A Looming Struggle Among Democrats Is Opened by Biden’s Decision To Stand Down

By Conrad Black

Despite the strenuous efforts of Democrats, both Vice President Harris’ supporters, and those, led by President Obama and Speaker Pelosi, seeking a stronger candidate, to pretend the retirement of President Biden is an instant panacea for their party’s electoral prospects, they are not escaping their responsibilities for the debacle of the last four years that easily.

Mr. Obama intervened in 2016 to ensure that Secretary Clinton and not Mr. Biden was his successor as Democratic presidential nominee. Mrs. Clinton was not the answer to the nation’s prayers but she is certainly a good deal more capable than Mr. Biden, and it was not possible for Mr. Obama and the other Democratic powers to realize that she would be a deficient candidate or to comprehend that the dissatisfaction of the lower half of American income earners was as profound as President Trump exposed it to be.

In 2020, all of the Democratic factions were able to unite on what they imagined to be an aggregation of brilliant maneuvers to assure the defeat of Trump, the hot pursuit of a far left “ultra-progressive” (though the progress has been backwards) program and the elevation of an un-frightening figurehead suitably rewarded for nearly 50 years as an amiable but increasingly spavined party wheel-horse.

The perversion of the intelligence agencies and the FBI to insert the Steele dossier of defamatory lies into the media just before the 2016 election as authentic intelligence, and the subsequent spurious Mueller investigation failed to derail Trump. The nonsensical impeachment over Trump’s request of the president of Ukraine to let him know if the Biden family had committed financial improprieties in Ukraine, not, as was falsely alleged, to require inculpatory evidence of him on pain of losing American financial assistance from the United States, while unsuccessful, did effectively bury the issue of the Bidens’ intercontinental influence-peddling operation past the election.

Although Ms. Harris bombed so badly in 2020 that she canceled her candidacy even before the primaries began, and Mr. Biden was badly defeated and ran fifth in New Hampshire with only 11 percent of the vote, it was still within the gift of the party bosses, despite Mr. Obama’s warnings about Mr. Biden’s limitations, to deliver the nomination to him on Super Tuesday.

With twice the money of the Trump campaign, thanks to the well-earned gratitude of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the continuing 95 percent support of the national political press, the Democrats were still not quite able to win the election so they had recourse to the ultimate weapon in their bag of tricks: invocation of the excuse of the pandemic to send out tens of millions of unsolicited ballots according to partially obsolete voters’ lists, raising concerns about unverifiable ballots and ballot harvesting by a largely unionized army of Democratic foot soldiers , and taking advantage of changes to voting and vote-counting rules whose constitutionality, despite 19 major lawsuits, was never adjudicated on the merits.

It worked; it was a brilliant plan, cemented by the instant reclassification of the antics of a small number of hooligans hiding amongst a vast crowd of Trump supporters on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021 as insurrectionists inspired and directed by Trump. With this and the further histrionic nonsense of a second unsuccessful impeachment designed to remove him from an office in which his ostensible successor had already been inaugurated, the Democrats assumed that they had driven a silver stake through the heart of the Trump political phenomenon.

Then, it gradually all unraveled. The ten million illegal migrants, many of them shipped by the border states all around the country so that everyone could share the pleasure and the challenge of receiving such a large number of destitute and unskilled people — among whom are dangerous criminals,  terrorists, and fentanyl importers — have angered and dismayed the whole nation.

The imposition of a green terror that has attacked the oil and gas industry and gravely financially inconvenienced half the entire country with needlessly increased energy costs and depressed conditions in parts of the American energy sector, has been a disaster. The insane extravagance triggered a wave of inflation, which was minimal during Trump’s presidency, and along with the related price increases and tax increases, has reduced the disposable income of the great majority of Americans.

Permissive Democratic prosecutors and the misguided Democratic enthusiasm for defunding the police has caused skyrocketing urban crime. The departure from Afghanistan was a national disgrace and humiliation, the aid to Ukraine has been sensible and reasonably ample, but it is not accompanied by any strategy to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion.

And in one of the final disastrously inelegant attempts at artistic political cynicism, the Biden attempt to help Israel “defend itself” has been unconscionably curtailed by a lot of pompous hypocrisy about how not to destroy what the American government has long recognized to be a terrorist organization, Hamas. Its initial provocation of Israel last October was recognized by the whole world except a few Islamic militants in the Democratic Party as a casus belli that entitled Israel to destroy the Hamas terrorist organization.

All of Biden’s helpers and handlers and enablers knew that he was not up to this responsibility when he started, and all who have seen him at close quarters are aware of his steep decline in mental and physical capabilities. In their cynicism, this was not at all inconvenient as long as the public didn’t see the full proportions of it. In the June 27 debate, it became embarrassingly clear. The concern of the Democratic establishment was not the president’s condition but his inability to win reelection once his condition was known to the country.

It was an inexpressibly shabby business from beginning to end and the Biden family is right to feel thoroughly betrayed by those for whom the president carried water on both shoulders for decades. Inadequate and duplicitous though he has been, Mr. Biden has the same entitlement to civilized treatment as everyone else. Nor should he resign now: getting through six months is not like four-and-a-half years, and people demanding it just want to be sure Harris is the candidate — Republicans and Democrats, for different reasons.

There will now follow a nasty struggle between the Biden-Harris faction and the Obama-Pelosi faction, with the Clintons yet to be heard from. They are all complicit in the dirty tricks and the incompetence of the Biden era.  In all of the circumstances, Trump’s reflections on the departure of Mr. Biden, though ungracious, are not unwarranted. It has been a severely incompetent and deeply corrupt administration that has swiftly collapsed after doing great damage to the country, and it will not enjoy a more ceremonious burial than it deserves.

First published in the New York Sun