I don’t watch many horror movies. But I know enough about them to know that one of the recurrent themes is that someone is chased by the Thing, the Monster, the Murderer, the Alien, the Whatever, and then there’s a pause when the person feels safe and breathes a sigh of relief.
A pleasant interlude.
And then, when you don’t see it coming (or at least the film maker hopes you don’t see it coming) – boom! Just when you thought you could relax, the danger is back.
That’s how I feel about the prospect of a Biden/Harris administration, and about reporting each pick and each decision, drip by drip. For me the Obama years were a time of chronicling a series of bad moves and bad messages and bad precedents: on immigration, on foreign policy, on economics, on liberty, on racial relations, on education, and on much more.
There was also the intensification of a previously Democrat-friendly press into a Democrat-worshipping press. The dichotomy could not be more stark, and the MSM’s mendacity in service of that endeavor could not be more blatant.
The 2016 election was not all that happy a time for me, either. I disliked and feared both candidates, but for opposite reasons and to differing degrees. Hillary was a known quantity and would represent a continuation of the Obama policies emboldened by time and the shifting of the Overton Window to the left. Trump was an unknown quantity, a volatile and unpredictable man with no political experience who might be a loose cannon and even a dangerous one. On balance, Trump was a bit better merely because a Trump presidency was a gamble and a Clinton presidency a known quantity, but both sounded like a bad deal to me.
These last four years, though, I’ve been mostly pleased at so many of the things that Trump has actually done as president – how effective he’s been in exactly those areas in which the Obama administration was so wrong. I’ve also felt horror at the marshaling of so many powerful forces against him, forces that were willing to do anything to destroy him.
So during the four years of the Trump administration I experienced many positives, but also a constant sense of dread and fear that those pluses would be overcome by the forces arrayed against him. And I was also dreading the election of 2020 increasingly as the date approached and the COVID-fueled “reforms” piled up, loosening the voting security safeguards in many states beyond all recognition. I knew that this election would be a no-holds-barred affair, and I feared it would involve a great deal of fraud on the part of the Democrats.
In addition, as the primaries developed, it became clear that there was no one who had any chance of being the Democratic nominee whom I thought would be better than Hillary would have been. Some were even to the left of her, and worse. Biden, who eventually won the nomination, was someone I hadn’t liked even back when I was a Democrat – that’s how bad his combination of mediocrity, bad judgment, corruption, and mendacity seemed to me.
I also expected post-election lawsuits to challenge the election results no matter who won, and riots if Trump won.
But in particular I felt I knew that a Biden presidency would feature all the awful policies of the Obama years – and then some. The press would see nothing wrong with this and everything right with it. The eight years of the Obama administration would look like a stroll in the park compared to what awaited us.
And now that specter is what we are likely to face – the monster’s return. In what sort of detail do I want to chronicle a Biden/Harris administration? The first decision I have to make is whether to discuss and evaluate appointment after appointment after appointment, bringing back people and policies I was so very happy to see leave. For example, months ago it occurred to me that John Kerry – whom I detested even when I was a Democrat – would be recycled one way or another. And so he has been. When Obama’s term was up, I figured I’d never need to see Kerry again because he would be too old next time. Ha! These days, seventy-seven (which is what he’ll be on Inauguration Day) is considered quite the spring chicken. So the laugh’s on me.
I’m not saying I won’t be covering a Biden/Harris administration if it comes to that. I plan to do so, but right now I’m not going to deal in depth with every appointment and every depressing announcement.
I always knew – it was quite obvious – that any Democrat who might manage to replace Trump would try to undo all of Trump’s many foreign policy victories, and that this person might succeed because foreign policy is something over which a president has a lot of control. Once Biden became the nominee I knew even more clearly that any Biden administration would be an Obama retread or worse, and I was dreading that.
And so we have things like this, Biden’s intent to restore Obama’s terrible Iran deal. Can he do it? Perhaps:
But among the obstacles facing Biden, a Democrat, in his bid to reopen a pathway to detente are Iran’s mistrust of Washington, which deepened sharply when Trump tore up the deal.
“Why should we trust Biden? He is like Obama. You cannot trust Democrats,” said a hardline official close to the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei…
That’s from Iran and Reuters, so take it with a grain of salt. I believe that Biden as president would be likely to make it worth Iran’s while by bending over backwards to sweeten the pot for them, just as Obama did. But it does occur to me that, American politics being what it is, the Iranians might be wary of Biden’s ability to deliver the goods in a way that will last.
