The incomplete list of people to blame for the Biden debacle

By John Ruberry

Seven months in and it’s already fair to call the Biden presidency a debacle. Our humiliation in Afghanistan tops Biden’s list of failures. Yes, John F. Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs invasion and helplessly saw the Berlin Wall built during his first seven months in the White House, but to paraphrase what Sen. Lloyd Bensten said of Dan Quayle, Biden is no JFK. And Kennedy, while we’ve learned years later that he was not a healthy man, showed no signs of cognitive decline during his brief presidency. JFK was 46 when he was assassinated. Biden turns 79 later this year.

The old proverb, “Success has many friends but failure is an orphan” is true to the extent that people prefer to sweep failure under the rug. Lee Iacocca, the legendary automotive CEO, remarked in his autobiography that there were plenty of people eager to take credit for the success of the Ford Mustang. But not for the flop of the Edsel car a few years earlier. 

As a civic duty I’m going to point out those deserving people and groups to blame for Biden, our White House Edsel, being elected president. And there are many.

Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor. The White House physician is also Biden’s personal doctor. In late 2019, as he released Biden’s medical records, O’Connor said, “Vice President Biden is a healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency, to include those as Chief Executive, Head of State, and Commander in Chief.” Wow. Biden wasn’t “vigorous” two years ago. And just how healthy is Biden?

Do you care to update your comments, O’Connor? And please, doctor, don’t hide behind patient confidentiality laws. Biden is responsible for the safety and well-being of 330 million Americans.

Jill Biden. Someonse else nailed Jill’s role in this tragedy on the head last week and I’ll hand things over to her. “Who are the people responsible for putting someone this incompetent and frankly this mentally frail in this position. …I’m sorry, as a political spouse, I can’t help but look at Jill Biden,” Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy, who is married to a former congressman, said last week. “No one knew better his state of mind than Dr. Jill Biden. And if you ask me the most patriotic thing Jill Biden could have done was tell her husband, to love her husband, and not let him run in the mental state that he is in. I think she failed the country as well.”

US Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC). After lackluster performances in the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary it appeared that Joe Biden’s third presidential run would end up like the others, along the lines of a batter being dealt a three pitch strike-out. But to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination–and a Trump reelecton–Clyburn gave Biden a strong endorsement shortly before the South Carolina primary. Biden won the primary and essentially coasted to the Democratic nomination, while conducting his campaign, to use Sean Hannity’s favorite phrase, from his “basement bunker” in Delaware.

Senior Biden campaign officials. I’m sure they knew all about Sleepy Joe’s mental state.

The media. I excoriated the mainstream media’s role in elevating Biden in a post here last week. I suspect reporters knew–and still know–that Biden is a weak old man. But they chose to keep it to themselves. And because the person they loathe, President Donald J. Trump, absolutely could not be reelected, they had to cover up, or at least obscure, Sleepy Joe’s many weaknesses.

Never Trump Republicans. Perhaps the GOP Trump haters belong at the top of this list. Are you happy now?

Biden voters. On WIND-AM Radio last week, co-host Amy Jacobson observed that many Biden voters approached last fall’s election as if it was a student council race. Trump was that mean bully and rude Tweeter and he just had to go. He just had too, you know! And besides Trump wasn’t “cool.” As Barack Obama famously and correctly said, “Elections have consequences.” In high school if you elect the wrong people to the student council it might mean that films you don’t like are screened on Campus Movie Night. The stakes regarding elections to the most powerful office in the world are immeasurably higher.

Barack Obama. Sometime in 2019 Obama should have convincingly told Biden, “C’mon man, you’re too old and to feeble to be president.” Or maybe Biden was unqualified to be president even before his cognitive decline set in. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up,” Obama supposedly said about his vice president

Joe Biden. Surely in his more lucent moments Biden must realize that whatever mojo he had as a politician, other than name recognition, was gone. And even when he was at the peak of his skills, Biden was simply a mediocrity.

I’m certain I’ve left many worthy people of shame and blame in this list. Feel free to add others who come to mind in the comments section.

Update 8:00pm EDT:

I can’t believe I forgot the 50 former intelligence officials who made the false claim that the Hunter Biden laptop discovery appeared to be a disinformation campaign put forth by Russia. These “experts,” swamp rats really, either had no clue if that claim was true or they were lying.

The propagandists that we call the mainstream media utilized this denial as justification for not reporting on the Hunter haptop scandal.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Did “Never Trumpers” have an effect on the election?

As the election counting, and soon to be recounting, rages on, there are plenty of people that tell me they just “couldn’t vote for Trump,” even though in theory they are conservatives. Personally, I vote based on what a candidate says they support, or has demonstrated they support, for policies that I care about, ranging from foreign policy and gun control to right to life and taxes, and then on a scale of how much I care about each. For example, I care more about foreign policy and abortion than taxes because I’m directly affected by foreign policy and I’ve seen first hand how pervasive abortion theory is in hospitals, but I’m not making enough money to care if the tax rate jumps significantly.

I also know that while I’m a policy voter, many people have an emotional connection to voting, and they have to “like” the candidate they are voting for. We can discuss whether that makes sense in another article, but we should recognize that candidate likeability does matter to many people. It’s likely what got Bill Clinton elected. But is likeability enough that it mattered to Trump’s election?

Although the data isn’t complete yet, I pulled Reuters election data and used Wikipedia for 2016 election data to try and answer the question: Did people not vote for Trump that would have voted for another Republican Presidential candidate that was more likeable? I sampled data by looking at states that had Senate races. My theory was that if someone was a “Never Trumper,” they would likely still vote for the Senate Republican in their state. I also looked at Libertarian votes to see if they made a difference. The states I ended up picking were Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, New Mexico, Alabama, Georgia, Minnesota and Colorado, in what I think is a pretty decent spread.

First, was their a surge in Libertarian votes? Not at all.

Just looking at raw numbers, Libertarian votes went down, in many cases drastically. 2016 was a banner year for Libertarian and Green Party vote, but this year they just did not have the turnout, despite running Jo Jorgenson, a very likeable candidate.

Second, was there a noticeable Never Trump vote? I calculated the difference between Presidential votes and Senate votes between parties and then compared them. The numbers aren’t 100% aligned. I calculated a scaling factor to multiply the Senate votes by to balance numbers. Then I took the difference from Senate Republicans vs Trump votes to see if there were “Never Trumper” votes. If there were, I then calculated if the difference mattered.

The results are interesting. In Arizona and Alabama, the number was negative, meaning Trump had more votes than the Senate Republican. In the 6 states where there was Never Trump votes, only one, Georgia, would have mattered.

While not 100% scientific, we can reach a few conclusions:

  1. The Never Trump vote is real, but not everywhere.
  2. Where there is a Never Trump vote, it mostly doesn’t always matter, even in swing states.
  3. Libertarian vote didn’t appreciably go up this year.

For Republicans, this is good and bad news. It means that the Never Trump faction isn’t nearly as big as the media might make it out to be. Better still, when people had a choice between a more likeable candidate (Jo Jorgensen), they actively chose not to vote for her, far more than the 2016 election would have indicated.

The bad news is that Biden wins in key states can’t be attributed to candidate hatred. Democrats ran a relatively weak, bland candidate, and he is either coming out on top or close to it. That means that overall people are looking favorably on Democrat candidates. Whether its the biased news media, demographics, vote rigging or policies, Republicans are not in a good spot, because short of major changes, they don’t have a chance at capturing the Presidency in the future.
