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Sympathetically Diminished

“I’m sympathetically diminished.”

That’s how legal analyst Jonathan Turley described President Joe Biden’s “victory lap” over news that special counsel Robert Hur would not charge Mr. Biden with felonies for his “willful” mishandling and disclosure of classified documents. 

You see, in the special counsel’s “searing” 300-​plus-​page report, one reason for not prosecuting Sleepy Joe is that investigators found our president’s “memory was significantly limited.” In interviews, Biden couldn’t “remember when his son Beau died,” CNN explained, “nor the years he was vice president.”

Sure, it’s hard to testify about past criminal willfulness if one cannot remember the past. 

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him,” the special counsel points out, “as a sympathetic, well-​meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Ah, our 81-​year-​old commander-​in-​chief! Where did I put those nuclear codes?

Mr. Biden is “someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”

Yes, I certainly have my own misgivings about our commander’s … er, cognitive skills. How can a man incompetent to stand trial possibly be competent to preside over the federal government?

Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer and White House counsel Richard Sauber expressed their own doubts “that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”

“Appropriate”?

They claim “a lack of recall” is “a commonplace occurrence among witnesses.”

If not leaders of the free world.

Is our major party choice for president going to be between a sitting chief executive who cannot be charged for criminal conduct because he is “not all there” and one who can be and is being prosecuted, strangely disadvantaged by his pre-​octogenarian mental acuity?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies

Impeachments Are Forever?

The impeachment of President Donald J. Trump, just concluded in the Senate with an acquittal, was — so far as the Senate trial portion of the exercise is concerned — the least partisan presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

That’s because Senator Mitt Romney (R‑Utah) was the first senator ever to vote against his own party in such a proceeding.

Before we give the notorious flip-​flopper a ticker-​tape parade, or query too deeply into his personal animus against Trump, let’s acknowledge that the House impeachment, proper, was heavily partisan, and is only going to get more-so.

What? you ask.

How can a past event get more or less of anything?

Well, House Republicans, expecting a big backlash against Democrats next November, are already plotting to “expunge” the impeachment from the record. 

As if to stick it to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bizarre point that her House’s action would be “an impeachment that lasts forever.”

Sorta like Pharaoh Thutmose III chiseling his mother’s name — Hatshepsut — off the monuments of Egypt.

The Republicans’ planned “damnatio memoriae” is a good clue to the moral of this story: the impeachment process is … “not good,” to apply a Trumpian mantra.

Now, the process of impeachment has long seemed to me like a great idea — another one from those wise framers of the Constitution.

But with persistent partisanship, this constitutional recourse has not worked out very well. 

Overall. 

Historically.

Whether in 1868, with Democrat Andrew Johnson, or 1999, with Democrat Bill Clinton, or today, with Trump’s failed ouster, the impeachment process has proved (Romney notwithstanding) maddeningly partisan, and looks like it will only get more partisan — with House Democrats already talking about a second impeachment of Trump.

We need some new form of recall.

Citizen-​based, perhaps?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Pharaoh Thutmose III, history, myth, memory,

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