By Peter Laffin
So far, June has been the month of crossing “red lines” for the Biden administration.
To start, the administration has given Ukraine permission to use American weaponry to strike Russian military forces in areas of Russia near the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. It’s an escalation that deserves concern. Open conflict between nuclear powers has the potential to spin out of control fast. Should Ukraine do accidentally what Russia does deliberately and strike a civilian target with an American missile, Russian President Vladimir Putin might be forced to retaliate forcefully. Former Russian President and Putin lackey Dmitry Medvedev says Russia isn’t bluffing about its threat to use tactical nuclear weapons. I believe him.
On the domestic front, the coordinated legal efforts to convict former President Donald Trump of a felony finally bore fruit, marking the first time in American history that a former president has earned this distinction. Some on the Left have argued that evidence for President Joe Biden’s role in the prosecution of Trump is scant. However, it beggars belief that a wave of criminal indictments from different jurisdictions broke all at once, at the very moment it became clear that Trump was favored to win reelection, without a guiding hand behind them.
Democratic Party messengers in the media surely don’t believe that this is a coincidence. They have been saying for months now that a Trump conviction is necessary to “save democracy.” The most plausible explanation for the selectivity and timing of these indictments is that it is a coordinated lawfare effort to take Trump out. This is all troubling enough on its own.
Still, it is made exponentially worse by the reality that the man in charge of these red-line crossings has reached new levels of cognitive decline. A new report from the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday morning titled “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” paints a harrowing portrait of a president who can’t speak without the help of note cards or keep his eyes open during meetings. Drawing on conversations with over 45 people, both Republicans and Democrats, over a span of months, the report is not a revelation so much as a confirmation of what the public has long known.
Some, such as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, have attempted to cast the report as a political “hit piece.” But it’s too late for this kind of standard-fare partisan defensive action. The whole country saw Biden stop mid-amble after his press conference last week, turn to the press, and deliver a slow, creepy smile when asked for his reaction to Trump’s claim of being a “political prisoner.” To be fair, Biden was likely attempting to convey incredulousness and nothing sinister. But the lasting impression left by the awkward moment was that of a man who isn’t of sound mind.
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, America is currently led by a mentally incapacitated man who has decided to risk a hot war against the world’s second foremost nuclear power and lawfare against his chief political rival (who is, to be fair, not exactly the picture of mental stability himself).
In the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “Boy, that escalated quickly!”
