Of coups, pRetend pResidents, and other don't-matters

The meat of the whole thing.

America is Run By a Movement, Not a Man
The ugly truth that the Biden coup really exposed.

Joe Biden has gone from a vacation at a billionaire’s estate in California to a postponed appearance at the DNC convention in Chicago, and then once more to a vacation in Delaware.

The man who formally serves as president of the country barely has anything resembling a public schedule. And his private one appears to be equally empty. Biden is satisfied with occasionally showing up at a few events a week, mumbling something and then moving on.

Meanwhile his VP is on the campaign trail and appears equally out of reach, only now finally agreeing to a single CNN interview with Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, there to back her up. If Kamala Harris can’t handle a press conference, can she handle running a country?

And if neither POTUS nor the VP are running the country, who or what actually is in charge?

During the summer coup that successfully ousted Biden as the nominee (while leaving him in the nation’s highest office) it was revealed that there hadn’t been a full cabinet meeting since Oct 2003 and that those meetings that occur on camera are almost entirely pre-scripted.

But if the president isn’t running the country, who is? The same people who were all along.

If Biden had been running the country while suffering the profound cognitive failures that his own associates and the media rushed to put out there during the coup, it’s difficult to believe that members of his cabinet would not have invoked the 25th Amendment. Faced with a president incapable of discharging the duties of his office, they would have acted, if not in the national interest then in their own interest to be able to go on performing the duties of their own offices.

Why did cabinet members, top generals, and assorted insiders sit there and do nothing while the man at the top of the command chain could hardly stay up or pay attention to anything?

The uncomfortable answer is that Joe Biden was never running anything. The system is humming along the same way it did before whether he’s in the White House playing with paper clips and telling old stories or lying on the beach in Rehoboth. If that’s difficult to believe, it wasn’t all that long ago that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was on the verge of death, hospitalized and no longer knew where she was, kept signing letters and co sponsoring bills.

No one tried to remove Biden using the 25th Amendment because he didn’t matter anyway.

Annnnd bip-bop-BOOM, folks, there t'is.

Another of those classic memes that I deployed back when this whole crazy meme business was rocking in its wee cradle, and still have laying around on a hard drive someplace, exposes the underlying problem unsparingly: “Elect more Republicans, then sit back and watch as nothing changes.” That’s been the dismal, depressing reality for way too long; as time has marched relentlessly on, it’s a basic truism which has done nothing but get truer and truer still.

Now, having been an avid student of l’affaires politique since I watched the Watergate hearings* on the TeeWee in my early teens, and of US history since I was in grade school, the long, slow emergence of the Lovecraftian monstrosity so perspicaciously identified by hyperintelligent scribe Angelo Codeville as the Ruling Class has become impossible for people like me to deny, disregard, or dismiss.

Similarly, after Reagan took his best shot at reining in Leviathan only to be gobbled up by the ravenous Swamp beast ere the close of his White House tenure, the FederalGovCo edifice's slow-burn makeover into an unwholesome concatenation of misdirection, brigandry, untrammeled avarice, and lowbrow entertainment for purposes of manipulating the gullible, the Forever Faithful Spirit Squad, the wilfully blind, and the just flat-out stupid is now beyond debate. As I’ve long insisted both here and in conversation with friends, the people who wield actual, by-God POWER in our central government—the shadowy, skulking éminences grises who really run the show—have neither faces We The People will ever see nor names we will ever know. They never campaign for elective office, stand for re-election, make speeches, hold rallies, give interviews, issue printed policy-position statements, or engage in formal debates, even in the guise of phonus-balonus “moderators."

The Grey Men are the specific personages I refer to collectively as The Power©. They don’t care a whit for your opinions, your values, or your way of life. They seek neither your permission nor your approval. They don’t have to, see, such piffling trivialities are of no import to them—they don’t work for you, don’t answer to you, and feel they owe you neither explanation nor apology for the godawful crimes they perpetrate under the tatterdemalion rubric of a Public Servant operating in concordance with The Consent Of The Governed, as expressed via Free and Fair Elections.

See? All perfectly straightforward, open, and above-board. Thus does fact become fiction, illusion become reality, cruelty become compassion, impoverishment become wealth. The tune has been called; now we dance, or the Piper will by God know the reason why not.

You don’t know their office phone number, their email address, or where their office is physically situated, even. Should you somehow find out despite their best efforts and show up there intending to ask them a few polite questions about what they’re doing, why, and on whose authority, a paramilitary security force in full urban-combat kit toting select fire battle rifles, sidearms, and concealed edged weapons will pepper-spray you, Tase you, club you to the ground with ASP extensible batons, Flex-cuff you, and whisk you off to a security sub-basement holding facility for interrogation and in-processing as an “unlawful combatant."

