I’ve been thinking a lot about things lately. Politics, culture, religion, the state of the world. How close we are to civil war if not WWIII.
Little things like that.
Mind you, I’m not being black-pilled. Nor am I a pollyanna. Nosiree, Bob! not I. I tend to look at things with the cold, hard eye of the realist. And truth be told, it’s easy for some people to think I’m a pessimist. All one has to do is look around the present state of the world and think we’ve descended into a Hieronymous Bosch type of hell-scape. Remember the opening ceremonies at the Paris Olympiad? (I’m trying to forget.)
More will be written later about the political situation in the United States (and of course the geopolitical situation as well).
For now, I want to talk about Joe Biden. The man in the White House, the man who, back in 2020, was literally rigged into office. If you don’t believe me, look at this graph.—–>
I’ve been thinking about the entire arc of Biden’s as a parody of a Greek tragedy. Something like Oedipus Rex, Antigone or Medea. I can’t honestly compare him to a tragic hero but the optics are there. You know, the guy who had a humble beginning, has a series of struggles, experiences a high point, and then suffers a disastrous fall.
You see, Biden had none of the hallmarks of a tragic hero like Oedipus or Herakles. He was no great warrior like Achilles brought low by his hubris or a resourceful trickster like Odysseus whose voyage home was waylaid because he angered the gods. In contrast, the entire trajectory of Joe Biden’s life is neither heroic nor tragic. It was basically chicken-shit from start to finish. Joe was an example of how far one can go with a shoeshine and a smile.
Don’t believe me? Let us take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
When he was in law school, he was almost expelled for plagiarizing an already published article which he passed off as his own. He literally got on his knees and cried like a baby to the Dean, asking to be given another chance. Foolishly, the Dean fell for it. Regardless, he graduated in the bottom ten percent of his class –76th out of 85 students. He lied about all this. In fact, lying came naturally to him as we shall see. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Sure, he attained the highest office in our land, but he did so without charm, valor or wisdom. Like I said, he was literally rigged into office.*
His life was nondescript; usual story: got married to a nice woman named Neilia Hunter and had three children. Sadly, his wife and infant daughter Naomi were killed in an auto accident. (The sons escaped injury.) It would be easier to feel sympathy for him if he hadn’t used that accident to further his political career. He even lied about the other driver, stating that he was drunk. He wasn’t. According to the police reports, Neilia was at fault. Didn’t matter; Joe smeared that man’s name for decades, driving him to alcoholism and almost suicide.
As a widower, he wasted little time and took a shine to a charming young lass named Jill Jacobs, his sons’ baby-sitter. And she took a shine to him as well. Trouble was, she was married to another man.
It’s all downhill from there. In 1988, in his first run for the Presidency, he gave a stirring, Horatio Alger/up-from-his-bootstraps speech touting his accomplishments as a working-class kid from Scranton, PA. Unfortunately, the life he was recounting was not his own, but Neil Kinnock’s, a Labour MP who was running for Prime Minister. Of Great Britain. It was a word-for-word recitation of Kinnock’s life down to the last detail. When it was found out, he became an instant laughingstock and was forced to stand down.
I could go on and on. As a Senator, he was the quintessential good-time Charlie, getting along with everyone, even ex-Klan members. He was so well-liked that everybody overlooked his foibles. His legislative accomplishments were far from Progressive. He voted against school busing, saying he didn’t want his children to grow up in “a racial jungle.” He was unreflective in his warmongering. In 2008, during another run for the Presidency, he insinuated in a debate that then-Senator Barack Obama was a homosexual.
But that’s all history.
In Greek mythology, the agent of the protagonist’s downfall was Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance. It was she who laid low even the mightiest of heroes. Biden has now met his nemesis: Kamala Harris, the diversity hire he plucked from obscurity and placed into the Vice Presidency.
