Joe Biden And The Mystery Of The Missing Documents–A Fairy Tale In The Land Of Nod

Presidents of the United States was never provided with a burn bag.  His desk was always to be as clean as a whistle, documents hand delivered, scanned for relevance, and returned to sender where they would  be appropriately filed or burned.  Dealing with classified, secret, or top secret documents was never to be an issue for the Chief Executive, only for his underlings

The classified documents found in Biden’s garage and in the To Do files of his Washington think tank had gone missing during his Vice Presidency and tenure as the Senior Senator from Delaware, and the President hadn’t a clue how they had gotten there.  He had  been extremely careful about burning all Hunter’s correspondence – he knew that they could come back to bit him someday.  He had warned his son about such carelessness.  If he wanted to do crypto things with Chinese and Russian investors, no paper trail could follow him. Just take the cash, bank it in the Caymans, let it cool for a while, then double check it at the payout windows in Vegas.  Just don’t write anything down.  When his son insisted on scribbling potentially incriminating notes to him, he burned them after reading, reminded his son of the perfidious nature of Washington, and went back to Delaware’s and Barack Obama’s business.

So where was the burn bag when it came of officially classified documents?  Moreover, as far as he could remember, there was never anything of global importance that ever came his way from the Oval Office.  Biden had suffered through years of Vice Presidential lackeyhood just  like all other men who had sat in his chair; and to be honest he would be the last one to share anything with that ambitious vixen down the hall he had been conned into taking as a running mate.  A cipher, a totem for mixed race, diverse, inclusive America but without a brain, a meddler never to be trusted. 

He had a vague recollection of a smarmy FBI file on Netanyahu – J. Edgar Hoover could not have been more insidious and rumor-mongering – stamped ‘Secret’ or a few others on the backyard doings of Donald Trump; but in the main he was kept out of the loop, never saw anything of interest except some Bureau of the Budget spread sheets he couldn’t make heads nor tails of.  No, his tenure as Obama’s Vice President was as far from Top Secret as a tub of dirty bathwater.

“Purloined”, he imagined, removed late at night be an aggrieved staffer, whisked away, then deposited in the Wilmington garage during one of the President’s famous North Carolina barbecues; but more than likely odds and ends thrown helter-skelter his briefcase without looking on his way to Rehoboth for the weekend.

His wife knew better than anyone how forgetful and careless her husband could be. He was such a happy talker in those days with devil-may-care bonhomie, a caretaker and go-to man from a small, politically minor state; and it was not surprising that he scooped classified papers off his desk without thinking.  Who cared, really, when his entire ethos was doing good?  What were a few errant papers?

The President had a few good snickers while watching the movie Breach in the White House basement one night. Breach is the story of Robert Hanssen, biggest spy in US history who played cloak-and-dagger and squirreled away top secret information for the Soviets in tree trunks in Rock Creek Park until he was finally caught.  Buggering him for a few wayward bits of insignificant information wasn’t exactly counter-espionage.

When this all happened to Donald Trump and the FBI carried out a witch hunt at Mar-el-Lago, ad news of the raid reached him, the former president finished his T-bone, put his arm around Miss Connecticut, and said, “Honey, let’s dance”.  There was no national umbrage because voters knew that he had been set up just as he always had been; and even if he had deliberately stowed away some incriminating information collected about his enemies in the still of the night, that was simply Trump being Trump.  Of course he played fast and loose with the law.

Biden, however, was elected because of Donald Trump’s vaudeville show.  Biden was to be the anti-Trump, a man of moral principle, rectitude, and devoted service.  So when he was found to have spirited away classified documents all over the place, Republicans hit the roof and fellow Democrats who believed their man was beyond reproach, huddled in cloak rooms to decide next steps.  Biden had never done anything on his own, read from prepared speeches on teleprompters, and did pretty much what his handlers told him to do, so now, bottom of the ninth, the game on the line and the election coming up, they had to do something.

“Ignore it”, they advised until the conservative press, smelling blood, demanded more.  “A big fuss about nothing”, the President then said as he was boarding Air Force One for Wilmington. “Nothing in them, old recipes, work of an overeager aide with a Top Secret stamp”.  The baying grew louder.  Biden was a serious man, a moral man, a disciplined and proper man; so if he purloined classified documents, there must be something to it. 

“For the life of me I cannot simply remember them”, the President said to his wife as she tucked him in, but Jill knew better than that.  Despite the calls for her husband’s resignation on grounds of failing mental acuity, he was easily fooled, befuddled, and distracted, but never careless.  As a matter of fact, he was proud of the fine Moroccan leather briefcase engraved with the Presidential Seal that he carried with him on trips; and quite careful about arranging the papers and files he hoped to read so that his hairbrush, pomade, and trimmer would not damage them.

The issue was mental waywardness.  He might have been well aware of what he was doing at the time, but now, in the mist of a distant, all but forgotten past and his growing inability to grasp even the most salient points of discussion, he simply had no clue of what happened yesterday let alone fifteen years ago.

“It’ll die down, Joe”, Jill said comfortingly as she turned off the light.  “A tempest in a teapot.  You’re a good man”; and with that the President recited his favorite nursery rhyme about Wynken, Blynken,, and Nod.

God And Man In The White House–No Spiritual Advisors Need Apply

“I’m not that kind of reverend”, said the Reverend Al Sharpton when approached by President Biden concerning an appointment as Spiritual Advisor to the President, and with all due respect he went on to explain how his life was now committed to the streets not the pulpit, suffering not preaching, and social ills not the Ten Commandments.

“Would you accept something part time?”, replied the President.

