Joe Biden as King Lear is playing out in the White House
Aficionados of tragedy should pay a visit to the epic production of King Lear, running at the White House Theatre, Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington DC. The mad king is graphically played by Joseph Robinette Biden, who also moonlights as 46th President of the United States. “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” is the prevailing theme of this production.
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” asks the principal, with compelling realism. Indeed, Biden is a more credible Lear than the Shakespearian original. His callous indifference to the casualties in Afghanistan, as testified by parents of the dead marines and the camera catching him at the ceremony of reception of the bodies, with one hand on his heart and the other raised to consult his watch (How much longer is this going to go on?), brought extra force to the line: “Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”
Only the court of a mad king could have contrived the catastrophe in Afghanistan, in which the entire Biden administration is irrevocably implicated, in step with its leader (“My train are men of choice and rarest parts that all particulars of duty know”). That would be the likes of Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Ron Klain and Jen Psaki: good to hear that they all particulars of duty know. Which makes us wonder how those good folk of choice and rarest parts managed to make America the laughing stock of the world, effectively depriving it of superpower status.
Biden’s ham-acting at the podium, responding to a disaster exclusively of his own manufacture, aggravated the transparent phoniness of his reaction. First he attempted to shelter behind the memory of his son, who died tragically, though not in action: to newly grieving families that could only be seen as a crass attempt to match their immediate, raw bereavement with his own past grief. It was a tasteless moment.
Then, apparently forgetting that America is no longer perceived by the rest of the world as an intimidating superpower, but as the latest in a long line of collapsed empires, he looked hard to camera and pledged to the Taliban, ISIS-K, al-Qaeda and, probably, Trump voters: “We will hunt you down.” Coming from Ronald Reagan, George W Bush, or even Donald Trump, it would have conveyed real menace; coming from Joe Biden, in his self-inflicted geopolitical impotence, it sounded like a delusional cry of rage. (“I will have such revenges on you both/That all the world shall – I will do such things –/What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be/The terrors of the earth!”)
This is the culmination of one man’s obsessive search for power, of a 40-year aspiration to govern what was, until his watch, the most powerful nation on earth, despite his patent incapacity – at any stage of his life – to fulfil that role. It is the consummate condemnation of that scourge of governance, the professional politician. Biden is a mirror-image antithesis of Margaret Thatcher: she was a conviction politician; he has reversed, bartered, exchanged or renounced every stance he once took, every alleged principle he espoused, in opportunistic pursuit of office.
In the 1970s, Biden was one of the leading Senate opponents of race-integration school busing; today he is wholly committed to the BLM cause. On capital punishment, Biden was a lifelong supporter and actually wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which created 60 new capital offences; but on 20 June, 2019 he announced his opposition to capital punishment. Might there be some co-relationship with his career moves around that date? During the 1980s Biden was known as a “drug warrior” and headed the Senate Judiciary Committee that passed a large number of punitive measures against drug crime; since 2019 he has supported legalising marijuana.
On immigration, in 2006 Biden voted for the Secure Fence Act, to erect a fence at the Mexican border; today he is presiding over the collapse of sovereignty on the United States southern border, a disaster as damaging in its own way as the Kabul debacle. On social issues, in 1996 Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, prohibiting the Federal government from recognising same-sex marriage; in 2012 he forced Barack Obama’s hand, compelling him to abandon support of civil unions, in favour of same-sex marriage.
But the most gamey scent of hypocrisy comes from Biden’s policy reversals on abortion. In 1981 he voted, unsuccessfully, for a constitutional amendment that would have allowed states to overturn the decision in Roe v. Wade; the following year he voted against the same amendment. In 1981 he voted to end federal funding of abortion for rape and incest victims. In 2003 he voted to ban partial-birth abortion, but in 2007 he opposed the US Supreme Court’s decision upholding the ban he had voted for.
Biden supported the Hyde Amendment, banning taxpayer funding of elective abortions for all of his political career, from 1976 until 5 June, 2019. He similarly supported the Mexico City policy, denying federal funding to NGOs that promote abortion. In his first days as president he abolished both the Hyde Amendment and the Mexico City policy.
But, as well as unprincipled political opportunism, the abortion issue also highlights Biden’s sense of entitlement. Joe Biden has done more, this year alone, than any other individual on earth to increase the number of global abortions, yet he still demands to receive communion from the Catholic Church, whose canon law prohibits administering the Eucharist to those who publicly reject the Church’s teaching. With the help of complicit clergy, Biden still communicates; a different personality, rejecting a core pro-life Catholic doctrine held over two millennia, would simply have walked away. But Biden extends his political ambiguity and sense of entitlement even into the religious sphere.
If there is any corner of Joe Biden that harbours any notion that is honest, consistent, and unselfish it has so far eluded detection. There is an American tradition of respecting the office of president, if not the incumbent. When the mother of a marine killed in the Kabul atrocity describes the President of the United States as “that dementia-ridden piece of c—”, it marks a significant moment in the implosion of the American political order. It also signifies the distinction that bereaved military families make between unavoidable death in the line of duty and wasteful, unnecessary sacrifice of soldiers’ lives.
In Britain, for example, mourning the dead of Gallipoli or the Somme has always been tinged with anger at the folly of those who caused such carnage. In contrast, when we mourn the fallen in the Battle of Britain, that rage is absent because it was a necessary, unavoidable struggle against invaders, where the overwhelming sentiment is gratitude and admiration for heroes. If American families had lost their sons in well-conducted and militarily justifiable action against the Taliban, the heartbreak would be no less, but pride would have been the prevailing sentiment.
When soldiers voluntarily enlist, they accept they may forfeit their lives in action, for their country. The reciprocal obligation, on which they rely, is that their military superiors and political masters will not squander their lives due to incompetence. That compact was cynically and unconscionably broken by Joe Biden, in pursuit of a withdrawal date he fetishised for purposes of a political soundbite. For that, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghans were blown to smithereens at Kabul airport, while an unknown number of other victims are hunted down by the Taliban.
Among them is an Afghan interpreter who, in 2008, helped rescue Joe Biden and John Kerry when their Black Hawk helicopter had to land in a blizzard in a remote valley in Afghanistan; today he is in hiding with his wife and four children, being hunted by the Taliban. US bureaucracy prevented his exfiltration; gratitude does not appear to be a characteristic of the commander-in-chief.
Complementing the President’s political incompetence is the chief military buffoon, General Mark Milley, head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. When less eclectic commanders would have been focused in recent weeks on meticulous withdrawal plans and retaining control of Bagram Airfield until the last moment, Thoroughly Modern Milley was concentrating on the threat from “white rage” – more dangerous than jihadism, apparently – and the need to inculcate Critical Race Theory into all American military personnel.
The Biden gang is unfit to run a precinct dog-catcher’s appointment committee, let alone the United States of America. The chilling reality is that the Democrats have destroyed the American political system. One could ask voters accusingly: what possessed you to vote for a presidential candidate who, throughout the campaign, lived a troglodyte existence in a basement?
But that would be to ignore the methods by which the election was indeed stolen – not by Venezuelan voting machines, but by outrageous disregard of election law protecting the authenticity of voter entitlement, the near-monopoly of television stations in the Democratic interest and the policing of online media by Big Tech, all relentlessly churning out hysterical anti-Trump propaganda. If this election had been held in a developing country, international observers would have declared it unfair.
The most interested audiences for this King Lear production will be in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran; for them it will play not as tragedy, but as comedy. This is a very dangerous moment for the world. It is unlikely, though, that the principal character has yet arrived at the Lear-like moment of self-discovery: “I am a very foolish, fond old man… I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”