Jackals Snarling At A Lion

     There’s information in your adversary’s choice of weapons to wield against you. This is particularly important in politics.

     Joseph Biden has been pursuing the presidency since at least 1987. When he was a Senator from Delaware, he was regularly touted by the media as a “foreign relations expert.” During that first reach for the political brass ring, he was often a guest on talking-heads shows, solicited for his opinions on relations with the Communist bloc. The major left-liberal commentators on radio and television spoke of him in the warmest tones, and praised his presidential ambitions as both personally deserved and beneficial to the nation. It seemed plausible that the strategists, kingmakers, and opinion-molders of the Left wanted Biden to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in November, 1988.

     Then he was caught plagiarizing Robert F. Kennedy and British politician Neil Kinnock. The embarrassment put an end to his presidential ambitions...for a while.

     Immediately after Biden’s plagiarism was discovered, I recall hearing Dan Rather on WCBS-AM radio praising Biden and dripping contempt on “the dirty bastards” who had uncloaked him. Rather had been known to be a left-winger for some time already, so his sympathy for another left-liberal wasn’t out of his usual pattern. What was notable was his willingness to stand behind a fellow partisan despite the clear and irrefutable evidence that that partisan had claimed someone else’s words and works as his own.

     You may recall that the Democrats’ nod for the upcoming election went to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis, nationally as close to invisible as a politician who aspires to the highest office could be, lost to Bush the Elder by a substantial margin – a margin that, had the Republican lost, the media would have described as a “landslide.”

     The process of rehabilitating Biden began almost immediately after the election. Over time, the media worked to build up his image and to efface his plagiarisms from public consciousness. For a while the effort seemed to make progress.

     Biden, however, could not be said to cooperate. He pimped himself in ways far too easily revealed as deceits. Indeed, he couldn’t seem to stop. Even as his claims were shown to be lies, he continued on with others. Try as it might, the power brokers of the Left could not save him from himself sufficiently to make him viable for the top spot in politics.

     Barack Hussein Obama’s choice of Biden as a running-mate was originally promoted as a strengthening of the Democrat ticket’s foreign policy credentials. Yet it could also have been a preparatory move by the Democrats. Their “bench” had been empty for decades. Their enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton as a successor was weak, and they had no one else with any degree of national prominence. Perhaps eight years as VP would resuscitate Biden’s profile, now that his best known gaffes and deceits were far enough in the past.

     It didn’t work. Now, at seventy-six years of age, Biden is displaying so weak a grip on reality that it’s a wonder he’s allowed to cross the street without a minder. Yet the Democrats still have no one else of sufficient national stature. Their other aspirants are politically unpalatable to the greater part of the electorate. Biden, who will turn seventy-eight On November 20, 2020, is still their best hope for a Democrat victory over Donald Trump.

     What a thin hope he presents! But his need to pimp himself by borrowing others’ rhetoric and claiming fraudulent academic and intellectual accomplishments should have alerted the Democrats’ planners long ago that their ranks are fatally thin. Corey Booker, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren are what they have left. That ought to have concerned the Democrats’ planners well before this.

     Whoever gets the Democrats’ nod for 2020 will be opposing the most successful president of the century past, a man who plainly loves America, who’s kept the promises he’s made, and who’s been right about every issue he’s addressed to this point. Absent vote fraud of unprecedented magnitude or a betrayal from within the Republican Establishment – possibilities not to be neglected or under-weighted – Trump’s prospects for a second term look very good indeed.