“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Is the USA about to be cancelled? The nation’s irresolvable affairs festered in an ominous globe of silence through the weekend as the Potemkin inauguration of Joe Biden loomed just days ahead. With actual news scant, rumor frizzled through America’s neural network like political neuralgia, prompting little gleeps of pain in both the Red and Blue camps. Were those thirty-something-thousand troops in Washington DC posted to fend off an attack of white supremacists? What was that strange military aircraft traffic from Rome, Italy, to Oklahoma City about? How come Veep Mike Pence went to Fort Drum, home of the army’s fabled 10th Mountain Division, in wintry upstate New York?
The hypothetical Biden Administration is shaping up to be something like a four-year-long séance, a conjuring of apparitions wailing out talking points in a darkened room. The actual location of the inaugural event remains a mystery, or even if it will be an event, maybe just a pre-recorded video concoction of Mr. Biden’s greatest hits of 2020. Check and see if he’s wearing the same necktie from beginning to end. If a hologram is inaugurated, does that make the land-mass between Montauk and Santa Barbara a post-structural figment? The “president-elect,” made an ectoplasmic appearance Sunday talking up “science,” the Democrat’s mental life-preserver, and then shuffled offstage in an apparent fog of confusion as the Ritalin wore off. He’ll be great in the war room, I’m sure.
The mystery surrounding DNI John Ratcliffe’s long overdue report on foreign interference in the election cleared up only a little with the release of a letter sent January 8th to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In it, citing a side report from Intel Community Ombudsman Barry Zulauf, Mr. Ratcliffe refers to “undue pressure being brought to bear” on analysts by CIA management to craft their conclusions according to political loyalties. In other words, once again the CIA appears to be playing games with the American people and can’t be trusted. Isn’t that reassuring?
Meanwhile, The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC have turned into a nonstop gloat-fest anticipating the punishments to be dished out by progressive Wokesterdom against anyone who ever entertained a thought about or uttered the phrase “stolen election.” They can kiss their livelihoods goodbye. Their college degrees will be revoked by such bastions of free thinking as Harvard. Their websites will be liquidated. Senators and congresspersons must be thrown out of their seats. They’ll be reduced to squatting on filthy blankets at the entrance of the Walmart begging for spare change, or hauled off to re-education camps where NPR lawyers with riding crops preside over their therapeutic struggle sessions, beating the wrongthink out of their hides. For Democrats, vengeance is a dish to be served piping hot. Would you like flies with your shit sandwich?
First up, the Dems promise, will be an executive order granting amnesty to an estimated 11-million illegal immigrants, along with Democratic Party registration cards, to buffer up the voter rolls for elections yet-to-come forever more, with a caravan of additional thousands from Honduras conveniently heading north to the US border just as the Biden “team” has announced they intend to ease the rules for claiming asylum. That will surely be welcome news to the millions of Americans whose jobs, livelihoods, and businesses have been destroyed by Covid-19 lockdowns.
And what of the fellow who remains president for hours now measured in mere double-digits? That’d be Mr. Trump. Is he simply moping around the Oval Office on a heap of My Pillows as the end nears, awaiting the punishments promised by every George Soros-backed DA in the land and their Lawfare allies inside the Beltway? That would be unlike the man. You could sure make the case that whoever is president after Wednesday noon is likely to drown under a world-beating tsunami of financial and economic woes. Why not just pass that old baton to holographic Joe? Let him flail and flounder in the foamy slop of radical discontinuity.
Well, for one reason, it would be less than patriotic to leave one’s country to a hologram, essentially leaderless, and in thrall to sinister forces with other than the national interest in mind, that is, the citizens’ interests. And yet, to do your duty while breaking the long chain of peaceable transitions from one party of good faith to the another is an awesome and fateful step into the unknown. But, if the election itself was a kind of coup, if once good faith has become bad faith, well, that sort of changes everything. How this melodrama turns depends on the information at hand. Does the president have it or not? Something is going to drop in the hours ahead. Will it be consequential? Will it correct anything that’s gone wrong? Or will it just drive the country closer to civil war?
