Ousting Biden
"Maybe Mike and Steve just did it, and then told him he had no choice."
I am outraged! As George Bush said: “this aggression against Kuwait will not stand!” Americans were born as free men and women. We will never accept this high-handed usurpation. The die is cast. The dogs of war are let slip. The red sunglasses are on. My friends: I will see you in the streets! What will come, will come. Like Nathan Hale, I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country, and my President.
Don’t tell me I’m overreacting. Look at all these alarming overtones of a Third World coup, right down to isolating the leader in seclusion—Gorbachev relinquishing power, from his dacha in Delaware, by an op-ed in Izvestia. Can we at least get him on video? Can we at least get proof of life? While the President lives, there is hope!
From the objective, Rankean method of history, we do not know any other fact than that someone who knows the President’s password resigned for him. Maybe it was the President. Maybe it was some 27-year-old girl who looks like a horror-movie doll:
The Times has an official “inside” timeline. Anything in it that involves more than three people probably happened. We will get a video statement at some point. But—Maybe Mike and Steve just did it and then told him he had no choice—like Cecil and Walsingham executing Mary Queen of Scots, then telling Elizabeth. (She had signed the death warrant. But she thought that was the next to last step, not the last step.) Maybe they told him that unless he changed his mind, they would do it for him… if he objected, what would he have done? Log in to Twitter and change his password? When push comes to shove, his staff has all the power. Even if they don’t use it. Probably it happened the way the Times says it happened. But that doesn’t matter.
Everyone on the Internet and also IRL is giving me credit for getting this right. Fine. I’ll take it. Ultimately, a Democratic President cannot have any stable monarchical power, because monarchical power is only stable if the monarch believes in himself. But in order to stay in the job, you have to believe a thousand unbelievable things—always twisting your spine to the party line. Something convinced Biden that busing, actually, was a good idea. My guess is that it wasn’t an argument. The Democratic politician plays the proud and principled statesman on the show, and Seal Team 6 could really use John Wick if John Wick was real. But they’re not looking for Keanu.
A human being who really believed in himself could never get that job. Perhaps the last real statesman—a genuinely independent thinker in politics—in the Democratic Party was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Try to imagine a Moynihan in the Senate today! Biden simply did not have the personal self-confidence needed to keep his position—the idea that Washington needed his leadership and guidance was a fantastic parody of the idea that, say, Atatürk’s Turkey needed his leadership and guidance. There are no leaders in an oligarchical system of government—by definition.
I wasn’t endorsing “Biden.” I was endorsing Biden—the man, not the symbol. As the physical body of the President decayed, the image and the reality converged. The human being born in FDR’s administration, and the rotting symbolic remains of FDR’s personal monarchy, became one. There’s such divinity that doth hedge a king. My President! It is not too late, still, to call your people into the streets. I’m there.