By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Ravens Coach Harbaugh’s “bold call” on fourth down leads Baltimore to a classic win over Kansas City. Nike’s new design marks a “bold new entry” in running shoes. And now, The New York Times hails “Biden’s Bold Words” as the lapdog media struggle to reignite the sagging, sordid saga of Joe.
It’s a tough job. They’d finally scrubbed Afghanistan from the headlines, only to discover that Joe’s much-celebrated “over the horizon” terrorist kill had actually eviscerated an entire innocent Afghan family. Did Joe order it? No one will tell, but Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley was in too much trouble already, so they trotted out a subordinate to take the blame.
In BidenWorld, there’s a lot of blame to take to go around — so bring on the bold. The New York Daily News hails the “Bold, Necessary Climate Strokes from Biden.” John Kerry quickly follows up with the promise that he will cooperate with the Communist Party of China on Global Warming, rather than confront the regime’s flagrant human rights violations. Biden’s open-border policy is destroying Del Rio, Texas, and clueless “Border Czar” Kamala hides out, while tens of thousands of prospective illegals from Latin America, Haiti, and at least a dozen African countries crowd the border. Inflation is rampant, stressing the already challenged supply lines and promising a difficult winter, especially for the poor, whose energy prices will sharply rise.
So what does Joe do? He goes to the beach.
Meanwhile, his controllers scramble to throttle questions — and, when they can’t prevent them, to take desperate measures to make sure that Joe doesn’t get a chance to answer them.
Joe’s New War
In the midst of this fiasco, Joe’s instructors ask Vladimir Lenin’s question: “What is to be done?”
Joe’s answer: “Go on the attack.”
The enemy? The unvaccinated.
Joe went before the United Nations last week to announce that America was finished with “relentless war.” He was now going to indulge in “relentless diplomacy.”
So while he hands off America’s role in the world to his hapless, incompetent State Department, Joe turns his guns on the real enemy: us.
“Biden’s Bold COVID Plan Is the Prescription America Needs,” Yahoo News “reports,” followed by the assurance that “he has the full legal power” to enforce his moves.
That’s quite a mouthful of creative unconstitutionalism. But it would cause no problem for an editor at the Ministry of Truth. Winston would make only one correction: “Comrade: Remove ‘legal’ — remember, all power of Big Brother is legal.”
There is a sinister symmetry at work here. The more disasters, the more vehement Biden’s response. He even targets his own troops. Federal employees must be vaccinated or he will fire them. The same goes for just about everybody Joe can control.
For those he can’t control, well, it won’t be long before he can.
A sidebar: Heretofore, it has been virtually impossible to fire a federal employee. The rule is written in stone. The bureaucrats’ tenure, their benefits, and their pensions are virtually sacramental. Joe’s threat to fire them is indeed “bold, audacious, and unprecedented.”
Rest assured, a future president — and he doesn’t have to be Donald Trump — will use Joe’s “precedent” as authority to fire federal employees who disobey any diktat he chooses. An attractive prospect.
But back to Joe. Here, he’s relying on the Lockdown Syndrome: “I can get away with it if I tell them ‘I’m just trying to keep you safe’.”
Waving that banner, Joe’s next target is the governors of the 50 states. If they don’t help him destroy all limits to his presidential powers, they had better “get out of the way,” he said last month. Of course, the obsequious New York Times slobbers that it’s only Biden’s “new level of frustration with Republican leaders” That elicits such outbursts. In fact, the media Peanut Gallery is welcoming the “bold, audacious, and unprecedented” as a new governing principle, which they will quickly send down the Memory Hole should they ever be burdened by a Republican chief executive in the future.
Angelo Codevilla, RIP
This week we lost a true and heroic friend of freedom.
Rarely does one mind move the moral compass of the country. Angelo Codevilla’s mind did just that, and powerfully.
In 2010, the pompous troika of Obama, Biden, and Hillary was pirouetting through history even as the country careened in confusion. Old wineskins were leaking like sieves. And the new wine was fouled at the source.
How had this come to pass? A regime elected under a “conservative” banner had spawned a bloated monstrosity at home even as it sought out monsters to destroy abroad. It fought “terrorism” there by building an intrusive, oppressive, and criminal national security state here at home.
Of course, this was all to “keep us safe.” So, predictably, the floundering behemoth handed the Congress and the White House to the Democrat Left, leaving old-fashioned freedom-loving Americans wandering aimlessly in the ruins.
In August 2010, Angelo Codevilla’s essay, “America’s Ruling Class,” appeared in the American Spectator. As the nascent Tea Party provided a symbol for the majority movement that Hillary later christened the “Deplorables,” Codevilla provided the analysis. Rush Limbaugh read all 6,000 words in segments of his indispensable daily monologue, millions of Americans awakened, and the spark burst into flame.
Codevilla’s insights not only inspired a movement, they articulated principles that inchoately prevailed, yet to be articulated, among the majority of Americans. Codevilla dubbed us “the Country Class,” who were, he revealed, considered to be mere subjects in the view of the powerful minority “Ruling Class.” That craven cabal not only governed us, but treated us with the contempt that we deserved.
The new definitions that Codevilla provided for the conservative conversation were indispensable to the rise of Donald Trump and to his victory in 2016. Trump’s ripping back the curtain on the true nature on the foul nature of our elites led to their own coming out party as a tyrannical, incompetent, and vicious husk of a Democrat party that had once been home to patriots, Catholics, working families, and millions of others who can no longer honestly abide there today.
They can’t go home again.
Angelo and I go back a long way. We met at Notre Dame over 50 years ago, where we studied under Gerhart Niemeyer, a leading political theorist of his generation. Angelo went on to serve as a naval officer, in the State Department, and then with the Republican majority on Capitol Hill, where he served on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee and I served on Foreign Relations. We conspired early and often.
Angelo was a spark plug for the Reagan Administration, a vital critic of the dilapidated arms control process, and a scintillating author of treatises on intelligence, foreign policy, and war at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and at Boston University’s Center on International Relations.
Personally, Angelo was a devoted family man, an engaging and keen partner in conversation, and an intrepid warrior. He was a hard worker. When he died this past week in an automobile accident, he was on his third heart.
Twenty-five years ago I visited him in a Boston hospital. Naturally, he was watching Casablanca from what we thought would be his deathbed.
His wife Ann disagreed. “I’m going to get him home by Christmas,” she said, and she did — and for 25 more Christmases as well.
Our prayers and gratitude flow to Angelo’s wife Ann and their five wonderful children.
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