A lightweight when it came time to prove himself as a statesman and a leader, the White House has simply defeated him.
President Joe Biden campaigning for re-election in Pennsylvania in March. (Allison Shelley/Biden For President, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
“BIDEN DROPS OUT OF 2024 RACE” was the banner headline across The New York Times’s digital front page Sunday. How could I not think back to Aug. 9, 1974, when the Times fronted its editions with “NIXON RESIGNS” — same font, same type size, all caps?
Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace. Everyone knew this, even Nixon, and there was no pretending otherwise. Nixon seemed to try his best under the circumstances: “HE URGES A TIME OF ‘HEALING,’” was the subhead on the Times’ news report.
Maybe Joe Biden did his best, too, by the time he announced Sunday morning he would not run for reelection this November. But best or otherwise, Biden made the absolute worst of his circumstances.
He could have stepped aside weeks ago, even months, with grace and some semblance of dignity. Instead, he insisted he “wasn’t going anywhere,” sheltering in a state of full denial until he was forced from office looking like a foolish old man who simply gets in the way of things.
“America has never been better positioned to lead the world,” Biden wrote in the letter to “My Fellow Americans” he published on social media Sunday. If I were Ronald Reagan I would shake my head derisively and say, “There he goes again.”
Biden will end his days assuming, as he does here, that he can utter the most preposterous bunkum, contradictory to perfectly visible realities, and it will be accepted as true because he has said it. The Man from Scranton, authenticity beyond his reach and ordinary honesty foreign to his repertoire, got away with this chicanery for decades while he served in the Senate.
But the White House has simply defeated him. A lightweight when it came time to prove himself as a statesman and a leader, he never should have walked its halls as anything other than a visitor.
Of the many large truths worth noting about the Biden presidency, the most important in my judgment is that he has turned, error upon error, misjudgment upon misjudgment, stupidity upon stupidity, a gradual but long-evident erosion in American power, prestige and reputation into a precipitous collapse. There are a few things to say about this straightaway.
Crumbling Imperium
Vice President Biden with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, Aug. 27, 2014. (White House/Pete Souza, Public domain)
One, the decline over which Biden has presided was inevitable. Biden accelerated the deterioration of America’s power and standing — “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” as Barack Obama once said of him — but he is not altogether to be blamed.
The American imperium, a century and a quarter, or eight decades old, depending on how one dates its emergence, was from the first destined to crumble, and it is the lot of those living to witness this fate as it unfolds. This is the reality of our time. No one who achieves the White House will ever repudiate the empire, and no one serving as president can salvage it, either.
Two, America will never climb out of the depths to which Biden has led America. The great varieties of damage he has done are irreversible. This is as true at home as it is on the foreign side. There is no building back better, just as there is no making America great again. Let us not waste our time with this kind of thinking. Let us leave all that to the nostalgists. There is only building anew.
Finally, and related to the above point, it is important to view the imperium’s collapse positively. Failure — many failures — will be necessary before it becomes possible to begin realizing a post-imperial, post-exceptionalist America dedicated, at last, to the human cause.
It will not be easy to live through the interim to come — Biden and the incompetent people running his regime have made it hard enough living through 2024. But amid the ruins a certain opportunity falls to those Americans who refuse the prevailing nihilism in favor of the immanence of a future that departs from the past and the eternal present in which the imperium confines us.
The wreckage Biden leaves behind as he does us the favor of getting out of our sight is very formidable. I do not mean to suggest otherwise.
Liberal Authoritarianism
Biden’s inauguration motorcade, Jan. 20, 2021. (White House, Ana Isabel Martinez Chamorro)
Biden took office four Januarys ago — remember the inauguration, with that dreadful poet and Garth Brooks bursting out of his jeans? — droning on and on about his dedication to national unity. Forget it. That was one of his more outsized Bidenisms. Joe Biden has put this nation so at odds with itself that he and his flaks have resorted to blaming it on the Russians, the Chinese and lately even the Iranians.
