The United States currently has a president who really isn’t the president and a Democratic nominee who received zero votes.
Between now and the end of his term, the worst possible scenario is one in which President Joe Biden is able to fein competence, but in reality is only mimicking the words and policy positions of others.
I don’t care how many smart people are working to compensate for Biden’s deficiencies, “Presidency by Committee” is not the form of government the Founding Fathers intended for this country, and for good reason.
Unelected officials should not be running the government in the absence of a competent president.
Being effectively leaderless is dangerous. Decision making is clumsy and infighting inevitable.
Making matters worse is Biden’s eagerness to impact how history will evaluate his presidency. The president almost certainly had his legacy in mind when he agreed to the recent prisoner exchange with Russia.
Russia released more than a dozen individuals it had wrongfully detained, the most prominent among them being Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.
In exchange, the United States and its allies agreed to release convicted criminals and people the Kremlin now acknowledges were spies.
By far, the most significant individual returned to Moscow was a high-ranking officer in the Russian secret service. Vadim Krasikov was serving a life sentence in a German jail for the 2019 murder of an opponent of the Russian regime in a central Berlin park.
Everyone should be happy for the Americans who were released, but I fear the exchange has only encouraged Russia and other bad actors around the world to take American hostages. The strategy clearly pays off for them.
Russian President Vladimir Putin knows nothing prevents him from kidnapping a few more American citizens anytime he wants to replace those he just gave up.
Biden is chasing a legacy, and for all intents and purposes, the U.S. government is on auto-pilot. America’s friends and enemies alike are right now assessing how they can take advantage of the situation.
Is it just coincidence that in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s forcible removal as his party’s nominee, Israel decided to bomb and kill a senior Hezbollah leader in Beirut, and the head of Hamas’ military wing in Tehran?
The American government is currently distracted and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw an opportunity to act.
But if Biden offers our adversaries short-term opportunities, a Kamala Harris presidency would be a gold mine for any country or group eager to diminish America’s global influence.
I’m glad Biden is out of the race. He is a lousy president and was an even worse candidate, but to replace him with Harris, whom GovTrack, a government transparency site, in 2019 rated the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate is hardly a positive development.
Biden is a self-proclaimed moderate who governed as a progressive for purely political reasons.
Harris is an authentic San Francisco progressive who will govern as a San Francisco progressive, regardless of what she pretends to be today.
Hardly the third choice I was hoping for.
Voters are being told they should forget everything they know about Vice President Harris and replace it with the new version of the candidate her campaign is in the process of creating.
Still, I have to believe there are very few Americans who don’t already know who Harris really is, and what kind of president she would be.
But hate is a powerful motivator, and Democrats have been conditioned for years to believe Donald Trump is a monster who must be stopped at all costs.
That hate is now so ingrained in their thinking, Democrats will even accept a candidate as obviously inept as Harris.
George Orwell wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
It must be apparent to most Americans that Harris’ candidacy is an effort to give the “appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
In so many ways, progressives have pushed this country to the precipice. I can’t help but think a Harris administration would lead us right off the edge, with loyal Democrats like lemmings following right behind.
The sad truth is that most Democrats will accept and defend whatever persona Harris decides to adopt for the coming election. When you get right down to it, most people really don’t care whether they’re being lied to or not, as long as it’s their own party and their own candidate doing the lying.
We’ve reached a point now where it is irrelevant to most Democrats who their nominee is. Like Joy Reid, they would have voted for “Biden in a coma.”
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Porky Pig — it doesn’t matter.
The question is not how many Democrats will buy the farce, but rather, how many will choose to ignore what they know are lies and vote for Harris anyway.
“The problem is people are being hated for being real and loved for being fake.” — Bob Marley
Chris Roemer is a retired banker and educator who resides in Finksburg. He can be contacted at chrisroemer1960@gmail.com
