Bidenesque - Being Not Quite President While Little Miss Muffet Waits In The Wings

'God knows he's suffered enough', said Jill Biden to her aide-de-camp, concerned about the constant press reminders of her husband's mental health; but there was nothing she could do about his lapses, stumbles, and losing his way.  She tried - even sudoku and crossword puzzles - but nothing seemed to work.  He wandered, wanted to be read to, and was helped through his day by an attentive staff, teleprompters, and a clean desk. 

 

That last item was a godsend, for the President, when faced with sheafs of briefing papers just stared at them, shuffled them from one corner of the Lincoln, polished mahogany desk to the other, knowing there was something in them he had to look at but without the get-up-and-go to do so.  'Just remove them', Jill suggested to the President's Chief of Staff.  

Although she hesitated to make the allusion, she remembered how Ronald Reagan always had a clean desk.  His litany - patriotism, a small government, a strong military, private enterprise, and God - had earned him two terms and the love of the American people. 'A Shining City On A Hill' was what people remembered when they thought of the President and his reference to the Bible and the greatness of the Republic. One unique selling point.  Advertisers since snake oil salesmen knew this. 

But of course Joe had no such a succinct vision.  He was for the black man, gays, the environment, women; and a hundred other causes and issues - one big potpourri - with no real focus.  Adlai Stevenson was on the right track.  He was for the 'little man', and Herbert Hoover promised 'a chicken in every pot', but Joe got all tangled up when he began to speak, transgender this, pipeline that, Black History Month and Ukraine, and everything came out blah and indistinct. 

Oh, how he tried, but he raised his voice at exactly the wrong times.  His cadence did not match his words.  'If, when, but, and however' got the drumbeat and Putin, Kim, and oil got lost in a garbled mumble. No matter how everyone tried, they simply could not get the President to focus. 

He was becoming 'Bidenesque' a loose assemblage of old memories and past causes.  He meant well, and did have some of the compassion he talked about, but that was somehow linked to puppies and lost kittens; and he could never gin up the same feelings for The Black Man whom he knew he was to praise, reflecting on his tribal innocence, natural wisdom, and racial purity but could not.  

He simply couldn't shake the image of bling, Uzis, and the empty storefronts of the inner city, and each time he started in on the Black Man's position at the top of the human pyramid, he got lost 'in the sands of time', at the real pyramids, the Nile, and Nefertiti - the beautiful Nefertiti, now there was a woman! 

'He's only being Bidenesque' was the meme around the White House, the kindest, gentlest way of referring to the empty suit that sat in the Oval Office, 'a well-meaning, kind, elderly man with a poor memory', the characterization of the Special Counsel who referred to him in a document meant to exonerate him for wrongdoing in the misplacement of Top Secret files. 

'Let him be', said his Vice President, a greedily ambitious woman who knew that as long as she could prop up the old man for another few months, he would be re-elected, drop dead in his second term, and the Presidency would be hers.  As long as Biden was asleep in the Oval Office and not making matters worse by trying to make sense in public, she was safe. 

Out and about she was as toadying as could be.  Mr. President this, Mr. President that, holding chairs for him like a zoot-suited waiter at a fancy restaurant, fawning over him, loving him to death while all the while plotting like Clytemnestra and Tamora to get rid of him.  

She had long ago begun to form her own shadow campaign staff, young men and women with absolute faith in her ability speak for the nation, as a black woman  the embodiment of the progressivism the President could only talk about.  She would be the new Black Athena, a racial and gender firebrand putting the likes of Uncle Tom Obama far in the rear view mirror.  Hers would be the first real revolutionary presidency which would put diversity and inclusivity aside in favor of radical street justice.  She would shed her straight locks and goofy smile and go ghetto. Oh, what she would do! 

Yet closeting the President for the final eight months of the campaign year was not going to be easy, and even 'being Bidenesque' was far too dangerous.  There had to be a way to completely shut the fool up, but how?

The first move was to go toe to toe with Jill Biden who refused to acknowledge the President's dementia and wanted him out front and strong.  She needed to be put in her place.  After all she was a political non-entity, a cipher, a nothing in the dog-eat-dog world of Washington; and here she was pushing the old man off a cliff.  She meant well - the perks of First Lady would be nice for another four years - but what about the country?  She was too dumb to think beyond the wooden desks of her one-room schoolhouse Doctor Biden mentality. 