It is on you, Joe, with your failure to address even a single civil, sympathetic word to those who do not accept — this another of your legacies — the consolidation of a liberal authoritarianism that (I predicted this years ago) will be harder to dislodge than anything Donald Trump ever puts in place.
Does Biden think all his talk of “domestic extremism” was just easy propaganda? In every mention of it — and in all the regearing of federal institutions to suppress it — this regime dismissed a proportion of Americans the size of which we will see when the ballots are counted Nov. 5.
Thank you for the polarization, Mr. President. It will take a philosopher-king to repair it, and America does not produce these anymore, if ever it did.
Biden’s evident determination to destroy what may have remained of a coherent national polity extended quickly after he took office to corrupting the judiciary in the service of the liberal authoritarian cause. I count this among his regime’s gravest transgressions.
The Trump trials have proven farcical abuses of special prosecutors and the courts, it should now be obvious. But let us not miss the extent of the damage done. Trump will come and Trump will go. How, and by whom, can the judicial system be restored to independence and Lady Justice to her blindness?
There is the presidency itself. The overpromoted Biden leaves it discredited in two ways. One, he has imported his grubby, infra-dig corruption into the White House. While various House committees have gathered enough hard evidence of this to warrant an impeachment trial, the practiced small-time grifter will get away with it because the judiciary has in effect succeeded in letting the clock run out.
Two, our well-bribed Zionist president has let the Israel lobby, notably but not only the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee, so far into the political process it is hard to tell where AIPAC’s influence ends and the legitimate deliberations of government begin — such as these deliberations may still proceed in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
The parting shot in this line: Bibi Netanyahu, now subject to a requested arrest warrant at the International Criminal Court, will address a joint session of Congress Wednesday.
Further in behalf of terrorist Israel, Biden has purposefully instigated a climate of delusional anti–Semitism that resembles nothing so much as the Red-under-every-bed paranoia of the 1950s. Monomanias of this kind have consumed America periodically since the Salem witch trials, and the syndrome proves as destructive now as it has on all previous occasions.
Yes, Mr. President, America has never looked better as the leader of the world.
Cold War II
Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 20 during the U.S. president’s unannounced visit to Kiev. (White House/Adam Schultz)
Biden’s record on the foreign side speaks for itself. He leaves the U.S. stuck in a proxy war with Russia from which there is by design no exit, even as Ukraine is condemned to self-destruction and its people to a criminal, Nazi–infested dictatorship in Kiev. Cold War II now lies before us, by the look of it stretching out for decades.
Across the other ocean there is the new Cold War’s second front. Relations with China lie in ruins, having been run into the ground by patently incompetent amateurs whose sole qualification for office is their yes-man loyalty to a leader even stupider than they are.
Worst of all, of course, is the spectacle of America’s direct participation, well beyond mere support, in the final stage of a terrorist state’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This will leave a scar on the United States of America that no future leader will ever be able to erase.
March on Washington for Gaza outside the White House on Jan. 13, 2024. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
When Rachel Maddow, with this record fully in view, hails Biden as “a master of foreign policy and has been for decades” — this after his post–NATO press conference two weeks ago — it is time to get sober. Biden’s original sin on the foreign side is that he has brought no imagination to the White House when imagination was vital to the moment. I grow sick of those who insist on pretending otherwise.
If there is room for amusement as Joe Biden wanders in a daze off the stage, I found some in the boastful passages of his letter declaring he will not run again. He lowered drug costs for the elderly, he passed a gun law, health care for veterans will now cover exposure to toxic substances: All worthy, all of it. But isn’t there a question of magnitude here?
Put Biden’s list of accomplishments against his true legacy, and it reads like an upside-down confessional: Well, I have made a mess of America and the world, just as Barack Obama warned I would, but I have some incremental odds and ends over here to brag of.
