US President Joe Biden.
Photo: REUTERS
The third bell of the theater means the beginning of the action. The statement from the former White House doctor under three previous US presidents, and now Congressman Ronny Jackson, certainly rings a second bell, warning that everything is about to begin. “It’s just incredible how much he (Biden) has degenerated during his tenure,” Jackson said in an interview with Fox News. We cannot afford to have this man in power for the rest of this term and then another four years. He is already putting us at great risk.”
Here’s something to say about the jolly Biden! And what if he stumbles down stairs and hallways, starts talking a little, reaches into space, reads aloud the instructions he’s given about what to say and how to behave? Biden’s handshake must be strong! And this, as we know from our own experience, is the main sign of the Head of State’s ability to work, if there are no other convincing signs. You never know what the former doctor might think, although he declares that he “knows firsthand how exhausting the president’s job is, both morally and physically.” You never know what the president is like, and what if he again forgets where to go from the stage? The main thing is the affairs of the head of state, by which he can judge whether he fulfills his responsibilities or not.
And here the “second bell”, almost at the same time, is not heard by the doctors, but by the analysts. “Biden is creating more foreign policy problems than he is solving,” Christopher McCallion, a member of the Washington think tank Defense Priorities, said in a CNN article. He convincingly takes into account all of Biden’s recent statements about his foreign policy success and concludes: “As the United States fights to maintain its empire, its republic suffers. But what must be saved is the republic, not the empire.” Here it turns out that, if we judge by the facts, we need to “save the country.” So it’s not just doctors who recognize Biden as incompetent.
Biden has many critics in the United States, and not just among his political rivals. But the 81-year-old continues to be stubbornly dragged into a second term. It would seem obvious to everyone: well, the man is not up to the task, age has taken its toll on him. And with the red button, leaving grandpa, who painfully recognizes himself in the mirror in the morning, is very risky. This is obvious, but everyone around the American president pretends there are no problems. It is clear that the king is played by his entourage, but even so this expression refers more to ceremonial actions. But no king’s retinue can replace cognitive abilities (that is, in Russian, whether a person is sane or not).
There are many signs that the United States is almost repeating the path of decline of the defunct USSR. Gerontocracy is one of them. But it is more interesting not only to document the similarity, but to try to understand what causes it.
When the elderly Brezhnev was turned into a joke hero, Leonid Ilyich was only 70 years old. The signs of his physical weakness were obvious, but the more obvious they became, the more ardently his party entourage demonstrated their “selfless devotion” to the leader. Because? Firstly, the inability to renew leadership on time and smoothly is a sign of a failure in the party-state mechanism. Things in the last years of Brezhnev’s rule (this period was later called “stagnation”) did not go well in the country. And taking responsibility for admitting mistakes and having the courage to change course is not the destiny of many. There were no such people in the Soviet leadership during Brezhnev’s time. Everyone pretended that everything was fine and “you are on the right track, comrades!” Although Brezhnev himself, as was later stated, tried to retreat more than once, his comrades did not allow him to do so. The system has not produced a leader capable of meeting the demands of the time. This is how the “chariot race” happened.
Then we had another president whose health had serious problems. But in 1996, with all the signs of physical and intellectual weakness, he was “pushed” for a new mandate. Because the country was also in a deep, but not publicly recognized crisis, and they learned, with the help of the Americans, to “drown” all real competitors in the media, which had already been tamed. In short, “they voted with their hearts.” But in 2000 a new leader emerged and the previous one retired.
So in the United States they are now clinging to the “veteran” Biden for the same reasons: the country is in crisis, it is not clear how to deal with it and the ruling Democrats do not have another “promoted” leader with whom they could have a good chance in the elections. But still, rumors that it is time for Biden to retire appear more and more frequently.
After the second ring, the third should also ring. The US Constitution has clear instructions in this regard: the 25th Amendment establishes that if the current president cannot fulfill his duties, his power passes to the vice president. There are some complications with the procedure, but the lawyers will work it out. In any case, even when the elderly Biden was competing with Trump for the seat in the White House, they were already arguing with all their might that if he won, he would not sit for the entire term, but until they decided to invoke the 25th Amendment. So Are we waiting for Kamala Harris? Otherwise, Biden looks more and more like Firs from The Cherry Orchard, who was forgotten in an empty house.
THE NAIS IS OFFICIAL EDITOR ON NAIS NEWS