The President left the Oval Office sans retinue, escaped without handlers, alone and waving to no one in particular until an aide caught him in mid-stride and shepherded him into the cloak room, holding him firmly by the elbow until help arrived.  'How are you this morning, Mr. President', she said. 

'Which President?', Joe replied thinking she was referring to Washington or Lincoln just honored on the three-day weekend just past, and she buzzed for help, but even White House aides needed a break and forgot in their chatter to look up at the monitors in the cafeteria which would have shown grandpa wandering down the halls.

'This is not good', the Vice President said to her staff while thinking of baby tethers and car seats, anything to keep the man in place only for a few months.  And all this concern about a wayward President took time and effort away from her own plans for her future Presidency.  'Why can't the bloody fool sit still?', she yelled to the Ladies Room mirror. 

Now, ambition in a severely limited woman is not a pretty sight, and she couldn't see how wobbly and unhinged she was becoming She cackled at everything, bullied her way onto one-on-one television interviews where she made no sense at all, just cackling and meandering until the thankful end of the hour.  Even her most ardent supporters began to question her prospects.  While they would never admit this publicly, what on earth were they doing behind such a clueless clown?

So the West Wing was a mess - a dotty, doddering President, a crazy-as-a-loon, desperately ambitious Vice President, and a dimwitted First Lady. 

In Washington nothing stays private for long, and the conservative press quickly got wind of the Kamala-Jill catfights, the growing dementia of the President, and the Goneril and Regan plotting of the Vice President to send old Joe out on the heath to die.  They had a field day, and the American public, despite fear of Donald Trump, voted No Mas and the Biden era happily and finally came to an end. 

It all goes to show that power doesn't so much corrupt but only makes men act silly; and the Grand Guignol, Punch and Judy, vaudevillian show at 1700 was a jolly affair indeed.  It all ended on January 20, 2025 with the inauguration of Donald Trump.

American Politics - The Fine Art Of Bluster, Nonsense And The Rise Of A Progressive Star

Bobby Benson had grown up poor but advantaged.  His father was in the aluminum siding and encyclopedia business, and he accompanied him on his door-to-door calls. These bilking scams were part of the American entrepreneurial repertoire until the Seventies when they were outlawed.  'Buyer Beware' was not good enough to cover the silver-tongued, persuasive, engaging homilies and entreaties of Bobby's father who could get people to sign up for a thousand-dollar set of Britannica, no money down, one a month from A to Z, with interest, until they forfeited, the Indonesia knock-off books repossessed, and money in the pocket.

 

The aluminum siding business was even more lucrative - find a family deeply mortgaged in a dilapidated single family with roof rot and foundation problems and offer them a makeover in aluminum siding, guaranteed for a lifetime, painted and bossed for free.  Their house had been chosen to be a model for the new generation of siding, and 10 percent of the value of every neighboring family's new purchase would be passed on to them for free.

Of course no siding was ever put up, and all monies were absorbed for 'administrative costs' and parceled out to Bobby's father and his Newark crew to sell more phony contracts. 

Bobby's father was a genius at sales promotion. In his pitch he played on every parent's hope for Harvard, cloyingly, persuasively thumbing through the hardbound volumes to read about Aztecs or Zapotecs and digress into geography and cultural history.  No home could be without a complete set of books, guaranteed to raise IQ, intellectual interest, and academic ambition.

Satisfaction guaranteed, he always added unnecessarily since as usual the homeowner had taken the bait hook, line, and sinker and begged for more - special siding for a brother, a set of books for a cousin, until Bobby's father's order book was out of pages. 

Bobby was there to add 'dimension' to his father's pitch.  A bright young boy who had benefitted from the set of Britannica could sell books on his own, but as a member of the father-and-son tag team, he helped take home thousands. 

So it was not surprising that Bobby went into sales, first retail, then wholesale, and eventually into financial instruments, complex bundles of mortgages, securities, bonds, and commodities that made millions for his Wall Street investment firm. After selling fictional, never-to-be-built siding to Down Neck pipe fitters, getting rid of devalued but 'promising' securities to eager online customers was as easy as pie. 

Selling came naturally to him, and thanks to his father who never once looked back on a scam with regret or remorse, who not only believed in Caveat Emptor but 'A Sucker Is Born Every Minute', both complete exonerations of every sketchy scheme thought up by Wall Street or down home.  What was sales, after all, but selling a product which nobody needed, convincing them they did, and making millions from the deal?

Advertising was a fungible business - admen went from socks to Entresto in the blink of an eye.  Whether apparel or pharmaceuticals, there were consumers who never knew they needed them.