And now Biden and the Democrats, having rendered the party disgracefully undemocratic, will force the nomination of Kamala Harris as his successor. We will have to see what comes of this, but there are only two outcomes now in prospect. Given either Donald Trump or Harris will serve as America’s next president, it seems to me those who vote are left to choose between two disasters. Maybe it was fated to come to this.
I have compared Biden’s exit with Nixon’s, not Lyndon Johnson’s. The latter, who announced 56 years ago he would not seek re-election, had it disastrously wrong in escalating America’s aggression in Southeast Asia. He knew this, he knew he had divided the country, and so stepped aside just short of disgracing himself and his office. Biden already has, as Nixon did.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
A disaster. What next? Donald or Kamala? OUCH!!!
Biden blowing up Europe by blowing up the pipeline is up there with starting the war against Moscow.
Horrible president.
“authenticity beyond his reach and ordinary honesty foreign to his repertoire…”
This should be his epitaph, and also put on the headstone of his grave. An utter failure as a politician, embodying the worst of the deep corruption in the US establishment.
The military industrial think tanks and corporate interests have taken over for profit motives the male dominance system that refuses to give up while pretending to protect women of the world as its private herd. as the protection racket of the ages.
Nixon just pretended to fall on his sword to protect the system and perhaps win more time for the republicans too. Reagan then came on the scene and blamed it all on the 60’s anti war progressive era and rebuilt a culture war to reset the military system with evangelical zeal against liberals.
Trump won due to the deal for the Supreme Court held up by republicans in the Senate and once elected just let them have their way with him in return for worshipful adoration.
Then the same religious sect swung to Biden for other strategic reason perhaps to fight that other orthodox mythological fantasy that fled via Kiev and on to Moscow a thousand years ago..
I get your anger and frustration Patrick, I really do and I agree with everything you have written with one exception. The poet Amanda Gorman at Biden’s inauguration, I thought, was magnificent. As a Canadian I can’t even stomach to listen/read the mainstream media not only from the US but in my own country where it seems the script from the White House comes straight into our newsrooms and with Ottawa is so far up Washington’s butt GPS can’t find it.
I agree with the large majority of what Patrick says, with one major exception. He claims the “Trump trials” were some kind of unspecified abuses of power. Like hell! Trump did his best to incite a mob to prevent the transfer of power and kill Pence. These various charges and trials of The Donald were a product of the justice system trying to hold our former president accountable for his crimes. Does Patrick really believe Trump is above the law? Sorry. No go.
Great article. You forgot to mention how Biden destroyed Europe by blowing up the pipeline.
Every time I hear the phrase ‘the man from Scranton’ I have to think of 30000 Pounds of Mashed Bananas see: youtube.com/watch?v=q8I-zPmTPzM” rel=”nofollow ugc”>. Sadly it’s not sad enough.
Great overview from Mr. Lawrence. As usual.
Let us not forget that Biden was placed in the office by the same overlords who have now removed him. And what have they learned? #Bratenhiemer. A true, viral candidate. It will be much more difficult to dig themselves out of that hole.
I know the odds of this appearing are remote, but it makes me feel better.
Wow..! You state “Biden’s evident determination to destroy what may have remained of a coherent national polity extended quickly after he took office to corrupting the judiciary in the service of the liberal authoritarian cause. I count this among his regime’s gravest transgressions.
The Trump trials have proven farcical abuses of special prosecutors and the courts, it should now be obvious. But let us not miss the extent of the damage done. Trump will come and Trump will go. How, and by whom, can the judicial system be restored to independence and Lady Justice to her blindness?”
We’re talking A couple of realistic Federal cases over stealing classified documents and of inciting treason. A couple of unrelated State cases of election fraud interference and of business fraud. A separate State case of fraud paying off a porn star related to campaign finance laws. A State case banning Trump from ever again having a non-profit Charity he abused. And this is your judiciary manipulation case. Federal prosecution has NO relation to State prosecution. You should know this.
Sir, you have a storied career in exemplary journalism… this is not it. Fail..! Stop pandering.
BUT, pursuant to financially ham-stringing a political rival, it seems Federal and State prosecution DO have a perfect symbiotic relationship.
