Before the first debate, there was real concern in the Trump camp that Biden would outperform the expectations set so low that he’d exceed them if he avoided a vegetative state. But that obviously didn't happen.
Biden imploded, as perhaps no candidate has since Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy. Except that where Nixon’s flop sweat made him look like an untrustworthy ghoul, Biden looked more like something an actual ghoul might turn up while robbing graves.
For the right, this was a cause for celebration and concern. With so much time remaining before the election, surely the Democrats would react with the kind of ruthless efficiency which they used to eliminate other powerful but "problematic" figures who were past their prime.
While it was gratifying to see the old goat humiliated, conservatives feared that it had come too soon and had given them too much time to avoid certain doom.
Now, weeks later, Joe Biden is still the nominee for the Democratic party, even despite multiple calls for him to step down from essentially every Democrat with an IQ above room temperature and/or any sense of political self-preservation.
Meanwhile, Biden has reverted to an argument that would be laughable if it weren’t so depressingly familiar: namely, that the "elite" and "establishment" are out to get him.
It's the only argument that could persuade the people who now run the party to keep him, and even if he’s forgotten everything else, Joe Biden knows that. Because Joe Biden, for all his fumbling senility, is truly the candidate of the modern Democratic party.
There is only one dictum that has ruled the Democratic party since at least 2014, and it can be summed up in one sentence: “You’re not supposed to notice.”
When a person who is politically favored, nonetheless very obviously cannot do whatever job you’ve set for them, you’re not supposed to notice.
That’s what all the critical theory and wokeness of the past ten years amounts to: the demand that you ignore your lying eyes. That your eyes deceive you, because your eyes have been indoctrinated with racism, sexism, ableism, and whatever else TikTok told them to hate.
Can Joe Biden do the job of president? No, of course not. But neither could Claudine Gay serve effectively as president of Harvard. Neither can Alvin Bragg successfully run the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Neither could Disney Star Wars turn a profit.
But Democrats went right along with all of those because they bought the same line of argument now being used to defend Joe Biden.
Even when a corpse walks out onstage and leers at you before hacking up rotten word salad, you’re not supposed to notice.
Because to notice is to be mean. To notice is to not be agreeable. To notice is to be problematic.
Because to notice is to be mean. To notice is to not be agreeable. To notice is to be problematic.
If the Democratic party had proven itself remotely capable of holding back this kindergarten-level idea of "equity" from its worst ideas, they would have some chance of enforcing the old-fashioned idea that a president that is this out of it can't do the job.
But not now. Not when they’ve spent a decade slandering the very idea of qualifications as a way for their scapegoats du jour to rig the system, and brainwashing even their few competent leaders to believe it. After that, something like the Biden zombie campaign was inevitable.
And the really supreme irony? This is their version of populism: they think standing up for the least qualified, least intelligent, least strong, least lovable, and least functional among us is somehow standing up for the people, writ large.
Trump, on the other hand, understands true populism is aspirational. It recognizes that to appeal to the people, you must speak to the parts of the human soul which aspire to greatness, not revel in condescending to the ugly urges.
The Democrats tell you that even if you have no redeeming qualities, that's okay, because we're all created equal, and by God, if we don't stay that way, someone must've cheated.
Joe Biden cheated by keeping questions about his age off the agenda. His party cheated by censoring criticism of its policies out of existence.
We won't call him Old Yeller, but we will say he’s an old yeller. And this November, President Trump is going to take him round the back and put him – and his rabid party – out of their misery.
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