Over recent years, culminating in Faux Jaux Biden’s sloppily staged, widely panned run as the gruesomely miscast (figure)Head of State—until the Grey Men Behind The Curtain stepped in to unceremoniously give him the ol' heave-ho and replace him with an at-best-mediocre understudy culled from the C-List roster—the actual shape of things grew ever more clear until not even the verymost dewey-eyed, starstruck, and damp-drawered cub “journalist" could any longer be gulled into the requisite suspension of disbelief. In increasing numbers—be they audience members or cast, crew, or production staff—everybody couldn’t help but ask themselves, “How much longer can The Show go on?” Also, in wiser, more knowing heads: “MUST this shitty Show go on?"

In any event, by the time the Dump The Dotard option sped from Nightmare Hypothetical to Pressing Last Resort, the cold, unyielding realization that nobody as feeble both physically and mentally as Too Aulde Jaux could honestly be said to be in charge of anything, up to and including himself, had hit home—thereby affording supporting evidence aplenty of the putative PoTUS's descent into near-total irrelevancy. We knew it; foreign heads of state knew it; White House pool-reporters, staff, and security personnel knew it. The one and only person who didn’t know was the pRetend ***”pResident”*** himself, apparently. In fairness, though, he hardly knows much of anything these days, up to and including the day of the week, the year, who he’s talking to, and who and where he is at any given moment.

“Most Powerful Man in the World”? Uh huh, suuuuure. At this late date, the *cough-cough* man *cough-cough* roosting behind the Resolute Desk is about as indispensible as a skin-tag, a superfluous nipple, or an untrimmed ear hair. Basically, he’s a flashlight with dead batteries, a two-legged barstool, the single sock the dryer mysteriously ate. He’s an Ikea furniture-assembly instruction booklet written entirely in Attic Greek. He’s belly-button lint, nail clippings, pimple squeezin’s, toejam. He’s the gob of hair in your hair brush, the gunk you swipe from your eyes when you wake up, the tiny sliver of the bar of soap you’ll end up discarding. He’s the forgotten receipts from twenty years ago lying in a crumpled wad under the scattered screws, flat washers, Nylocks of unknown origin, and other longtime residents of the kitchen junk drawer.

In purely practical terms, Faux Jaux is yesterday’s newspaper, the burned-up charcoal ash in the Weber from last week’s grill-out, the cheap, decrepit old shoes not worth the bother or expense of having them re-soled. He’s the Bronze Age box of baking soda at the back of the fridge you keep forgetting to replace, the guest-room closet door you haven’t opened in forever, the residue in the flattened toothpaste tube you just grumble “fuck it” as you toss it into the bathroom wastebasket and break out a fresh one. He’s the half-inch of flat soda in the 2-liter bottle that you dump down the drain without even trying to talk yourself into choking the nasty stuff down so as not to be “wasteful” first.

Please see the lyrics of the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” for further information.

So who really IS running the fed’rul gummint, then? Who, if anyone, is in charge here? As Daniel says, the same sub rosa cabal of whey-faced, unaccountable malefactors that's been running it for years, that’s who. Seeing as how nobody voted them IN, it only stands to reason that nobody will be voting them OUT, either. When/if frustrated, disillusioned Real Americans finally decide to get serious about ridding the Homeland of this veritable plague of loathsome vermin once and for all, they’re gonna need to avail themselves of the extermination expertise of Orkin, Terminix, or preferably both, to deal efficaciously with the foul infestation of DC sewer crawlers, sneak thieves, and snake-oil salesmen.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Then, once that’s taken care of, we kill all the blood-sucking lawyers. A-HENH!

* Being a green, snot-nosed kid it didn’t occur to me then, but knowing what I know now I’ve come to think it no kind of stretch—not intellectually, ideologically, or ethically—to evaluate the comic cavalcade of blunder, preening gasbaggery, and inept miscalculation now filed under the “Watergate” heading as the high-tech lynching of Richard Nixon, well before such stratagems were a twinkle in beady, rat-black D卐M☭CRAT eyes—or a dagger plunged into Clarence Thomas’s back. For greybeards like myself who are old enough to remember, the cacophony of shrill, discordant lamentation damning Nixon & Co’s unconscionable, deadly assault “on MUH DEMOCKRASEEE!!!” surely rings all too familiar as contemporary encore. Stylistic note: as a harrumphing, gruff, impeccably besuited and becoiffed Senate investigator/prosecutor/Nemesis Of All Wrongdoers reliant on his dignity, reputation for personal integrity, and collegial, folksy charm to see him through, Chuckles “Grillmaster” Schroomer sure makes a piss-poor Senator Sam, wouldn’tcha say?