Roger Kimball

Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of Donald Trump? I am wondering when we are going to have Congressional Committees grilling people about such matters. I suppose they could, in homage to a certain senator from Wisconsin, be called the House and Senate American Activities Committee. Nancy and Chuck should preside. They could share some of that expensive chocolate ice cream that the always well-coifed Nancy likes as they root out people who say things they don’t like and vote for people with whom they disagree. I’m sure they would get a lot of academic support. Just a week or so back, one professor suggested that criticizing St Anthony Fauci or other government officials should be a federal hate crime. Why not?

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700. Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested 'positive for COVID’. What remains of you will be transported to a hospital where management will file a claim and get 15 percent more on their government reimbursement because you 'died from’, or at least with COVID. There are exceptions, of course.

Listening to the testy exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and St — er, Dr Anthony Fauci the other day, I couldn’t help but think both of these famous lines from Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Marmion’: ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!’ ...and also this excellent ‘completion’ by J.R. Pope (‘A Word of Encouragement’): ‘But when we’ve practiced for a while, How vastly we improve our style!’ Sen. Paul began by reminding the ubiquitous doctor of Section 1001 of the US Criminal Code, which makes it a felony, carrying a prison term of up to five years, for lying to Congress.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. Consider the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That once-respected institution has been busy wiping (or, more to the point, not wiping) egg off its face at least since the moist tenure of James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey. For those wondering why it is that Comey is cashing fat royalty checks instead of stamping out license plates at Club Fed, the answer is part of my story. There is the Elect, of whom James Comey numbers himself, and there are the Serfs, among whose number, Dear Reader, you probably belong. But I am getting ahead of myself. James Comey was plenty ridiculous, as were his jesters and factota, the love birds Lisa Page and Peter ‘Dracula’ Strzok, Andrew McCabe and the rest of that unlovely Brady Bunch.

It’s a good thing that Vogue’s nauseating profile of Jill Biden — sorry, I mean Dr Jill Biden, EdD — wasn't published in North Korea. The censors in North Korea long ago cottoned on to smartypants writers who think they can get away with mocking the Dear Leader or government policy by being ironical, sarcastic, or speaking tongue-in-cheek. Irony is illegal in North Korea because it can so easily be a cover for mockery. As of this writing, Merrick Garland, Dr Biden’s attorney general, has yet to make irony a sign of domestic terrorism or white supremacy, though whether that is an oversight or is simply something he hasn’t gotten round to yet is unclear. I have it on the authority of anonymous sources close to the principals that Gene.

Isn’t normality great? That’s been Joe Biden’s selling point from the beginning, ‘normality’. Back in March 2020, the former conservative Bill Kristol announced that Biden represented the ‘simple’ choice for the ‘normal American’. Biden wasn’t Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders — but especially, just between us, he wasn’t Donald Trump — ergo, etc. Achilles was the ‘swift-footed’. Ronald Reagan was ‘the Great Communicator’. Joe Biden is — what? People talk about ‘gaffes’, but that is unfair. A ‘gaffe’ is a clumsy social error, a faux pas. Emitting gibberish when you can’t remember the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence is not the same thing as committing a gaffe.

The future of the GOP is the same as the future of the Democratic party. That is because the parties are not two things, but (to compare low things with high) somewhat akin to that union described in the Catholic creed: ex patre filioque procedit: ‘it proceeds from the father and the son’, one substance, two faces (well, three, really, but we can leave that to one side). As I have had occasion to observe elsewhere, the current political disposition of the United States is not a two-party system. It is at most a one-and-a-half party system. There is a regime party, which basically calls the shots. And there is a junior, adjunct party that has different branding but sells mostly the same goods under different labels.

Tomorrow, The Committee will bundle up Joe Biden, titular president of the United States, and take him for a nice ride across the big, big ocean in a very shiny airplane. Weeee! No details have been released yet about what flavors of ice cream he will enjoy, but The Committee’s press arm has been full of stories with titles like 'Three things to watch on Biden's first foreign trip’. This is not a difficult assignment. The big boys and girls who arrange Joe’s play-dates have told all his favorite friends in the media exactly what to say. And just a couple of days ago they surprised Joe with an article in one of his favorite newspapers, the Washington Post. It was just so nice. A couple of the minders got together and wrote the article and then put Joe’s name on it.

Will January 6 go down as another 'day of infamy,' an assault against America akin in its seriousness to December 7, which commemorates Pearl Harbor? Maybe, but not for the reasons that comparison suggests. Sure, many irresponsible commentators — but here I repeat myself — and Democratic politicians compared the January 6 protest at the Capitol to December 7, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, even (thank you Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer) to the Civil War. Back in February, I noted here that there were a few differences between these two sets of events.

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.