Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., went out as he came in, plagiarizing.
Well, in style anyway, his bizarre farewell address striking ultra-familiar themes.
“Most Biden speeches are acknowledged (Lincoln, Obama) or unacknowledged (Neil Kinnock, John Kennedy) homages to other politicians,” explains Matt Taibbi. “This last Biden attempt at an Eisenhower impersonation offers an anti-insight. We’re warned about an ‘oligarchy,’ which Webster’s defines as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.’”
And here the intelligent reader is already ahead of the author.
“He tries to tag disobedient billionaires like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg (as opposed to Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Steven Schwartzman, etc.) as this new oligarchy, but there’s one closer to home, which Biden referenced later in the speech: ‘In the years ahead . . . it is going to be up to the president, the presidency, the congress, the courts, the free press and the American people . . . I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands. . . . Now it’s your turn to stand guard.’
“Biden’s possibly ad-libbed distinction between ‘president’ and ‘presidency’ was the most inspired line of his career,” Taibbi quips.
And eerily defining . . . of Biden’s stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . . . and various vacation hot spots.*
Taibbi contrasts the man — “stumbling, tumbling” — with the machinery of the office — run by a mostly-unseen cabal Taibbi defines with reference to H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The Invisible Man.
Other sci-fi metaphors come to mind. In his penultimate paragraph, Taibbi mentions Frankenstein filmmaker James Whale, and then in his last line Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man. But didn’t Philip K. Dick provide a hundred examples of fake personae as presidents and tyrants?
Except that the Biden Administration, whatever it might have been, was limited in its power because it lacked legitimacy from half the population — and was as cognitively challenged as Biden himself.
Yesterday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Meet the Press that our sleepy commander-in-chief had been manipulated by his staff into signing key executive orders under false pretenses. And running interference for this Democratic Party “presidency” were Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.).
Thank goodness, the Age of “The Biden” is over.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Biden spent 40 percent of his term in office “on vacation.”
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