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Bobby's father was not the first in the family to make money from unregulated sales.  His great-grandfather Hiram had made a fortune from Johnson's Elixir, a snake oil derivative claimed to cure gout, rheumatism, and jittery nerves.  Marketed especially to women, the Elixir had erectile properties and when put in the coffee of diffident spouses would do wonders for their sex lives. 

His uncle had been a master of what had pejoratively been called Ponzi schemes but which were actually pure entrepreneurism - programs which encouraged 'economic pyramids', great schemes of shared upward value; dynamic, highly mobile and transferrable assets which would make everyone rich. 

'You should go into politics', said a colleague at Baxter, Burnham & Ross; and Bobby admitted that the thought had crossed his mind.  How could selling ideas to the American public be any different from aluminum siding or creative financial instruments? Ambition, a silver tongue, and a way with women were all that had ever been needed door-to-door, on the Street, or in cyberspace.  He was made for the job and through Washington connections, he made his first foray. 

He had patience but he was a comer, so up through the ranks he went, through county seats, to legislative assemblies, and finally to Washington as a member of the progressive alliance, a group of radical environmentalists, feminists, and racial reformers whose new manifesto claimed the future. 

Bobby could have gone either way, Left or Right, conservative or liberal, but thought that progressivism lent itself best to his particular skills.  It was by nature idealistic and unconcerned by the record of a a discredited history.  No proof was needed that the old ways of individualism, capitalist exploitation, and imperial rule had given the world nothing but misery; and that the new millennium of progressive vision would erase all that had come before to inaugurate the Year Zero of hope and promise. 

 

What could be more suited to a true salesman than progressive politics?  Selling a vision and a Utopian ideal was right up his alley.  Facts, figures, and the archival record of past investments, programs, and initiatives were supernumerary, incidental trip-ups of history.  If he could sell aluminum siding, he could sell the American people on the political version of A Child's Garden Book of Verse. 

And so it was that Bobby's cash registers rang and his campaign chests filled.  He was a master of purposeful elocution.  His stump speeches were masteries of allusion, reference, and innuendo. His sense of timing, phrasing, and emphasis practiced in the parlors of Newark and the offices of Wall Street served him well; and before long he was feted, in demand, and loved. 

Of course as a true American huckster, he had no commitment to the progressive program - it was simply the best suited for his brand of facile promotion - and he certainly had no intention of staying on the field until time, but it was a good go, an extremely profitable enterprise.  Most of the monies in his coffers were from his various PACs, so they were fungible and almost without restriction; so while in Washington he led the good life and was able through some creative investments find ample and reasonable financing for homes in Aspen and Palm Beach. 

When to the dismay of his colleagues he retired from public office and took his sizeable fortune to the Bahamas, the Cote d'Azur, and Gstaad, he was as satisfied as anyone could be.  He had been a good legatee of Lincoln whose inspiration about American gullibility had made him millions and at the same time was a patriotic citizen who honored and never once demeaned American can-do enterprise

Bobby was a man of his times, his place, and his culture - a real American, unashamed of his snake oil, Ponzi scheme, shell game, aluminum siding past, recognizing it as the popular foundation of wealth and opportunity, and above all the greatest game on earth.  How could anyone gifted with a silver tongue and without moral traces, be unhappy?

The Russians Militarize Space While The US Putzes Around On Mars - What Were We Thinking?

In the movie Dr. Strangelove the Russians have built a 'Doomsday Machine', a cluster of buried bombs set to detonate automatically should any nuclear attack strike the country. The resulting nuclear fallout would then engulf the planet for 93 years, rendering the Earth's surface uninhabitable. When a  rogue American nuclear bomb hits Russian territory, the Doomsday Machine will explode, annihilating the planet.  

 

Stanley Kubrick made the movie during the Cold War, at a time when both the United States and Russia were armed to the hilt with nuclear missiles, all pointed at each other and ready to be launched at the drop of a hat.  Optimists said that such guaranteed MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was the only reason the two countries did not go to war, while pessimists claimed that the arms race had brought the world closer to disaster than ever before.

There followed decades of disarmament and nuclear stockpiles were reduced but never decommissioned; and given the explosive power of just one hydrogen weapon, the chance for mutual annihilation seemed only  to have receded not disappeared.

