Joseph R. Biden, the sitting President of the United States (POTUS), had turned into a lame duck early into his last year in office. While this is expected of any presidency on its last term and is indeed catalyzed by the final transitional period between the declaration of a clear winner in a presidential election year from November 5 to the January inaugural date the following year, the case of POTUS in his final weeks reveals an earlier downspin.
American pundit Michael Moore calls it “going out in a blaze of horror,” referring to foreign policy shifts and the escalation of hostilities in Biden’s final weeks as POTUS.
Biden is playing a dangerous chicken game with sixth extinction consequences following a loss that serves as a historic counterpoint in the annals of democratic governance. The impetus to save face has its foundation in the Biden-friendly demonization campaign that sought a second term and a desperate grip on power on the decline.
Note its aspects.
One, the deployment of lawfare against his challenger had reached unprecedented banana republic levels.
Two, the Biden-friendly mainstream media (MSM) had seriously betrayed the public trust when rather than essentially provide balanced objectivity in a gravely divided milieu, and perhaps, while doing so spark critical discourses via evidence-based opinion-making, MSM had instead become an inflexible steel pillar to hoist ad hominem personality politics falsehoods.
Looking back, as commonly cited, the symbolic shit did not just hit the fan at the June 2024 presidential debate that uncovered a hidden reality. As a deliberate disservice to its constituencies, MSM had been proactively fomenting a worsening lie long before.
But honesty demands self-reflecting farther back. The increasingly cognitive decline of the POTUS, who had his finger on the nuclear button and was entrusted with the codes that could ignite a global Aramgeddon, was evident as early as the 2019 campaign. Recall the serial gaffes regarding places, dates, and names.
The eventual July 2024 candidate switch that anointed Kamala Harris sans requisite primaries integral to American democracy was just another of the many sharp detours that veer from a path of normalcy.
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Unfortunately, with weeks to go, 2024 remains characterized by even more unexpected detours, not just along the labyrinthian maze the rest of the world is forced to take from the tangled Gordian interchanges that characterize American politics, but also the unexpected detours our existence on this planet might take as a result of decisions taken by hawks circling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Admittedly, this Monday morning quarterbacking will not make it to the top ten talking points of the typical Filipino family conversation fare. The dishes we salivate for and eventually gorge on are concentrated on the multi-media antics of at least two criminal protagonists currently going for each other’s jugular to perpetuate power either lost in 2022 or resurrected from the crypt of a wax-encased cadaver.
It is a pathetically comedic, albeit tragic sideshow that pre-occupies and distracts us from far more fundamental questions ironically relevant as we enter our own campaign period for 2025.
Ignorance is bliss. Like the cliché Marxist structural-functionalist concept of the utility of religion and its opium-for-the-people analogy, on a global scale, our predilection for kitsch keeps us from the existential question of a near brush at Armageddon that reckless US commanders-in-chief take us as they waste away on a Delaware beach chair.
Rightly or wrongly, issues that matter are determined by media where its influence selectively prioritizes. The resulting focus should determine political platforms, especially when highlighted in times of elections where change or continuity are active choices, and the people are directly empowered.
Among the issues that converge along those lines, other than burning economic priorities due to debilitating inflation, street crime worsened by porous or open borders, international territorial intrusions, and, indeed, global war and peace, there are dark apocalyptic threats on the horizon.
Fortunately, there are also faint silver linings from the imminent recovery and eventual strengthening of the United States in several of the world’s most dangerous arenas.
Already, we have seen a willingness to cooperate, declare a ceasefire and return to the negotiating tables along the border between Israel and Lebanon. A factor in these is the depletion of Hezbollah funding once bankrolled by ill-advised Democrat dogma where planeloads of over $1.7 billion were delivered to a terrorist state in 2016.
Stateside, along border states and sanctuary cities, against current taxpayer-funded domestic violence and economic inequities created by policies that favor providing shelter, employment, healthcare and even gender reassignment for people who have not paid a cent of taxes, we are now seeing historic cooperation between the United States and Mexico covering border security, immigrant vetting and trading parameters.
While the path to global peace requires greater detail, there are now mutual and shared interests that are good signposts.
Unfortunately, malevolence is both driven and relentless. Filipinos are only too familiar how evil can easily resurrect, bore up from six feet under and then prevail.
As good men sue for peace, others are hellbent on playing chicken games and taking a short detour to Armageddon.
Veering off the path to peace, taunting an escalation and nuclear reprisals, and violating his own policies on the matter, in his final weeks Biden authorized the use of deadly American-made long range ballistic missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory from launch sites in Ukraine.
To forestall any post-election overtures for a negotiated peace in the post-Biden years, in a deadly Tit-for-tat, Biden likewise authorized the planting of banned land mines whose lethality is indiscriminate with deadly effects that extend far beyond a declaration of peace.
Biden’s reckless taunt produced a counter-taunt that was far from subtle. A bevy of Mach 10 (3.4 kilometers per second) inter-regional ballistic missiles (IRBM), against which no current counter measures in the West can stop, rained on targets inside Ukraine. Had its payload been nuclear and its delivery system been a Mach 10 ICBM, then perhaps a much grimmer conversation would have been daily fare anywhere actively threatened by a hegemonic nuclear superpower.
Our predilection for kitschy political pleasures might quickly turn into prayer sessions. After all, we all know that these are proxy wars, albeit all undeclared in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the South China Sea. We also know that Ukraine is a virtual firing range, tactics and outsourced weapons testing site with Ukrainians as live targets and lab rats. This bears remembering our fellowmen mistaken for wild pigs at Crow Valley off Tarlac in Central Luzon under the previous Marcos dictatorship. – Rappler.com
Dean de la Paz is a former investment banker and managing director of a New Jersey-based power company operating in the Philippines. He is the chairman of the board of a renewable energy company and is a retired Business Policy, Finance, and Mathematics professor. He collects Godzilla figures and antique tin robots.
