Even the venerable Abraham Lincoln, in a presidency dragged down by the secession of half his domain, chose to separate the causes of the Confederacy from the character of the people settled upon it.  In that one and only American Civil War, Lincoln became the Great Unifier when the loss of 360,000 Union soldiers might easily have justified a heavy-handed approach to everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line.

More Orwellian than Lincolnian, Joe Biden has plotted a more calamitous course for his administration.  Aligning with progressive politicos who juxtapose January 6, the Civil War, September 11, and Pearl Harbor in a single talking point, Biden has now taken authoritarianism to excess, putting his political fate in the hands of woke boardrooms, big tech, and a doting media while forming an ideological front against the will of his own people, either by his own volition or on behalf of his all-knowing, face-on teleprompter.

Last week’s Morehouse University sales pitch for voting rights calling for the abolition of the filibuster rule was demagogic on its face and declared an intifada on Republicans.  Biden tried to soothe his party’s brittle relationship with black Americans, holding himself up as a beacon of civil rights standing athwart a Trump militia reminiscent of Jim Crow, Bull Connor, and soldiered by white supremacists and conservatives.  The speech fell flat with many black voters and several progressive allies and organizations gave the rally a cold shoulder. With the electorate shifting to the GOP column and members of his own party delivering recurrent death blows to his agenda in the Senate, it was a desperate gambit to brand the new voting majority as the enemies of democracy.  In Atlanta, the flower came off the bloom for Joe Biden, and he is now leading without a moral compass.

On many issues, but especially race and vaccine mandates, Biden is an emperor without clothes.  The media strains to deflect from his racist gaffes but cannot pull the covers up and over a career of political support for prominent segregationists. Disparaging George Wallace and Jefferson Davis before a largely black college faculty and students is laughable in view of Biden’s longstanding advocacy for the former Democrat governor and for voting in favor of a 1977 Senate bill to restore U.S. citizenship to the president of the Confederacy.  He cozied up to James Eastland, John Calhoun, and Strom Thurmond, three senators known to be long-winded on racist rhetoric, and the latter of whom conducted the longest filibuster in congressional history over his strong opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  Because it favored his appointments to select committees, Biden opposed school bussing, desegregation, and took a stance against reparations while supporting mass incarceration at the heart of the 1994 crime bill.  As vice president, he publicly slurred Barack Obama by race on at least two occasions, faux pas that may have brought Obama to openly question his competency to run for president.

Biden has always been an outsider to the genteel class of Democrat power brokers.  His Senate years brought him three failed presidential runs and repeated notoriety for cribbing the words and writings of others more gifted and cerebral.  Over five decades in Congress, his given name has been accessorized with Crazy, Sleepy, and Old, while those propping him up cloaked his ill-gotten family wealth behind blue-collar misnomers such as Amtrak, Middle Class, and Scranton Joe.  All of it has brought about a cottage industry of memes and caricatures highlighting a creepy uncle who gropes and sniffs at necklines, believes electric cars can cross the country on one tank of gas, that truth trumps facts, makes a cringe-worthy mess of every teleprompted speech, and naps at the most inopportune times.

Joe Biden has exhibited erratic behavior for much of his political life, some innate to his character and perhaps consequent to the surgical removal of two cranial aneurysms.  Hissy fits and mood swings at the podium replete with a bipolar medley of whispers and bug-eyed tantrums have become endemic to his public addresses.  There have been face-to-face outbursts at working-class voters using tough-guy lines purloined from vintage Westerns.  Biden does not suffer complaints quietly and fancies himself above denunciation.  Political critics are challenged to pushup competitions and schoolyard fisticuffs.

While Biden pushes voting rights as a subterfuge for one-party rule, vaccine mandates are the sanctum for Biden’s despotism.  Vax tyranny is an anti-science charade that now leverages the low mortality of the latest strain to claim credit for inoculations and boosters while harping upon its more virulent transmission to maintain public fears, demand papers and proofs everywhere but the polling booth, keep kids out of schools, and families at each other’s throats.

For an administration obsessed with the idea of racial inequities, vaccine compliance has a racially-disparate impact.  In Biden’s backyard, where the District of Columbia resident population is evenly split white and black, fully-vaccinated whites outnumber blacks by almost twenty percent in the 18-65 working-age group.  The latest compliance reporting from 42 states indicates that blacks trail whites in 33 states, with the national rates being 54 percent of whites to 45 percent of blacks within their respective populations.

Biden is scrupulous in imposing restrictions upon the unvaxxed.  He chose wizardry over science in ordering mandates on mid-size businesses while exempting blue voting blocs who receive welfare and food stamps, the millions who have entered the country illegally, and the U.S. Postal Service, whose 200,000-strong union pledged support to Biden and participated in numerous incidents of ballot hanky-panky.

Large swaths of the American electorate are frustrated and remorseful, many hounded and demonized for their skepticism over how a basement presidential candidate who couldn’t fill a convenience store parking lot at his campaign speeches won the presidency by a landslide, with several state election results overturned in the wee hours after a massive ballot infusion.  The media persists that no evidence of election fraud was found and that President Trump filed and lost more than sixty election lawsuits.  Truth be told, out of eighty court filings in 2020 and early 2021, thirty-four of the cases were summarily dismissed by judges who chose not to hear the evidence in the critical swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia.  These cases were not lost on their merits.  In fact, twenty-one additional cases were decided after presenting evidence, with President Trump winning two-thirds.

Save for a 25th Amendment intervention or an unlikely resignation, Joe Biden will fumble his way through to 2024, his domestic and international policies steered by radicals and interventionists, and his cognitive decline further exacerbated by age and pharmaceutical side effects.  Unless the Democrats intervene by hook or by crook, a growing electorate of Republicans, independents, blue dogs, and accelerating numbers of black and Hispanic voters will oust majorities from the upper and lower chambers of Congress.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of COVID tests are about to flood American households, keeping Americans off-balance, focused on the virus, and fearful of every sniffle or dry cough.  Absent a federal takeover of state elections, it is likely that the Biden administration will keep public COVID fears at peak levels in an effort to manufacture a crisis over in-person voting and force a return to widespread mailed ballots.

Democrats in earnest will continue to wag the dog in an effort to upend the predicted outcome of the 2022 midterms.  Voting hijinks, saber-rattling with Russia and China, COVID variants du jour, and January 6 conspiracies and criminal charges to unseat congressional Republicans are all dog-eared in the playbook.  Now convinced of the means to ill-gotten power, they are determined not to lower the curtain until there’s an encore.

Image: Gage Skidmore