Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and the Death of Stalin
Seems like everybody out there has his or her own assessment of what’s actually happening with respect to the collapse of Joe Biden’s presidency and reelection hopes. I’ll give you mine in a moment. But before I do, a recommendation:...
The post Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and the Death of Stalin appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
Seems like everybody out there has his or her own assessment of what’s actually happening with respect to the collapse of Joe Biden’s presidency and reelection hopes. I’ll give you mine in a moment.
But before I do, a recommendation: If you’ve never seen The Death of Stalin, the satirical 2017 thriller directed by Armando Iannucci starring Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, and Simon Russell Beale about the aftermath of the Soviet dictator’s demise, now would be a good time to remedy that. The movie is bitingly hilarious, which is reason enough to give it a watch, but it’s also a fairly insightful study into the behavioral dynamics of power-mad psychotics in high political positions.
There’s a little foul language in this clip, but I’m offering it up by way of setting up the rest of the column…
This scene depicts the demise of one Lavrentiy Beria (played by Beale), who was Joseph Stalin’s chief murderer as head of the NKVD. Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev, who ran the coup to knock out Beria and ultimately took power as the next dictator in the USSR.
Why talk about all this? Well, for one reason, the Democrat Party at its highest levels functions more than a little bit like the collection of psychopaths that was the Soviet Politburo’s inner circle.
And what governs organizations like that isn’t intelligence, it isn’t virtue, it isn’t managerial competence. It isn’t merit of any kind.
Getting ahead in organizations like that is chiefly, if not solely, a function of ambition. It’s about a will to power. It’s about being willing to do the things the others aren’t willing to do.
That alone is the reason Stalin ended up as Vladimir Lenin’s successor instead of Leon Trotsky, who everybody thought was the smarter and more ideologically sound choice. Stalin had none of Trotsky’s virtues but his was a level of ruthlessness nobody in Lenin’s inner circle could match.
I’ve written an entire book about all the awful things Barack Obama has done to this country, but one of the most easily identifiable lessons in Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama is that he got where he is because he was more ruthless — more willing to do the things nobody else was willing to do — than anybody else in American politics.
That’s why Obama still runs the Democrat Party eight years after the end of his presidency. Nobody in that party has the stones to cross him.
Remember, it was Obama and his team who selected Biden as the 2020 Democrat presidential nominee. It wasn’t the party’s voters. They showed in those early primaries they didn’t want anything to do with him. They also showed they didn’t want anything to do with Kamala Harris, either. None of that mattered, though — Team Obama bought off Bernie Sanders with a promise that most of his communist ideological platform would show through in a Biden administration (because Obama and Sanders are hardly opponents when it comes to ideology), and they similarly cut deals with the other major candidates and stood them down.
What was left was Biden, the most plausible puppet for the Obama regime, and Harris, who was Obama’s earliest choice to be his successor in the 2020 cycle before she crashed and burned on her own.
So where are we now?
It seems pretty obvious that Obama, despite his public show of support for Biden, is open to the idea of moving on. It also seems obvious that the Democrats’ donors and boots-on-the-ground folks are up in arms about the pretty obvious fact that Biden 2024 is a loser of a campaign. And yet most of the official Politburo types within that party have not come forth to oppose Biden.
He meanwhile is doing things like calling into Morning Joe and trashing the “elites” in his own party and challenging them to go against him at the Democrats’ convention…
Who’s he talking about? Obviously it’s Obama. Biden, it turns out, might be an even more obnoxious egomaniac than Obama is, and the fact that he’s feeling his old boss’ support slipping away is firing what neurons he has left.
The upshot of this is, as I’ve written a few times lately, that Joe Biden does not appear likely to go gentle into that good night. The people around him, and most notably Jill and Hunter Biden, who know a great deal about how to be enablers in service to their own selfish interests, are all fully invested in propping up this failing enterprise in hopes — Hitler-in-the-bunker-style — that some magical occurrence will reverse their fortunes. Jill Biden is a cross between Edith Wilson and Lady MacBeth; you aren’t getting a patriotic and selfless move out of her.
This is somewhat of an aside, but it’s instructive. Donald Trump held a rally Tuesday night on the golf course at Doral, and in front of a crowd estimated to be as large as 45,000 people. Trump took up a challenge of playing 18 holes of golf Biden issued at the debate by offering to spot Biden “10 strokes a side,” or 20 strokes over 18 holes, with a million dollars to the charity of his choice if Biden were to win. Trump offered to have Doral host the match and he said it would likely be one of the most-watched TV events of the year.
This was Team Biden’s response:
Our response to Trump challenging President Biden to a golf match at his deranged rally tonight pic.twitter.com/9j4AcGhZy1
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) July 10, 2024
Forget about whether this is an effective method of chickening out of a challenge Biden himself had issued. It’s the ferocity of the statement, and the utter delusion behind it, that stands out here.
Which means that unless things get worse in a way that makes Biden even less sellable than he is now, and yes, things can always get worse, you’re not going to convince Biden to just go away.
Which is why I’m bringing up The Death of Stalin, and why the Dems are so, to use the common vernacular, screwed at present.
It’s so crystal clear what the solution for them is. The problem is that the solution is a bad one. Absolutely rotten. And imposed on them by Obama’s own bad judgement.
At Doral on Tuesday night, Trump mocked Biden by saying that the one good decision he made was to have Harris as his vice president because “she’s a hell of an insurance policy.” Harris is a lot less sellable than Biden, or at least that’s been the common understanding; the more senile and decrepit he becomes, the less true that may be.
We’re finding out why. Because if Kamala Harris was any good as a politician, if she had any chops at all, she’d be Khrushchev in this version of the coup among power-mad psychopaths.
She’d round up the members of the Biden cabinet and cut deals with them to keep their jobs or get better ones for the remainder of this term and perhaps into the next one, in return for their assent to either a forced Biden resignation or a 25th Amendment succession. That takes two-thirds of the Cabinet, as you know.
Make one of them the VP, shift a couple of others into jobs vacated by Cabinet members who won’t go along, and so on, until you get that two-thirds majority, and then go to Biden with an ultimatum: either resign the office, or we hold the vote in an hour’s time and you’re out — we know the House of Representatives will uphold the Cabinet vote because the Republicans are all in, and if we can get the Cabinet, we can get a suitable number of Democrats to go along with the move.
I’m not saying this would be particularly good for the country. I’m saying this is the obvious play Harris should be making.
She’s already demonstrated that she isn’t going to get anywhere trying to run for president as a non-incumbent. That was a lead balloon when she tried it. If she’s going to have a political future, it has to be as an incumbent president, or at least as an acting president, with the entire political-media complex apparatus gaslighting the public into the idea she’s underrated and quietly brilliant as a political figure.
And if she were to run a successful coup d’etat within the Biden administration, that might not actually be a lie.
And right now, the leadership vacuum growing in the Democrat Party — which Obama can’t fill because he can’t step in and run — is such that anybody who seizes power will be seen as a hero.
Were Harris to play the game of thrones and win, the party and its propaganda arms in the media would hail her as saving the country from Biden’s decline and Trump’s … whatever their chosen accusations would be.
But here’s the thing: so far, there is absolutely zero indication that Kamala Harris has either the chutzpah or the brains to pull off a stunt like that.
And Biden, who doesn’t know much anymore, does know this.
So it seems clear that the Democrats are fated to circle the drain for a good while longer. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of psychopaths.
READ MORE:
The Fall of Biden Portends Real Danger
Kamala v. Jill: The Ugly Catfight Ahead
The post Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, and the Death of Stalin appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.