According to Seymour Hersh, she was getting ready to invoke the 25th Amendment. This was all pre-arranged with Obama. (Think of the irony: it was Obama who lifted Biden from the Senate to the Vice Presidency and now it was Obama who removed him from the Presidency.)
So why did Obama collude with Harris to tear Biden down?
Simple: because Biden was well on his way to getting trounced in November. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you (or himself). And then there was the disastrous debate on CNN. Biden was exposed to all the world as the senile, incompetent empty suit that he always was. Suddenly, the entire press corps lashed out in mock horror –how could “they” have been duped for so long? Truth is, everybody knew that Biden was a doddering old fool. Anybody who watched the 2020 campaign could see it.
To add insult to injury, it was his wife (another empty suit who insisted on being called “Doctor” for a worthless dissertation bestowed upon her by one of her husband’s cronies) who helped to bring him down. It was positively cringe worthy to see her unintentionally humiliating him after the debate, treating him like a three-year-old who just got potty-trained. For my money, that video will eclipse Mike Dukakis’ ridiculous ride in the tank.
That’s all water under the bridge. Now, they were stuck with defending his obvious dementia in addition to his disastrous Presidency. That’s a bridge too far, even for shameless media whores.
So, Obama ejected him from the Oval Office, and he used Kamala to do it. The man who cheated Trump out of reelection is now being cheated out of his office. It’s almost as if the bullet which was intended for Trump took him out instead.
And now, the Agonist is taken down in a most ignominious manner, along with his entire family. The “Big Guy” will no longer be of any use to his family.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
*Still don’t believe me? OK, let’s do the math: there are 133 million registered votes in the United States. Trump got 74 million, Biden got 81 million. You do the math.
Petros says
Makes you wonder what their “October Surprise” is going to be this year. They’re running out of time to ramp things up since we’re slightly less than 3 months away from the election. They’re pulling the same thing with Kamala that they did with Biden in 202, hiding him from the public. Makes me think they know they are going to “win” because they have something up their sleeve.
In the lead up to the election this phrase has been popping up a lot in my mind: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
In Church related news, here is a very uncharacteristically critical article from Orthodox Times on Met. Emmanuel and Pat. Bartholomew:
https://orthodoxtimes.com/metropolitan-of-chalcedons-personal-agenda-in-kyiv/
Much like how the war version of Project Ukraine is crumbling, perhaps we are seeing the religious Project Ukraine crumble as well.
This comes on the heels of the announcement that Pat. Bartholomew is planning on creating a Constantinople Exarchate for the UOC parishes once they are formally banned. There seems to be zero enthusiasm for this among canonically Orthodox Ukrainians…guess Bart was hoping they would have Stockholm Syndrome and come running to him….
LonelyDn says
I know that everyone keeps saying “nothing ever happens,” but the events since the debate seem to bring that assertion into question – but the Israeli war with Lebanon is definitely happening, and Iran is definitely going to be involved in that war, and Israel is definitely going to be directly bombing Iran more. Things are escalating quickly – not only in the Middle East, but along the dying front lines of Ukraine.
The basic question is: can the US manage a war against the entire Middle East?
We know they can bomb Iran, and destroy their cities, which is the response you get when you ask about a war with Iran: “We’ll just carpet bomb them and send them back 100 years.”
The issue that I’ve taken with that assertion is… well, hasn’t Iran has been aware since at least the invasion of Iraq that the US was planning to carpet bomb Tehran? And these people are not stupid. So it seems to me that if they know that is the opening move of the US, they’ve probably set things up to respond to that.
One would have to assume that they have a lot of caves and tunnels with a lot of drones. They also have the ability to activate militias using tunnels and drones all over the region. The US doesn’t really have a response to “people running around in tunnels firing drones.” There just isn’t really a conventional military response to that, other than sending in ground troops to chase down the people in the tunnels.
We’ve seen what a disaster the Israeli operation in Gaza has been for the IDF. The IDF is effectively and de facto a branch of the US military, given that they have access to all of the technologies and training, and further, it’s obvious that US Special Forces are active in Gaza. So, this whole “tunnels and cheap rockets and drones” system is a way to resist the US military more or less indefinitely.
