America’s four-year ordeal is almost at an end. Since January 2021, the nation has staggered under the weight of runaway inflation, soaring crime rates, and a virtual invasion of illegal aliens. At the same time, the worst excesses of extreme progressive ideology have all but shredded the cultural and moral fiber of the country. Shortly before embarking on one last taxpayer-funded vacation, Joe Biden delivered a final insult with a mass pardon – or, to be more accurate, a mass commutation of sentences – for many of America's most brutally violent killers, sparing them the death penalty. It is a sad and insulting final chapter in the story of what may have been the most inept, wasteful, dishonest, censorious, and secretive administrations in modern American history.
“I think people, including probably a lot of people in the White House, are just ready for it to be over,” one veteran Democratic donor and bundler told The Hill. “There’s just such a great level of sort of disappointment on the way this presidency is ending. It’s almost like a resignation at this point,” a Democratic lobbyist observed, adding: “Among Democrats, nobody’s looking forward to Donald Trump being president, but everybody’s ready for the Biden presidency to be done.”
A National Sigh of Relief
That last remark seems to sum up the mood of the nation. It's almost as if everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief when Joe Biden first announced that he would not seek re-election. And then, when November 5 came and went, and the possibility of Kamala Harris subjecting America to four more years of Biden-esque leadership – or worse – disappeared, the nation exhaled once more.
Harris's electioneering mantras, “We're not going back” and “We’re turning the page,” proved accurate after all – just not in the way she and her party expected.
History will almost certainly not be kind to the Joe Biden legacy – although that may depend on who writes the history books. A lot of people on the political left tried for the past four years to portray Biden as the greatest American president. Yet it appears that there will not be any ceremonies and celebrations to honor the man as he shuffles off to retirement in Delaware.
The Joe Biden Years and the Reckoning
During the coming Trump years, there are bound to be some savage postmortems of the Biden presidency conducted on Capitol Hill and, quite possibly, at the Department of Justice. And, since a few people have now quietly admitted that Biden's physical and cognitive decline was apparent to White House insiders from his earliest days in the Oval Office, perhaps Americans will find out who was really making all the big decisions. There is good reason to speculate that Joe Biden may not have always been personally calling the shots. Does that get him off the hook for some of his administration’s disastrous – and, in some cases, unconstitutional – actions? On the contrary, he was supposed to be the chief executive, and if he was unable to fully carry out his duties, then, for the good of the country, Joe Biden should have stepped down. This is why those postmortems will be necessary because everybody also needs to know the names of the people who were aware of his infirmity and covered it up.
Though Donald Trump is already acting very much like a commander-in-chief in some ways, he is not yet back behind the Resolute Desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. That means there's something of a power vacuum at the center of the executive branch for the last 20-something days of the Joe Biden presidency. Does it really matter, though? In the absence of a direct military attack on the US or a massive natural or man-made disaster, can America survive a couple of weeks with no decisions being made at the White House? Yes, of course it can. And considering some of the decisions that have been made there over the past four years, perhaps it would be for the best.
Biden appears to have been using his last few weeks in office to put as many flies in ointment jars as he can so Democrats can later wail and gnash their teeth over the terrible state of things after Trump is sworn in as the 47th president. It is maybe a good thing that Biden is once again on vacation. An awful lot of people, probably including many within his party, are perhaps wishing he would stay on vacation until January 20.
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