America in 2020

In 2020, America elected a president who slithered his way up the greasy pole and a vice president who slept her way up.

The election that will bring this pair to power was rife was practices that enabled cheating on their behalf. For example, a fair system of poll watching is a sine qua non of fair elections. That’s why the international community sends poll watchers to countries suspected of wanting to hold unfair elections.

In America, we don’t use outside observers. We rely on poll watchers from the two parties to monitor the counting of ballots. If only one party has people present when votes are counted, the counting can’t be trusted.

The vote counting can be halted for no reason other than the desire to figure out how many votes the favored candidate still needs. Large tranches of ballots can suddenly appear, all or virtually all of which are for that candidate. Alleged computer glitches can flip votes into the favored candidate’s column.

It appears that all of these things occurred in America in 2020. The favored candidate was Joe Biden. The excluded poll workers were Republicans.

One thing that’s striking about the victors is how little they were ever able to impress even Democrats. Until Barack Obama elevated him, Joe Biden had failed to register with Democratic voters in his two bids for the presidency (1988 and 2008). Kamala Harris, even with massive funding and non-stop media adulation, failed dismally in her attempt to win Democratic primary votes.

Biden’s lack of distinction is also stunning in a president-elect. Here are the colleges from which our last four presidents graduated: University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale, and Georgetown. The last four presidents with law degrees got them from Harvard, Yale, Yale, and Duke.

Biden got his undergraduate degree from the University of Delaware. His law degree is from Syracuse where he graduated near the bottom of his class (and later lied about his class standing). Harris’ degrees are from Howard University and UC Hastings Law School (where she might well have benefitted from a a racially preferential admissions policy).

Fancy degrees and academic accomplishments are hardly the be-all and end-all for a president. Many people still achieve high distinction on merit alone without strong academic credentials. Some of these people have accomplishments befitting a president.

Joe Biden isn’t one of them. He never accomplished anything in the private sector — unless one counts enriching himself and his family by peddling influence to China (among other countries), which Biden denies doing.

Biden never had ultimate responsibility for running a governmental or bureaucratic entity. By contrast, George W. Bush ran the state of Texas, Bill Clinton ran Arkansas, George H.W. Bush ran the CIA, Jimmy Carter ran Georgia, and Ronald Reagan ran California.

Joe Biden ran his mouth. Endlessly and often incoherently.

And let’s not forget Biden’s multiple instances of plagiarism — so emblematic of the intersection of his mediocrity and lack of character. By rights, this brazen behavior during a presidential campaign should have ended his national political career. It’s embarrassing to live in a country that elected a plagiarist its president.

Speaking of character, Biden is a nasty piece of work. He’s amicable enough, in a glad-handing style, until he isn’t. Say or do something he doesn’t like, and the Biden temper kicks in. Along with his penchant for bullying.

It’s also likely that Biden sexually harassed and assaulted one of his aides. Under Biden’s approach to evaluating harassment claims (other than those against him), we should conclude that Biden is guilty.

And even apart from Biden’s approach, there is enough evidence from the time of the alleged assault and the few years that immediately followed to conclude that, more likely than not, Biden sexually harassed Tara Reade in non-trivial ways.

That’s America in 2020. We can no longer trust the integrity of our system of electing presidents. And our system has given us a nasty, corrupt, dishonest, and thoroughly mediocre president.

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