The question posed in boffo episode four of Tucker Carlson’s new Twitter show is whether Joe Biden is a wannabe dictator, as asserted by a chyron that Fox News displayed for 27 seconds on the day his administration arrested Donald Trump: “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.” (Fox News hastened to apologize to the world and to fire the producer who so incontinently chyronized.)
Carlson spends a couple of minutes discussing absurd reactions to the brief-lived caption. But most of his satirical 13-minute monologue is about whether President Biden qualifies for dictator-hood.
Carlson suggests that you have to do much more than jail political rivals to qualify.
Dictators enrich themselves and their families, taking bribes or kickbacks from businesses or other dictators.
In a dictatorship, it’s no longer possible to fight the injustice of the system. If people “gather in large numbers to protest the rule of the dictator, they’ll be arrested by state security services even years after the fact.”
In a dictatorship, you can’t even complain from your home; unauthorized opinions on the Internet must be censored.
In a dictatorship, major mental or physical lapses by the Dear Leader would be routinely covered up by a compliant media.
A dictator would say your kids belong to him. But Joe Biden says your kids belong to all of us; we have joint custody.
It’s a litany that could be extended, and Tucker Carlson does so.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Wannabe Dictator”
Most historians of America classify Presidents as “weak” or as “strong”, depending upon how much power each claims and exercises. Some of these historians have observed that each new strong President has picked-up where the last strong President left-off; thus, the power of the office always increases, even if “weak” Presidents exercise less of that power. Authoritarian dictatorship is the natural outcome of such ratcheting.
What we’ve seen with some of our “strong” Presidents is that they can be quite weak-minded. And even those “strong” Presidents who are not feeble-minded but simply mediocrities are often front-men rather than actual leaders. The result then is a dictatorship of people behind the scenes.
Do you know who actually directs Merrick Garland? Michael S Regan? Lloyd Austin? If so, then please tell me! All that I know is that it ain’t the Dummy-in-Chief.
In answer to your question, I can only make a guess. The tandem of Barack Obama and Susan Rice. Obama nominated Garland to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, but McConnell used the ‘Biden Rule’ to prevent his confirmation. Rice and Obama may not operate in the open but it’s a safe bet they are providing instructions behind the scenes.
Obama was foremost in my mind as an example of a medocrity who was a front-man for other people behind the scenes.
He adopted mannerisms that many associate with intelligence, but he doesn’t actually demonstrate much of it. He’s a lawyer who never argued a case in court. He’s a former professor who could not secure tenure because he published nothing in the law journals, a would-be scholar who could not write a contracted book on race and the Constitution even with the help of a ghost-writer and therefore punted to an autobiography. He’s a public speaker who stumbles like GW Bush when he doesn’t use a teleprompter (though he’s better than Bush about sticking to use of the teleprompter). Yet he was rather swiftly elevated to the Presidency, because people behind the scenes knew that they could use a man of his sort.
That empty suit might now act as some tool behind the scenes, but he doesn’t have the brains to call the important shots.