There’s a famous scene in the Humphrey Bogart classic The Caine Mutiny in which Bogart’s character, the unstable and largely incompetent Captain Queeg, appears as a witness against the officers who relieved him as the ship he commanded was at risk of foundering – and proves them right for having done so.
We had something of a reprise of that scene last Thursday in the person of Joe Biden, who’s rapidly living up (or down) to the nickname of Joe Deadhorse that I gave him a few weeks ago (and if you’ve had a look at the two installments of my new novel King of the Jungle, now being serialized here at The American Spectator, you’ll recognize the reference). Biden’s handlers juiced him up on … something, then hastily sent him out to angrily denounce the report of special counsel Robert Hur, who had been appointed to investigate the fact that Biden was in possession of oodles of classified documents that he was not legally entitled to have. It went pretty badly:
Of course, Biden should have been thanking Hur for noting his enfeebled mental state and his cognitive incompetence as a likely affirmative defense to a prosecution for his clearly illegal mishandling of classified information. Had Hur not made that reference the discussion would have been the absurdity of Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump for the same crime, with one major difference.
READ MORE: Biden’s Sound and Fury
That being the fact that Trump was president at the time he brought home those documents, and with the president having plenary power to declassify documents, it is physically impossible for Trump to have broken such a law — the act of taking those documents home is a de facto declassification.
Biden, of course, was not president when he spirited those documents away. He was a senator and a vice president.
We’re not talking about that fact. Instead, we’re talking about Joe Deadhorse and his broken mental state. We’re talking about the demented, senile old man roaring at the reporters who finally, at long last, are beginning to smell blood and ask the questions that ought to have been asked all the way back in 2020.
But at the end of the day, perhaps it doesn’t matter — either way we would be talking about the brightly lit “DANGER” sign blinking in the faces of today’s Democrat Party honchos for their manifest mistake of attempting to foist Biden on the public for a second term.
A term, it should be noted, that would end with Biden having had his 86th birthday.
Thursday’s Captain Queeg denouement reboot wasn’t a particularly bad moment for Biden. In fact, it might have been about as good as it gets from here on in. Biden’s handlers made sure he skipped the traditional presidential interview in the lead-up to Sunday’s Super Bowl coverage, because everyone knows and understands that he couldn’t sit down for a real interview with an actual journalist who would ask substantive questions about issues like the border, our exit strategy — or lack of one — in Ukraine, our $34 trillion national debt, inflation, Bidenomics, transgenderism, the declining national birthrate, the decreasing availability of decent housing or health care not just for the poor but for the middle class, catastrophic downturns in military recruitment numbers, and oodles of other issues on which his administration is performing abysmally.
This is what Biden is now. And it’s going to get worse.
All last week, the media circles were buzzing about that atrocious NBC News poll that had Biden at a meager 37 percent approval rating and getting blistered by 5 points in a head-to-head race with Donald Trump. Well, now there’s an Economist/YouGov poll giving Trump a 7-point lead on the question to respondents: “Who do you think would win?” That’s usually a pretty good predictive question, though it often has more power late in a race rather than early.
Ah, yes, but is it really early in this race?
Or is it actually fairly late?
Mitch Landrieu, the formerly apocalyptically horrible mayor of New Orleans (he’s the dolt who knocked down the iconic statues of Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and built a billion-dollar airport without bothering to arrange a proper connection to I-10, all as crime skyrocketed thanks to a hug-a-thug consent decree he signed with the Obama DOJ) who was tabbed as Biden’s infrastructure czar and is now in charge of his reelection campaign, swears Biden ain’t goin’ nowhere. Landrieu dismissed Thursday’s debacle in front of the cameras by impugning the mental capacity of men far more lucid and successful than either himself or his boss:
President Trump, just the other night, confused what day of the week it was. He is confused who the leader of North Korea and China are. He’s confused the leaders of Hungary and Turkey, by the way. Speaker Mike Johnson was on the other day and he confused Iraq and Iran. And of course, President Trump doesn’t know the difference between Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley.
Landrieu would, of course, say these things because Joe Deadhorse Biden is his personal gravy train and sole path to political relevance. Landrieu can’t go home and run for much of anything without humiliating himself, and his record of achievement to date would likely qualify him for a career selling aluminum siding, or perhaps solar panels.
