolster their agenda of trying to save US relevance, and thus their fingers on the power pool in Washington DC.
That however is not served by the decision of the US Supreme Court to exonerate Trump from some of his criminal charges based on basically one rule for you the masses, another for me El-Presidente.
Coming from the highest judiciary body, it is also an indirect indictment of the US' rules-based international order. After all, if the source dice is already loaded in an orwellian mode, how can the game play out fairly for others, especially those labelled by the US as authoritarian and autocratic?
Basically, the US Supreme Court's new decision immunizes the US President when he signs any Executive Order and he is also presumed to be immunized so long as not acting beyond his authority.
This gives him latitude to make sweeping decisions from the Resolute table from which he presides but on which is stated 'the buck stops here' from days of Truman.
Even Perry Mason will get up from his Ironside wheelchair in protest after reading the decision.
The danger to the world from what has transpired for all to see is this:
Neither Biden nor Trump is able, rational, sustainable and possessed of a long-horizon worldview that transcends personal idiosyncracies and can see things with a perspective that is beyond his biases.
Therefore, it will be the puppet masters of each who will be pulling the strings, ultimately of a hegemon with military, networking, financial, nuclear and space overreach.
And since those puppet masters are appointed, they are answerable to no one, given the dependence of each candidate to them.
They will be pushy proxies but without propagative peace, only the tyrannical trappings of power, on which matter one is reminded of what historian Lord Acton had said - of absolute power.