Joe biden

President Joe Biden hit the golf course for the second time since taking office on Sunday, continuing something of an American presidential tradition. Unlike his predecessors, however, Biden appears to be a duffer. It's possible that at one point in time Biden was a decent golfer. He's been a member of Wilmington Country Club in Delaware since 2014 and reportedly had as low as a 6 handicap. That's a bit hard to believe as former president Barack Obama said he had an 'honest 13' handicap after playing 300 rounds of golf. A video of Biden on the links this past weekend further confirms that his golf game has gone the same direction as his mental acuity. The clip shows Biden well to the left of the green behind a short stone wall.

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than four months into the Biden-Harris deep-state maladministration and we have roaring inflation, the most disastrous jobs report in recent memory, rising unemployment, spiking gas prices, an imploding stock market, devastating cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and a janus-faced crisis on our Southern border in which tens of thousands of disease-ridden illegal migrants are huddled into cages while thousands more fan out across the fruited plain taking jobs from Americans even as they infect us with COVID. Quick work, Joe! And of course that is just the tip of the proverbial North Atlantic iceberg into which His Senileness is steering the ship of state.

Who wants bipartisanship? The short answer is: neither side, so neither is getting it. Activists in both parties have been clear about that. There was a moment, last spring, when it seemed Democrats might opt for centrism. It came when Rep. James Clyburn endorsed Joe Biden, who went on to defeat Bernie Sanders and capture his party’s nomination. Biden promised general election voters a center-left agenda and extensive bipartisanship, though he did bow occasionally to his party’s left-wing. Biden may have been promising moderation and bipartisanship, but Donald Trump was not. Quite the contrary. He was a populist candidate who actually governed like one.

Vice President Kamala Harris is not historically very popular. Her approval rating rarely topped 40 percent during her campaign in the Democratic presidential primary. Her poll numbers sagged in her home state of California. It wasn't until Biden chose her as his running mate that Harris enjoyed consistently higher approval ratings, but even as of April of this year, her unfavorability ratings were just about as high. Despite being pretty unlikable (and as that nervous laugh suggests, awfully inauthentic), Harris has managed to maneuver herself into arguably the most powerful position in the country. If she does eventually run for president, who would be her base? Who actually likes Kamala Harris?

They’ve finally found a way to make Joe Biden look young and vigorous: put him next to a Jimmy Carter doll. It’s elder abuse, though I’m not sure who’s being abused here. I had thought that the most alarming image of this year would be the one of the QAnon shaman at the Speaker’s desk in the Capitol Building. But the photo of Joe and Dr Jill with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter really is a riot. The Bidens look like ventriloquists, dropping by a seniors’ center to cheer up the inmates. The Carters look like dolls, awaiting the insertion of their owners’ hands so that they can jump into jerky life. This is the official photo, selected by the Carter Center. We have to wonder what obscenities are contained in the outtakes.

Before the bombs and bullets of World War One reshaped life as we know it, for 'the vast majority of Americans, from east to west, north to south, the principal, if not sole, link with the national government was the postal system,' Robert Nisbet wrote. It’s hard to imagine life without the megastate now. Frustration with it will occasionally spark the call for a return to limited government, but there is no going back. The vast majority of Americans are dependent on it to some extent or another, from the loans they use to purchase homes, farm subsidies, and the regulations with which they try to tame corporations and protect small businesses.