Now, imagine all of southern Lebanon being a Gaza, having Gazas all through Iran, plus of course the Gaza in Yemen, and then various different Gazas in Iraq and Syria.
The point is: what Hamas is doing is working. Israel keeps losing soldiers and there is no real evidence they are any closer to “destroying” Hamas than they were on day 1 of the invasion.
When you look at things in those terms, leveling Beirut and Tehran don’t really mean very much, because the Iron Dome doesn’t work, and these fighters can continue to fire rockets and drones into Israel until you figure out a way to get them out of the tunnels.
Are you following?
The common wisdom was “oh Israel can just ‘take Gaza’” – ten months later, that hasn’t happened. And Gaza should be easy, compared to South Lebanon, let alone Iran!
The only obvious solution to the war that the Jews and the Americans are planning, that I can see, is to deploy massive ground forces to actually go into the tunnels. Otherwise these groups will not be destroyed, and because of these technological developments in rocket and drone technology, if they are not destroyed, they can just keep attacking.
The other problem that I see here for these people is that if you attack Iran, and Iran responds by starting fires all over the Middle East through this militia network they’ve built, Sunnis are going to start saying “well, we should do something too” and start overthrowing governments and so on.
People who plan these wars don’t really know very much about the constitution of Arabs and Middle Eastern people generally. They are not really opposed to war, unless they are very rich (at which point they get soft). The US has prevented constant wars by making sure very rich people control the governments of the region. But the young men are also likely to risk their lives, and they are pretty good at organizing into units that operate in a cohesive way without top-down organization.
If the whole region is set on fire, all bets are off. And I see no way to go through with this planned war with Iran without setting the whole region on fire. Then the US has this single goal of protecting the Jews, like some kind of Tower Defense game… it just all looks to be very poorly planned.
Misha says
Evidently, Mother Russia has left the fence. Nonstop flights of military supplies to Iran. Not like we haven’t favored the Resistance all along; nonetheless, arming Ukraine was a mistake on Israel’s part.
I predict that this will become a tactic in the New Great War. Nukes are off the table in the Ukraine and they will stay off the table in Palestine/Iran as well. The decisive factor will be conventional military projection. Iran can, if it chooses, achieve the same end as a nuclear strike with barrages of hypersonic missiles from itself and Southern Lebanon. And, more importantly, it can turn up the heat to anywhere in between the current situation and that unloading whenever it wants. Together with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Syrians, the Iraqis and the Houthis, it holds escalatory dominance. The US must project power from half a world away. And if Israel’s nukes are rendered useless by MAD, it’s just a matter of time.
And I get the strong feeling that Iran is Russia’s new proxy against Israel/USA just like Ukraine is the US’s proxy against Russia. I predict that the conflicts will become increasingly interdependent.
The Iranians are being quite patient. I think they understand that it is only Netanyahu and his posse that want war. Difficult to say how hard Iran will come at them. But killing one of their guests, especially after the last go around, is a provocation they can’t ignore.
Gail Sheppard says
RE: “The Iranians are being quite patient. I think they understand that it is only Netanyahu and his posse that want war.”
And it’s only Netanyahu that Iran and everyone else wants.
I have heard that Russia is going to start defending all of Europe and the 5 Eyes are going to take over the oceans. That should be interesting.
Brendan says
“Bombshell: 10% Of Voters NOT CITIZENS In 2020 Election! Says Rasmussen Reports ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA-RCEvtvjg
[Video – 09:44]
‘ Hidden deep within the results of a recent Rasmussen poll about the upcoming presidential election were some rather shocking responses about non-citizens and voting in the 2020 presidential race. According to the poll, nearly 2 percent of 2020 voters in battleground states self-reported as either non-citizens or that they weren’t sure of their citizenry. Expanded to the entire country that number jumped to nearly 10 percent! ‘