The Political Con Goes On

A stew of scandals is bubbling over in the White House. But you'd never know it from the New York Times's Strangelovian leading headline today: "How Democrats Learned to Cast Aside Reservations and Embrace Biden '24."

As far as the Paper of Record is concerned, the shocking admission by a former CIA acting director that Secretary of State Antony Blinken (while a top Biden campaign operative) had solicited a letter with 51 intelligence bigwig signatories that falsely ascribed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal to "Russian disinformation" is not worthy of coverage.

 Ditto for the  high-level IRS official seeking whistleblower protection for information implicating Attorney General Merrick Garland himself in stalling or outright quashing criminal charges against Hunter Biden for evading millions in taxes for money earned on murky foreign business deals.

This same Attorney General, meanwhile, is busily prosecuting a Black socialist group and its elderly leaders. Their alleged crime? They criticized the Ukraine proxy war and they accepted, at most, a few thousand dollars from Russian donors for their charity work. It is now apparently a crime to exercise one's First Amendment rights if the government has deemed them "weaponized."  This story, too, is being studiously ignored by the Times and other establishment media outlets. 

So is a letter by a ranking House Democrat to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, threatening him with prison for the "crime" of conflating two security state acronyms in a Tweet - not, mind you, in his actual congressional testimony regarding government censorship of social media.

 As far as the Gray Lady is concerned, the big story this week is Joe Biden's upcoming re-election announcement. We're told that the only thing that should concern us about Joe Biden is his advanced age. He'd be 86 by the end of his second term. 

Despite what the Times generously euphemizes as his "middling approval ratings," the article makes clear that the only concerned voices that really count are those of the ruling political, donor and consultant classes. The public, as ever, be damned.

Democrats yearn for a fresh face in 2024, according to repeated polls, they just don’t know who that would be.

After Democrats won more races than expected in the 2022 midterm elections, any energy to challenge Mr. Biden quickly dissipated. The left has stayed in line even as Mr. Biden has lately made more explicit appeals toward the center. And would-be rivals have stayed on the sidelines.

Was there ever a more damning assessment of a political party? A more cowed, complacent and corrupt bunch of people has probably never existed. And by "party" I very much mean the de facto Uniparty, of which the Dems are the willfully weaker wing. The only thing that these increasingly authoritarian liberals can do is flap their gerontocratic gums. 

And that goes for the young "progressives" in the mix as well. Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York feebly groused to the paper that it's "almost as if" Biden is pandering to GOP talking points, what with his recent harsh actions on immigration, veto of criminal justice reform in Washington, DC,  and allowing oil-drilling on federal lands. But if there's one thing that Biden is good at, it's maintaining the owning classes in the lifestyles to which they're accustomed. So what, therefore, if tens of millions of people are losing health care, food assistance and the very roofs over their heads? Bowman tells the Times and its readers exactly what they want to hear: what really matters is "stability." 

Haven't you heard? "Status Quo with Uncle Joe!" is the new Medicare For All. The insane march to World War III by a cabal of mediocre politicians is Stability You Can Believe In. Let's face it. Sudden relief from everyday misery and chaos would be too much of a shock to the system. 

Now, you might possibly be worried that this group bear-hug from Dems might end up literally cracking Joe Biden's aged spine. But the point is not his aging body or his deteriorating mind. He is as expendable as anyone. The presidency is a group effort. He is just a figurehead or a front-man.

Thanks to the Trump menace, the presidential bar is not only set too low, it's at a subterranean level if it still exists at all. The current White House occupant doesn't hold domestic press conferences any more and nobody even bats an eye.  Even when he did honor this archaic tradition of public accountability, he did so with pre-selected reporters and cue cards supplied by his handlers. Biden has admitted on more than one occasion that "they" have warned him not to talk about this or that.

Therefore, his re-election announcement will be a "low-key" pre-recorded, scripted video.

Philip K. Dick forecast the Biden presidency style way back in the 60s in his futuristic novel The Simulacra. In the book as in reality, there is only one 21st century political party, and it's called the Democratic Republican Party. 

In the scene introducing Dick's futuristic White House, President Kalbfleisch (tr. Veal) has just been delivering televised remarks to the citizens of the United States of Europe and America, warning them of a fascist presidential rival. Noticing a slight slowing of the presidential performance, the lead handler gives the order to "shut if off."

"The Kalbfleisch simulacrum stopped. Its arms stuck out, rigid in their final gesture, the withered face vacuous. The simulacrum said nothing and automatically the TV cameras also shut off, one by one: there was no longer anything for them to transmit and the technicians behind them, all of them Ges (elites with top secret clearance) knew it."

 

The simulacrum techs congratulate themselves on the president's speech. satisfied that its fear-mongering purpose and its promise of "stability" had resonated with the public. This is despite somewhat regretting they'd nixed a comparison of the Trump-like rival to Hitler. After all, they say, "51 percent of the population would like to see another Hitler."

One of the techs then walks up to the president, "touching it gingerly on the shoulder, as if expecting it, prodded, to resume its activity. It did not."

Simulacra come and go, but the ruling elite who manufacture and maintain them remain more or less the same in the historical grand scheme of things. Maybe next time around, they can build a fresher-faced simulacrum, just as they so successfully did with Barack Obama. The least that they can do, absent a fresh face, is to manufacture a more coherent actor, much like twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan in his mostly asymptomatic first term.