Fat chance. Russia has now deployed nuclear weaponry in space and aimed it at New York, so tit for tat will begin again with plenty of room to make the generals on both sides happy; but what was the US thinking? and why has it been so busy putzing around on Mars looking for life when the real action is just a few miles off-planet. The only hope is that the inevitable war will be galactic between fully automatic space armadas, but that too is just whistlin' Dixie when the temptation to shoot downward will be hard to resist. 

Bob Muzelle had cut his teeth on the peace movement of the Sixties, and although complete detente was never achieved, at least the levels of parity were reduced.  In other words, complete annihilation would simply take a bit longer.

Bob was heartened by this spirit of bilateral cooperation between formerly implacable enemies. If such an agreement could be reached, then even more ambitious goals of world peace might well be achieved in his lifetime.  And so it was that peace morphed into civil rights which morphed into climate and all were fitted into the big tent of progressive values.

So it was with sadness that Bob, now an old man with more of life in his rear view mirror than on the road ahead, read the news of the Russian space deployment which was ironically on the same page of the Times as pictures of the Mars Rover, making its way back and forth across the surface of the planet poking and prodding, sifting and analyzing in hopes of finding life.

Bob had been an enthusiastic supporter of the space program because of its humanitarian, scientific, and intellectual promise.  'It can't happen again', he replied to cynics who said the US was only interested in militarizing space, and sending rovers here and there only helped perfect launch angles, trajectories, and soft landings.  Yet, here it was on page 3 above the fold. The Russians had pulled their nukes out of storage and put them a scant 250 miles from Earth.

 

Most Americans were too young to remember Sputnik and how the Russians beat us into space, and how our landing on the moon was a triumphant victory over the Reds far more than a technological achievement, and how the space race was the logical outcome of the adventure. 

Influence came and went, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history, but it hasn't taken long for Russia to recover and show its imperial colors once again.  While we were dithering with inclusivity, diversity, and gender, tending to inner society's needs while the rest of the world took advantage of our naïveté .  Of course, they say, there will be another major war, of course it will take place in part in space, and of course no holds will be barred. 

Ronald Reagan accelerated the downfall of his old nemesis, the Soviet Union, through a massive buildup of the American military to which the Russians had to respond, thus putting even more pressure on a failing socio-economic system.  Vladimir Putin knows that even if the missiles in space are not used for a while, they will disrupt the self-righteous, self-assured, desperately naive United States and force anti-progressive investments in war. 

 

So Bob once again donned his cleats and pads and went back onto the field.  He might be old and fading, but his fires had not gone out, only banked.  His country needed him more than ever. 'Give peace a chance', he shouted in a reprise of 1963 when he and the Reverend William Barnes Loughlin marched on the national Mall, demonstrating for nuclear disarmament.  Of course such liberal blandishments were music to Russian ears.  Once more the American giant was retreating into a Robert Louis Stevenson Child's Garden Book of Verse world, reading The Land of Counterpane instead of Churchill. 

Images of the Mars Rover, picking, pecking, and rolling its way over the Mars landscape were seen throughout Russia with the accompaniment old Soviet-style newsreels of bustling arms factories, launching rockets, and smiling spacemen. 

President Biden, thinking that all he had to worry about was Ukraine, was shaken by the news. The Jews were causing him immeasurable trouble in the Middle East; the corrupt Zelensky regime was sucking billions of dollars in military aid to keep the country afloat for just a few more months; the Iranians, delighted that no one was stopping their disruptive, canny proxy wars, were stepping up activities in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon; and that pesky fat bugger in Pyongyang was acting up yet again.  

And now this. Russian nuclear missiles in space.  What to do? It was an election year and his base, died-in-the-wool old liberals and young idealistic progressives wanted peace, cooperation, and consensus in a peaceful, verdant world. 

There was nothing he could do.  All the sanctions, threats, and attempts at intimidation over a nasty little war in Ukraine amounted to nothing.  Putin has continued the war, neutralized his opponents, and consolidated a hold on power.  The only recourse would be to defund the Rover and put billions into a nuclear, militarized space program.

Biden tested the waters, but his claques, too busy with their parochial issues of transgender rights and the Pinnacle of the Black Man enterprise were uninformed and unconcerned.  Space was certainly not a good campaign talking point and war with the Russians even less. 

'Do it before Trump gets re-elected', advised one of Putin's top military advisors knowing full well that the big man would be a royal pain in the ass, would do a Ronald Reagan and bet the store on space weaponry, and would not hesitate to pull the trigger.  

So Putin is amping up his space program, unconcerned that his investments are very public while Joe Biden is still trying to figure out what goes where and how to make sense let alone lead a nuclear counter-insurgency.