The disintegrating presidency of Joe Biden is a challenge for our country and so a challenge for us personally. Lies in the arrogant pursuit of power have so characterized the political culture of which Joe is the figurehead that our country is clearly approaching a national reckoning.
Turning from the sickly fascination of the Biden’s presidential death spiral, we must look to another politician for guidance.
Always great principles are at play, but sometimes that is more obvious than others. This is becoming such a time.
Observant commentators on the scene have turned to a universal truth. “What goes around comes around,” people say. “Instant karma’s gonna getcha,” said the Beatles. “Measure for measure,” wrote the Bard.
Comrade Lennon was reaching back to the Hindu doctrine of karma, and Shakespeare was echoing a rabbinic concept, mida kenegged mida, which translates precisely as “measure for measure,” which in turn was merely a summary of several biblical texts, such as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” or “as he did, so it shall be done to him” — no doubt, dear reader, you are familiar with others. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Biden Distracts Americans. Turns on Israel With New Ceasefire Proposal)
Victor Davis Hanson, wearing his classicist hat, points out to us that this is a great theme of ancient Greek tragedy: nemesis follows hubris. The tragic hero is too proud and arrogant, a flaw that sets him against the divine order, personified in the goddess Nemesis, who sees to it that the arrogance itself brings about the flawed hero’s downfall. Shakespeare uses the theme often, and daringly, and significantly for our tradition of freedom, in his histories.
Richard II is an outstanding example in which King Richard’s supreme and arrogant use of his power in confiscating the lands of Gaunt pushes Gaunt’s son over the brink into rebellion and then the king’s continued pride, even when defeated, greases the skids for his precipitous fall and execution.
It seems that a tragedy is playing out. Joe Biden has lived by the lie. He even renders the story of his own origins into a mish-mosh of truths and fantasy; his first presidential bid fell to ruin in the aftermath of one such lie.
His fortune is based on maintaining a lie of integrity and lawfulness over a simmering pot of grift and he has been good enough at it to escape a reckoning despite boasting about the most flagrant use of his political power for preserving his scheme.
This is, of course, the famous talk before the cameras in which he boasted about threatening Ukraine with loss of American aid if it did not end the investigation into the corruption of Burisma, the energy company paying Hunter Biden a gigantic salary so that Joe Biden would see that America had their back.
Joe was preening like a peacock in front of the friendly audience, who may or may not have known then about the flow of lots of money through Hunter to the Biden family that the Ukrainian investigator had sniffed. Joe insisted on the investigator’s immediate dismissal — and got it.
Hubris.
Joe and his enablers eventually became so arrogantly sure of their ability to fool everyone about whatever they needed that they lied about the most obvious things. He and his enablers in government and in the media were good enough at their game to make the truth seem to be mere partisan defamation. John Selden commented acidly at his lively table about the similarly facile public liars of his day:
[They] would have us believe them against our own reason; as the woman would have had her husband against his own eyes, when he took her with another man, which she stoutly denied: What! will you believe your own eyes before your own sweet wife?
As President Joe might have chimed in, in his best rendition of Being Folksy — C’mon, man! The idea!
And so they lied and lied again about Joe’s accelerating decline, which played itself out in plain sight, but was always met with what seemed to pass for an agile response. And the response was agile enough to keep the issue from exploding, even as the evidence increased in frequency and amplitude.
It was only within this last month that his handlers thought to discredit those who dared to call attention to the truth by the lie of calling the evidence “cheap fakes.”
As even most of the Biden team knows, the debate with Trump was a disaster. Now, even those who were on the Cheap Fake bandwagon a mere two weeks ago are trying to find the smoothest way of enabling Joe to disappear himself from his candidacy without implicating themselves in the lies that sustained him to this point.
But as we can observe as this plays itself out, even those deserting Joe’s cause, are still lying to escape the consequences of the lies the lived by and benefited from. They are pretending still that the lie was no lie and they lie as they do so.
As for the hardcore, our American regent, Dr. Jill, and the bag man of the grift, Hunter, are the fully sentient ones left in charge of the leaky ship of this candidacy and presidency. The have lived by the lie till now and they are fully caught within it. Nemesis has them firmly in her grip.
If we turn from Athens to Jerusalem, there is still the hope of redemption. Shakespeare shows Hamlet is at fault when he denies the possibility of redemption to his mother and her king’s paramour. God calls to the sinner to return from his path and live.
It would be a wondrous thing to see. We have seen precious few apologies, though, for any of the lies, only the desire to escape their consequences.
Turning from the sickly fascination of Biden’s presidential death spiral, we must look to another politician for guidance. What is it we seek? Vengeance? Not that deadly potion, surely. Justice — that is a worthy end, enough to justify our own contest for the power needed to bring justice about.
But justice has often been of late mistaken for retribution. The whole woke enterprise lies on such a misprision.
Our law tradition, though, steeped in the people’s desire for liberty, is rather for restorative justice. We have been diminished. We seek power solely in order to be made whole.
We might pray, with Lincoln, that as a country, we at last hearken to our better angels. There is surely something here to motivate us all to clean up our national political culture, to seek the good of the country and its redemption from what has it in its grip, to embrace the commonweal, in which we and our posterity unite for the good of all. (READ MORE: Israel Abides by Rules of War Its Enemies Would Never Dream Of)
In response to the national lie, we are called upon to stand for truth, in all its particulars. As living examples, can we teach what needs to be done and so avert the headlong plunge into national tragedy that surely lurks if we were to succumb to the venality and lies that have driven those in power?
The nation needs no less than that generous commitment to the truth that must command us all.