What backfired on both Federal and State prosecutors was the arrogance that what was done in their little fiefdoms would have any effect on a political outcome.
I laughed when Donald’s poll numbers went up after every trumped up charge. (Sorry, had to do it)
“We’re talking A couple of realistic Federal cases over stealing classified documents and of inciting treason.”
No, we’re talking “borrowing” documents from the record (as every modern president has done) and exhorting supporters to make demands from Congress being prosecuted as if they were crimes. That the MSM has fed you the pablum that such actions are unique and rise to the level they should be prosecuted just shows that Biden was not alone is destroying the basis of judicial independence in America.
While there is a lot to blame Biden for, the polarization started in the 90s when politicians discovered it could win them elections and Corporate America discovered it could make them money.
As for the Trump cases, he committed his crimes very obviously, as you point out. Unfortunately, it left the Democrats with a lose-lose situation: either they please their base and break the quid pro quo where D’s and R’s ignore each other’s crimes to prosecute Trump, or they ignore it and thus prove to everyone that the rich and powerful never face justice.
Sorry Nigel, I cannot agree. Trump is an embarrassingly poor excuse for a leader of any nation (I cannot imagine any country other than yours that could possibly elect him); a lying buffoon, but Biden is no better, nor is HRC, nor is Obama, nor is a succession of Bushes — not a one of them if your yardstick is apportioned in thousands of innocents slaughtered per month.
Neoiberalism is fascist adjacent; its death should not be mourned.
Some Consortium News readers may recall Gore Vidal’s wonderful critiques of the deranged U.S. imperialist foreign policy as well as its threat to the survival of the American Republic. Vidal’s commentary was articulate and fun to read. His anti-imperialist books, as well as his historical fiction, are still in print. Patrick Lawrence’s essay in this column is reassuring evidence that we can still read articulate commentary and enjoy reading it. – – – The good news in 2024 is that America has nowhere to go but up.
So obviously, Patrick, sarcasm is not a bug, it’s a feature. The one thing that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere is what does the US need to do now to accommodate the multipolar world? Stop lecturing countries about their internal affairs? Stop trying to undermine any country that fails to bang their forehead on the floor three times and swears to obey Washington’s dictates? Or maybe simply implement Zhou En Lai’s 5 principles of peaceful coexistence? I dunno….
No doubt, “we, the people,” of the universe, have been catfished! AND, the cover-up, is f/colossal, @ all levels of the USG, from the bottom of the wrung, press Secretary to POTUS’ Commander-N-Chief, M.I.C., National $ecurity, key eeh why? National Intere$ts, Corporations.
“How do “we, the people,” “Cast out the Demons” (Common, cunning, Democrats) aka the feral cats in Congress, the WH, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the M.I.C., the DoJ, the DNC, the MSMedia, PRINT & TV?
“Go, fi$h.” “IT”S SHOWTIME!!!” the most feral cat of all ‘em, will be luring the masses, “live,” from D.C., tonight; after hours (10AM-4PM), on TV:
…. “It has nothing to do with his health. The president is going to speak to this directly to the American people in prime time. In his letter he talked about the country, he talked about the party, *[“THE PARTY,” that “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.]” *Orwell
Concluding, Biden’s-Harris’ et al., truths are one big f/lie!!!!
…”he talked about the moment we’re in right now,” “It is not about his health. I can say no, that’s not the reason. But hear him out tonight.” KRINGE JEAN-PIERRE
And, “The moment we’re in right now,” FJB!!!
And, in between the deception, the destruction, the deaths, executed, delivered daily, denied by the Biden-Harris cabal; in between the attempted assassination of DJ Trump; &, in between Biden’s spray tans, Botox, Covid, Isolation, Desparation, Decline, Indignation; AND, the response, thereto, “falls the shadow” of a broken, bankrupt, political corpse posing as POTUS masquerading as human, “cooking w/gas,” to “Keep America Dumb!”
