Biden administration

When Joe Biden’s personal physician, Kevin O’Connor, pleaded the Fifth Amendment yesterday during the ongoing congressional hearings about Biden’s mental acuity while in office, it didn’t put suspicions to rest – it amplified them. Why would O’Connor refuse to testify if he had nothing to hide from Congress? He can claim doctor-patient confidentiality all he wants, but it’s not like Congress was asking to see X-rays or blood-test results. What didn’t Biden know and when didn’t he know it? This is about more than just setting straight the historical record. It’s political bloodsport, the Democrats know it, and the whole things smells like a coverup.

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

It turns out that Joe Biden is one of the best things ever to happen to Donald Trump. Sure, Trump was so peeved by his loss to Biden in 2020 that he inspired an abortive insurrection against Congress, but his defeat gave him a grace period of four years to prepare for a fresh term. If the rapidity with which he is upending the federal government is anything to go by, Trump benefited immensely from his protracted exile in Mar-a-Lago, not to mention the welter of court cases, federal and state, that he endured. Now Trump is exploiting Biden once more to provide a further fillip to his political fortunes.

The ongoing (unsuccessful) attempt to persuade the world that Joe Biden is something more than a marginally-sentient head of cauliflower continued on Thursday, as Biden appeared with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, on The View. The money moment arrived when co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked Biden about the spate of books, “deeply sourced from Democratic sources, that claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities.” Biden stared downward, with an angry smirk. “What is your response to these allegations?” Griffin asked, “Are these sources wrong?” “Are wrong,” Biden gurgled, even though they were obviously not wrong. “Nothing to sustain that. Think of what we left with.

The return of two NASA astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore – back to Earth after equipment malfunctions saw their intended week-long sojourn to space turn into a nine-month stay on the International Space Station, should be cause for national celebration. Alas, politics has tainted the stratosphere, with each side of the aisle playing a part in the blame game for the astounding delay in getting our stranded astronauts back home.  Williams and Wilmore will have endured more than just a few missed family events and some extra time spent conducting experiments (they carried out more than 150) aboard the ISS.

When US officials and former officials face lethal dangers for the work they did in office, they deserve protection from the country they served. That’s true whether they served the country well or poorly, whether they can pay for that protection themselves — most cannot — and whether they are loathed by the next administration.  Those are pitiful reasons for denying them protection. If today’s officials, or yesterday’s, are threatened because of what they did in office, they deserve protection. They may not deserve our gratitude. They may not deserve our thanks and appreciation. That depends on our assessment of their performance. But they deserve our protection from domestic terrorists and foreign actors such as Iran.

Joe Biden is not going gently into that dark night, politically or cognitively. He is going down with large, bold actions. The latest is a mass commutation for some 2,500 “nonviolent drug offenders.” Biden’s justification is that they were sentenced under laws that have now been overturned as the country has moved to more lenient treatment of all drug offenses and eliminated differences between laws penalizing crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. Those are reasonable justifications, but they are far from the whole story and far from the way the White House is selling the action to voters and friendly journalists. The vast majority of the prison terms were actually given to dealers or violent offenders, mostly members of criminal gangs.

President Joe Biden delivered his farewell address last night in the Oval Office. While he started with strong patriotic themes, he ended by warning the country of some “things that give me great concern.” Biden declared that America is an oligarchy now. Cockburn thought it was turning into a dictatorship? He can’t keep track. Overall, though, he thought Biden’s speech presented an idealistic view of America. It featured inspiring snatches, with stories about the Statue of Liberty and references to the words of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, saying America is “a nation holding the torch of the most powerful idea ever in the history of the world. That all of us are created equal.

Last night’s White House Christmas party with digital creators resulted in a cacophony of posts from social media influencers praising Hunter Biden. The swath of pro-Hunter posts following President Joe Biden’s hugely unpopular pardon of his son gave the impression that the Democrats were keen to rehab his image and tamp down accusations of nepotism. “Just met Hunter Biden at the White House Holiday Party.” Majid Padellan, or “BrooklynDad_Defiant!,” posted to his 1.2 million followers on X. “Super nice guy.”“This one is dedicated to all my favorite meme-making trolls out there!” Joanne Carducci, or “JoJoFromJerz” wrote with a picture of her and Hunter Biden. “Merry Christmas!” She has almost a million followers on X.

The nightly news is replicating Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds, which scared Americans by describing an invasion of space aliens. Listeners who tuned into the broadcast a little late didn’t hear the disclaimer that it was fiction. Now, they are tuning in on time and hearing real broadcasts about mysterious objects flying over our skies. And people are asking the same questions they asked long ago, “What are those things?” They have heard the government’s disclaimers, but they are not sure whether to believe them.  The public is frightened, and bland reassurances from Washington aren’t helping.

America’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, is already taking his job more seriously than his predecessor ever did. Unlike Kamala Harris, Homan does not need to be goaded into doing the job assigned to him by the president. Homan, the former director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is already hitting the trail, telling prospective illegal immigrants to turn the caravans around and warning America’s bluest cities that a new sheriff is coming to town. During a swing through Chicago, Homan told the Windy City’s residents that “your mayor sucks and your governor sucks.” Both Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker have suggested that they plan to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s broadly popular immigration plans.

“My word as a Biden.” Remember that? It was something that Joe Biden was in the habit of saying whenever he was about to utter something untrue. A couple of years ago when the Great Unraveling was beginning to be obvious to everyone, Biden deposited the phrase right before saying that he was “never more optimistic” about the prospects for the country. This prompted one social media wit to respond: “The border is open, real wages are down, energy costs are outrageously high, the Taliban controls Afghanistan, and the cartels are making billions smuggling fentanyl. There is reason to be ‘optimistic’ though — we have a [House GOP] majority who is working to hold Biden accountable.