The thing is that those not quite-so-personally invested as Landrieu is seem to be a bit less sanguine about Joe Deadhorse”s future prospects.
For example, there is this guy, who speaks for the Democrats’ boss, Barack Obama:
David Axelrod warns Biden presser 'reinforces the meme' that the president is too old: 'Can't unring the bell' https://t.co/JAIi9L4ykT #FoxNews
— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) February 10, 2024
But Axelrod was full of bad news for Democrats — he poured ice water all over the idea of parachuting Michelle Obama in as the nominee:
David Axelrod says Michelle Obama will not replace Biden on Democrat ticket. And Smerconish throws shade at NY Post reporter Cindy Adams, who has been stoking the Michelle rumors.pic.twitter.com/29duelhbHb
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 11, 2024
Well, what happens next, then?
It won’t be Gavin Newsom, in case you’re thinking he’s the real nominee. The thing is, the Obama machine still controls the Democrat Party, and as such you cannot be the nominee without the machine giving you — or, better put, you earning — their imprimatur.
Which is another way to say you have to be a puppet of the Obama regime if you want to be the Democrat nominee. And Gavin Newsom is nobody’s puppet — his ego is even bigger than Obama’s. What’s more, Newsom is entirely transactional — he’ll do whatever he thinks will make him popular, so long as he’s the center of attention. That makes him not the greatest fit to continue the “fundamental transformation” of America into the vision of a communist paradise Frank Marshall Davis plugged into Obama’s brain all those years ago in Hawaii. Newsom will go full wacko policy-wise in California because the Left Coast swells like it, but he can’t be trusted to follow orders from the Kalorama Kommissars the way Biden has.
Wait, Scott, you’re saying — are you trying to tell me we’re about to see Kamala Harris’ (brief) moment in the sun?
Well…
Maybe so. Probably not, but then again…
The thing is, Landrieu might be right for once in his life when he says that Joe Biden won’t step down no matter what. And the Democrats on Capitol Hill are not going to do to their president what the Republicans did to Richard Nixon. Joe Biden could be molesting toddlers live on MSNBC, and it won’t move them to ousting him via impeachment.
And if Biden won’t walk the plank on his own, the 25th Amendment won’t dig him out of the White House. As David Catron noted here at the site yesterday, Johnathan Turley wrote at the Hill that this is no magic bullet:
It is Section 4 [of the amendment] that allows the removal of a president.… It requires a vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and notify Congress that the vice president intends to take over. If Vice President Kamala Harris could get eight Cabinet officers to go along with a letter to Congress, her status as the “Acting President” would likely be short-lived. Joe Biden (who yesterday declared, “I’m elderly and know what the hell I’m doing”) would only have to declare to Congress that “no inability exists.” Biden would then resume his powers.
But while they can’t get rid of him if he doesn’t agree, the party’s in-crowd does actually have a say at their convention.
Yes, you retort, but will they vote to dump Biden if Kamala Harris is all they’ve got? In that same NBC poll, Harris’ approval rating was a lot more upside-down than Biden’s was. She’s at 28 up, 53 down.
And I don’t disagree with you.
Kamala Harris as the nominee is little more than a sacrificial lamb. If she’s at the top of the ticket, all of their money will flow to the bottom of the ticket in a mad scramble to take back the House (the Senate is almost surely gone from the Democrats’ grasp this fall, given Biden’s unpopularity and the 12 seats currently held by Democrats in states Trump won in 2016, 2020, or both).
Here’s the fundamental problem, though: They might not have a choice. The Democrats have been the party almost exclusively of ruinous, radical urban socialist political machines for close to two decades now, and that existence has denuded them of candidates capable of carrying a broad spectrum of the electorate. That’s one reason their bench is so scandalously short. The other reason, which is related, is the identity politics problem: They can’t afford to alienate black women, and passing Harris over for anybody other than Michelle Obama would do just that. Black women actually really like Kamala Harris, which doesn’t say great things about that demographic but does put the Democrats’ dilemma on the big screen in technicolor.
One struggles to conjure up much sympathy, especially as events tumble forth to illuminate the damage this president, and the regime he represents, has done to the country.