Consequently, “we, the people” are looking for a Leader who is alll about 1) restoring sanity, universally, 2) “restoring civility to public discourse,” 3) “restoring competency to political office.” 4) Saving the planet, NOT nuking it!
“Given either Donald Trump or Harris will serve as America’s next president, it seems to me those who vote are left to choose between two disasters. Maybe it was fated to come to this.” PATRICK LAWRENCE, You ROCK!!! TY for a spot f/on “after action review,” unpackin’ everything!!! It’s brillant. TY. “Keep It Lit.”
Biden is only symptomatic of deeper rot. Obama is said to have a lot of power, as do the Clintons. How could a venal mediocrity like Biden, his whole career built on corruption and toadyism to Zionism and corporations be clearly foisted on the USA. Sanders at least represented a semblance of government of by and for the people. But the DNC would have none of it.
The official policy of the feudal overlords is a stratified, ignorant, shallow citizenry at home and endless war and futile dreams of hegemony abroad.
The US is incapable of making or keeping agreements. The Empire of Lies. It’s doomed to irrelevance as the Global Majority focuses on building a better world, leaving not just the US, but also the arrogant imperialist West behind.
Biden did some good, like for Native Americans and ecological issues, by appointing Deb Haaland as Secy of the Interior.
But none are so blind as the D faithful who have insisted that this man from Scranton is one of us, the majority working class. Yeah…never mind the neolib econ policies destroying us, the same so beneficial for 1%ers and the corporate elite. Even more beclouded are the hagiographies assuring us that Biden and admin are another New Deal. Never mind that the real New Deal put people to work, actively supported union organizing legislatively, fought and won regulation of finance and banking, and was explicitly focussed on the ideal of the common good. The contrast is stark.
The current version of the D party is a continuation of the one that dumped the New Deal, abandoned labor, is responsible for deregulation, and enabled the intensely undemocratic international corporate trade agreements. Then add this admin’s new found love for empire and endless wars via the neocons running the State Dept.
“Liberal Authoritarianism” is exactly right. The Ds are the party of the 10-20% professionals and administrators. Unlike we mere workers, they’re the beneficiaries of trickle-up who don’t worry about being reduced to economic cannon fodder or ever see deaths of despair. They’re the class that as bureaucrats keep oligarchies, plutocracies, and outright dictatorships in business.
“patently incompetent” That, too. Their smug certainty about disastrous decisions, their self-assured superiority justified as “meritocracy.” More willful blindness–of course they haven’t read David Halberstam’s //The Best and the Brightest// about how that era’s arrogant elite produced the horrors of Vietnam. Yet we lessers can see clearly this is B & B 2.0, and that the results of their wars are becoming just as devastating and unwinnable.
“Monomanias of this kind have consumed America periodically since the Salem witch trials” Let us not forget that the same Puritans who orchestrated and conducted the witch trials, were also amongst the early Christian Zionists. The chain of religious fanaticism continues, becoming ever more ferocious. To focus on the ideological, and ignore this Messianic, religious aspect of the zionist project, is at our peril..
Patrick writes, “Worst of all, of course, is the spectacle of America’s direct participation … in the final stage of a terrorist state’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This will leave a scar on the [USA] that no future leader will ever be able to erase…”
-For me, this is the highpoint of a very good article (for which I’m grateful to both Patrick & CN). I was in college during the late 60s, & despite my decades of, let’s call it, “deep cynicism” about the US, I never dreamed it would be possible for this country, after basing so much of its reputation in the world on the Hollywood-ed version of WWII, to ever openly do just what the Nazis did. I naively thought that even the types of people who end up in Congress would’ve paused out of shame, before they’d go that far. I thought it would occur to them that “Hey, we can’t do that, because the public will see that we’re partnering in a genocide, and they’ve been taught all their lives that only Nazis do genocide, and we’re supposed to be the Great Anti-Nazis.”
Clearly, I overestimated them.
