One of the most disturbing characteristics of our nation’s capital is the lack of accountability for bad behavior of almost any kind by elected players or appointees. Sadly, it's a bipartisan affliction.
True, voters can unelect these people at the next election if their memory and outrage are strong and sufficiently enduring, though that rarely occurs.
These officeholders get away with all kinds of skullduggery. Consider Benghazi, for instance, under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Leon Panetta. Four loyal government workers, including an ambassador, were murdered by terrorists due to a lack of preparation, security, backup, and rescue.
Thirteen years later, even after lengthy GOP House Oversight hearings, no one, not a single person in charge, was held accountable, even when the president disappeared for the entire episode and never offered an explanation.
And how do so very many members of Congress somehow become incredibly wealthy on a $174,000 annual salary? Nancy Pelosi was paid $223,000 a year as Speaker of the House, but is now worth in excess of $114 million.
That kind of Swamp stench was major fuel for the unexpected 2016 uprising that sent a political rookie like Donald Trump into the White House, now twice.
So, it’s quite tempting this week to feel fresh hope that the same man also will pioneer the imposition of some consequences and possibly punishments on the Band of Bidens and their cronies who spent the last four years playing the presidency for profits and the American people for fools.
They quite possibly would have gained a four-year extension of their grift but for the arrogance and pride of Joe Biden challenging Trump to an early debate one year ago this very month. Team Biden was cocksure it could put Trump out of their misery for good.
During the first five of those 90 painful minutes on national TV, Biden was revealed to be what RedState readers already knew him to be: no longer mentally competent to remain commander in chief. If he ever was.
READ MORE: Joe Biden Is Exhausted. So Is the Country. Our Rocky Road Toward Divorce.
Biden stole speeches from other politicians, not realizing he would inevitably be exposed. So, he was never smart enough to organize the colossal collusion it took to mask his shuffling senility for so long.
It took a massive multi-year team effort by his younger wife, Jill, and senior aides he trusted for decades to mute and hide his mounting mental and physical infirmities. Advisers like Anita Dunn, Steve Richetti, Ron Klain, and Mike Donilon. And they got a media assist.
They used selective scheduling and timing, careful shielding, screening, and downright lying about the 81-year-old commander in chief being “sharp as a tack” and running rings around assistants.
Media cooperated, pronouncing Biden totally fit for another term even two years ago, while raising questions about Trump's condition.
To be sure, Biden did say he wanted a second term. Biden also said other things that Mark Twain would have labeled “stretchers” and many more things that were downright fables, often repeatedly and after debunking.
Most of us know too well from personal experience with aging parents and relatives the signs of significant or even minor, mounting diminishments in memory, thinking, energy, and decisions.
It’s inconceivable that Jill Biden and those aides in hourly proximity to him somehow missed such signs of decay. Not coincidentally, a second Biden term would keep those aides and family members in well-paid, prominent public positions of power and influence with opportunities now and later to reap substantial financial rewards.
In any normal family outside Washington, that would constitute de facto elder abuse.
And yet these relatives and associates not only allowed his reelection decision, they encouraged it, facilitated it, and actively sold it to the public as beneficial for the country and party, all the while knowing the truth.
READ MORE: A Scary Fact: President Biden Is Not All There and No One Is Doing Anything
And using the “threat” of a Trump return as convincing evidence of the compelling need to keep Biden in the White House, of course, along with his wife and team of accomplices.
Members of Congress and Hollywood types like Jeffrey Katzenberg were equally complicit in this collusive plot to convince others that, golly, they had seen no changes in Biden’s razor-sharp intellect. It certainly looks like there’s some legal culpability there.
Conveniently, such a probe will keep the dim-bulb Biden era in the news and in voter memories as midterm elections near. Will Biden boosters help the GOP and rise to the bait, attempting a defense of that indefensible political con game?
Unfortunately for them – oh, and by the way, an entire nation that they took an oath to serve – selling Joe Biden as a president fully capable both physically and mentally of leading the United States and the free world had potentially disastrous national security implications.
The country was at great risk from numerous ambitious adversaries, actually for the entire time Biden was in office, with a handpicked airhead vice president in the wings. What was especially perilous was the 183-day period that he remained in the White House after agreeing that he should not continue in office.
My question at the time was: Wait, how can Biden be just fine for the last six months of his term, but on Jan. 20 suddenly turn incompetent and become incapable of serving out a second term?
The Biden buyout did extricate Pelosi and Chuck Schumer from their own handmade jam involving a jury-rigged primary process designed for Biden's win. More than two years ago, we asked if Biden could survive his term, let alone another one.
But the desperate political coup at the hands of just two party elders arbitrarily overturned the choices of some 16 million Democrat primary voters. And it installed Kamala Harris, who’d been the DEI choice of one man and not a single voter.
Democrat leaders like Pelosi and Schumer awarded Biden the extra months of incompetence as the price for the incumbent giving up the party’s 2024 nomination. Never mind the country’s welfare, Biden pride and the party’s desperation to dump him were most important.
This past week, Trump ordered his counsel to work with Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Biden’s mental state and actions during the closing weeks of his term, especially the use of the autopen to sign documents such as legislation and pardons. Did the president know what was being done in his name, things like commuting the executions of dozens of death row inmates?
In his memo, Trump noted Biden had “suffered from serious cognitive decline” for years. The 47th president wrote:
In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority.
This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.
In a statement carrying his name, Biden is reported to have said, “I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
Naturally, you did not see that much about Trump's action in the mainstream press, which was much more excited by the noisy playground scuffle between the president and Elon Musk.
Some people might suggest, given the country’s current polarization, that this investigation is political retribution by Trump. For what exactly, someone else might ask?
The most likely reason would be the 91 felony counts in four separate indictments placed against Trump in recent years by Democrat prosecutors in widespread jurisdictions designed to cripple his reputation, resume, image, personal finances, campaign schedule, and political career.
As obvious as it was, that lawfare tactic failed to achieve its goals. In fact, it engendered considerable public sympathy that may have significantly aided the president’s successful reelection last November.
The credibility and reputation of mainstream media, meanwhile, have taken two more gut punches from this Biden episode. One was for clearly facilitating the coverup by ignoring or playing down the worsening signs of Biden’s condition, such as his foggy mind and need for notes reminding him to sit down in a meeting.
The other blow is to media now seeking to profit from books and revelations detailing inside information about the Biden coverup as if the indignant writers did not know the situation all along and were just, you know, terribly fooled by those evil, conniving White House types.
We won’t know the legal outcome of the latest investigation for some time. It could have a marginal effect on next year’s midterm elections, which usually trend against a president’s party. At the moment, however, the enduring impact on Democrats of the deceitful dementia cover-up seems pretty much set in stone.
I would argue, however, that the more important, lasting result is the potential precedent that such an investigation, if honest and transparent, could set for finally installing some internal legal accountability for all performers in what remains that fetid, self-serving Swamp.
