Sleepy Joe's long slide

I'm not really sure what's been going on with Biden lately, but I don't see a single bit of the spark he used to have years ago. Go back to the Obama years and Joe was pretty much a firebrand, whatever you thought of his politics. I never saw the appeal to him as a candidate or politician, as he has essentially been nothing but a careerist schmoozer most of his life, not that it makes him any different from anyone else in Washington who has been around for decades. Knowledge of how to govern and good civics really has nothing to do with pressing the flesh and winning votes. Sometimes they overlap, but not often.

I get the desire to so badly see Trump booted from office that running the person with name recognition and deep pockets and connections, whatever his weaknesses, seemed like the most desirable move. I don't have a lot to say about Trump as a president, because I don't think there was a lot there. Lots of bluster and bragging, not a lot to back it up, and a cabinet with a life expectancy that would have made even Stalin blush (at least when Trump fired someone, they didn't get a Tokarev put against the base of their skull).

The Democratic party has unfortunately descended into a gerontocracy, where careerist politicians battle the woke millennials, and it suffers for it. Bill Clinton was a huge epinephrine shot into the veins of a dying party - imagine someone having the stones to replaced "Happy Days are Here Again" with music that was a least a generation newer? Obama was new and fresh (and clean, according to Joe) when he ran for office, but that time has come and gone. The Democrats could have put someone younger up as a candidate instead of Hillary and Joe, but those people didn't have a lock on the party and therefore the nomination.

So, what we got for president (unless he resigns sometime soon), is an old man who can't string a coherent thought together and looks like he is going to keel over at the podium every time he gives a speech. The funny gaffs have been replaced by a mental fog that is just painful to watch. Of course, any pressure to remove Biden is mitigated by the thought of Kamala sitting in the Oval Office. Remember that she was so unpopular then she dropped out of the race even before the first primaries.

Of course, Joe is sitting in the driver's seat at a time when things aren't getting any better. Covid is up, terrorism is going to be back in fashion soon, and inflation is likely to keep shooting up like a bottle rocket. It's pointless to predict details of the future, but the trends aren't looking so good lately, and the man who is ostensibly in charge can't get through a press conference without holding his head in his hands and hoping everything would just go away. 

It's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to be a blowhard like Trump, and it's okay to be an arrogant jerk. What's not okay is to look like you're not up to the job. That tends to make people start to think they're on their own because no one's running the show, and that leads to fragmentation and civil unrest if taken far enough. It goes without saying that when people aren't on the same page, and don't trust a single word they're being told, and think the man in charge needs to be headed to Shady Pines for a nice bowl of steamed prunes, nothing good is going to happen.