Joe Biden’s White House had been as secular as they come and determinedly so.  He, his administration, and his enabling supporters in Congress, had defiantly refused the likes of Billy Graham, presidential groupie who feathered his own nest with his kneel-downs in the Oval Office. 

Prayer breakfasts were only distractions from the real business at hand.  The less people turned to the magic of religion for guidance and inspiration and listened more to the appeals of good men and women fighting for social justice, the better off the country would be.  Religion while perhaps not Marx’s opiate of the people, was certainly no more than an after-dinner sweet; so the President’s new interest in spiritual advice surprised his inner circle and set off rumors of evangelism.  

The President was already having more and more of his shaky moments, veering recently off message and off theme, drifting here and there back to his boyhood, receiving communion at the altar rail, assisting Father Mullins at the 9 o’clock Mass, and happy summers at Rehoboth.  What if religion had finally surfaced like a long-dormant virus?

The problem was that the President was 80 years old, more than likely living his last decade on earth, and like many men his age he felt unready to face the unknown.  His perfunctory attendance at Mass was no more than getting a membership ticket punched, proof that he was still a Catholic but a flagging one.  The years of dogged progressivism had eroded whatever faith he had had as a boy.  The idea of an intervening, merciful, forgiving, and benevolent God had become a silly fairy tale.  

Reality – the hard streets of the inner city, the rancid smell of bad food, bling and spinners, ho’s and pimps, Glocks and posses – was something that God had never bothered with and never would.  Only man could make a difference, and he was elected to do just that.

Yet the niggling thought of death was as persistent ringing in the ears and came to the president at odd times – on his morning walks in the Rose Garden, in the presidential limousine, in Cabinet meetings, and on Air Force One.  You are unprepared, said the little voice in his head.  The President was nonplussed. What was happening to his hard resolve and determination? His salvation depended on the salvation of the country, and no deathbed conversion, personal epiphany, or finding Jesus would ever change that.  His was a collective path, not the wild, gyrating, speaking in tongues, nonsense of backcountry cracker visions.  Born once was enough in this troubled world, and he knew his way.

His aides acted quickly to stem the disconcerting wobbliness of their boss, and located a number of pastors who were spiritually anointed in name only – tenders of the flock with messages of social justice, civil rights, and environmental sanity.  

The Reverend Doctor Phipps P. Blanton of the Westphalia Church of Christ was their first choice.  Pastor Blanton led a congregation of wealthy white suburbanites, progressive to the core and only a step away from Unitarian Universalism in their very secular approach to religion.  They wanted to be chastened not for their spiritual waywardness but their ignorance of black plight, the caged spirit of closet transgenders, and the frustrated ascent to the glass ceiling of women; and so every Sunday to a full house, Phipps Blanton earned his keep.  

He was a talented orator who had learned technique from his black seminary classmates who had returned to the South and made careers of potent evangelism.  Blanton could cajole, tease, blandish, and chastise with the best of them; but whereas his Methodist mates urged submission to Jesus, Blanton preached moral victory.  Go back to the barricades, he said, recapture the freedom-riding days of your youth.  Sit in at lunch counters, consort with blacks, defy the white establishment.

And so a meeting between the Reverend Blanton and the President was arranged. Blanton was delighted at this opportunity to preach to the President, to channel Billy Graham, and to give him the moral and spiritual support that would help him to achieve his progressive reforms.

The President who was expecting an early ‘Let us pray’ was disappointed by the Reverend Blanton’s overtures of white guilt solidarity, black wannabee contrition, and, from a Catholic point of view, blasphemous references to Papist idolatry.  Blanton would not do; and neither would a string of liberal, secular, in-name-only spiritual leaders.

“Get me a Catholic”, the President advised his staff, and so they did; but it was much harder to find a priest with a secular vocation than a Protestant.  The Catholic clergy was still fixated on sin, transubstantiation, the mystery of the Mass, and the holy sacraments.  “Have you been to confession recently?”, asked one priest, honing right in on Catholic guilt.  None of your business thought the President, showing the priest to the door, ushering in the next applicant, a gay priest who had managed to fly under the radar of the Vatican, keep his sexuality under wraps, and keep his job.  He didn’t quite sashay into the Oval Office, but the President knew that his counsel would come with codicils, so out he went.

The President was more confused than ever, angry at this lineup of spiritual predators.  “I’m going to die soon”, he thought. “I don’t need these twits”.

The next Sunday morning the President went in mufti to St. Ann’s church.  He blessed himself with holy water and took a seat in a back pew. He opened his missal and followed order of the Mass.  There was no politics here, no fol-de-rol, no hectoring and hammering about social justice or the black man.  Just the Mass, the invocation, the Kyrie Eleison, the consecration, and the Ite Missa Est. It was a chastening experience, a return to spiritual simplicity, and in the regularity and predictability of the litany, a sense of calm and belonging,  He had no need of spiritual counsel, just the Mass was enough.

There was no need for any more Protestant preachers, no more finding Jesus, no more deceptive and insulting social cover for belief.  Things were in their place, God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world.  Death finally made sense, and progressive flailing for a secular Utopia made none.  

It seemed that the President had some sense after all. He gave religion in America its due, lightened up a bit on the dogged secularism of his progressive supporters, and never gave a second thought to Billy Graham, prayer breakfasts, or political spiritualism.  Regardless of the fantasy and impossibility of his political agenda, at least it wasn’t couched in anti-religionist cant, at least not in his office.  The Congressional Left kept thundering on about social inspiration and civil justice, the black man, and irremediable change, but Joe knew otherwise.  From now on he would keep his own counsel, and unbeknownst to even his closest advisors, he began to veer to the Right.