I don’t talk much about Joe Biden because I don’t really believe he is the President of the country in any meaningful sense. I don’t believe he was a good person even when he had his faculties and now that he’s losing them rapidly he is no longer able to conceal the ugly sociopath that hides behind that smile.
Yesterday in Hawaii he compared the awful tragedy of the Maui fires to him almost losing his ’67 Corvette in a fire. Almost. And then he says “all kidding aside.”
There are over 800 people still missing in Maui, many of them children. All kidding aside.
I read a sub stack this morning titled “Tell me How This Ends.” They wrote of long-term politicians:
They become debilitated by a lifetime of ritual language. If a staffer hasn’t told them to look somber and say “I’m sorry for your loss,” they don’t know how. It isn’t a line they’ve been equipped with for the event. Hey man your kids burned to death I almost lost my Corvette once, man. All kiddin’ aside, man!
By the way, standing on Maui he joked about the ground being hot.
Even recognizing that the man is struggling with senility, this is an astonishing performance. Meanwhile the next person in line behind him giggles and cackles and babbles like a drunk when she speaks anywhere about anything.
They aren’t people anymore. They can’t talk like people. They don’t have normal human affect. What’s particularly interesting is that this learned inability to read human cues is recent and narrow. Bill Clinton, as much a politician as anyone who has ever lived, had a well-known ability to see people and signal his empathy, or at least to do a brilliant job of faking it. Similarly, Donald Trump is obviously very very fond of Donald Trump, who is amazing, trust me, everybody says so, but he has a normal human ability to spontaneously bullshit with the normals. Elite disconnection isn’t inevitable.
The broken personal thing behind all the broken institutional things is a loss of basic human connection and behavior. It’s a learned disconnection, and they can’t hide it.
The worst part is that this is not a cause for concern or an emergency in the eyes of many. The media covers for him. The left makes excuses and the right shrugs it off. We no longer even expect humanity from our leaders. That should be the bare bones bottom expectation. Humanity. Empathy. But we don’t anymore. And for good reason. Our leaders clearly despise normal people. We all know it.
A country in which the leaders despise the led and the people don’t trust their leaders can’t continue forever. It won’t. We should expect more from one another. We must hold our elected leaders accountable but so many people don’t even believe in the integrity of our elections anymore. I read somewhere that about thirty percent of Americans don’t even believe that elections are fair. So what to do? What will happen?
This is a powder keg.
Pray. Pray often. Pray the rosary. I know I keep coming back to that but prayer is our only hope. Pray that we have the courage to stand up to our sociopath leaders. Pray that when it comes time for us to prove our fidelity to Christ we do so. Pray we don’t buckle under.
We should also pray for our leaders. That’s a part I forget about often. As long as someone’s praying for them I feel like we’re providing room for a miracle. So let’s pray for one of those as well.