Excellent whipping you have administered, Patrick, to a lout who sadly does not even recognise the many egregious sins he has perpetrated against this country and among many other innocents, including most notably Russia and its honorable president Vladimir Putin. Yes, the damage will take decades to heal, and my generation (I am 77 yrs old) shall never live to see even the start of such a reconstruction. It seems we will be lucky to avoid mass annihilation in a nuclear conflagration that Genocide Joe and his cronies made more likely than not in his catastrophic 3.5 years in office! It almost makes me weep when I recollect the great opportunity that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev gave us and the world back in 1991. I was a Democrat at the time. I am totally non-partisan now, as both major parties have gone stark raving mad with their Russophobia and Russophrenia and neither command any respect or support. I realised that such an opportunity might never come again, making Reagan fully deserving of the highest accolades, yet even present-day GOPers have abandoned his praise-worthy logic, spawning mostly maniacs like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Hailey in the foreign relations arena. If either of these examples achieved the presidency they would be virtually certain to outdo Mr. Biden as Warmonger-in-chief.
Patrick, Neither you nor I have even mentioned the additional immense catastrophe that Crazy Joe
has instigated with the forceful injection of social-engineering in the form of open borders and a consequent flood of unknown, unaccounted, unemployed, uneducated, untrained, mostly impoverished and unpredictable minorities from all across the globe to the tune of multi-millions of such people suddenly thrust into our social milieu without the slightest idea of the consequences, except perhaps for the fondest hopes by Democrats that they will all be given the right to vote and that they will dutifully stuff the ballot boxes for Democrats. The Dems can’t hide these motives, in fact, Rachel Maddow explicitly proposed them long before they started to happen. I’m not sure that even Obama understands the dangers on this front. How does stoking racial hatreds improve anything at all for this country writ large? Name the beneficial outcomes of the riots triggered in Minnesota, aside for some local politicians. Young American males are already at a massive disadvantage in seeking higher education and/or finding job openings now not available to them under Joe’s avant garde “Woke” and DEI social philosophy. Patrick, I fear that America shall be reaping the whirlwind of Crazy Joe’s radical social and political experiments for generations, not mere decades. I am not looking to “make America great again” either, so do not err to make Trumpism my default alternative for a livable future, not one governed in a snarling pit of identity politics, which Crazy Joe and his voter “base” has most certainly brought us.
Lady Bird Johnson said publicly that when her husband asked her about running in ’64, she told him to run. At the SAME TIME she told him not to run in ’68. Little historical tidbit for those interested in little historical tidbits.
If the United States ever regains integrity, dignity, common sense and kindness toward people at home and abroad, it will certainly come long after my demise. I am so angry and sad that the world and those who call the U.S. home have been saddled with what amounts to a mess of pottage not worth feeding to the hogs. Perhaps our youth can begin to repair the breach and build back a more just and compassionate country devoid of the national hubris that has brought us to this pass. I pray to God they will, and wish them Godspeed!
One revolting thing this brute did that doesn’t get the attention it deserves was his spearheading of bankruptcy reform way back in the late 1970s. Biden was a crucial player in making student loans no longer eligible for full discharge in bankruptcy court c. 1977. He thereby saddled tens of thousands of Gen Xers and Millennials with a lifetime of student loan debt that’s impossible to get rid of. Biden sentenced these folks to a lifetime of debt bondage in which it’s virtually impossible for them to ever buy a home or have children.
They count on us to not have memories, here in the United States of Amnesia … good job bucking the narrative builders.
Yes, the senator from MBNA did a lot to saddle the American people into unpayable and also un-bankruptable debt. Thats so much, Scranton Joe, defender of the middle class!
Yes, the senator from MBNA also made it difficult to discharge credit card debt in bankruptcy.
Thanks, Patrick, for yet again telling it like it is “Pore Joe Is daid” without watering it down with any of the hypocrisy of “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum”. It’s unfortunate that our corrupt government and mainstream media can’t even begin to approach such honesty.
$ee – hear….