Martin Sieff
Even after a revolution that cost millions of lives and a quarter century of war that devastated all of Europe from Portugal to Moscow, the restored Bourbon kings of France, their wisest and most cynical adviser Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord lamented, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
But of course Talleyrand was really 200 years ahead of his time, and talking about the Democratic Party of the United States in the year 2021.
On Wednesday, January 20, 2021, Biden is now scheduled to be inaugurated over a United States more divided than it has been in 160 years since the outbreak of the Civil War. Biden's campaign comments and speeches were filled with the rhetoric of reconciliation and unity, and of the need to come together. The slavish mainstream media has enthusiastically parroted every word of it. To enter the chat rooms of Democratic institutions and old Republican as well as Democratic think tanks, institutes and universities inside the Beltway, one could easily we were back in 2008, or 1990: The Evil Genie of "Bad" Donald Trump has been banished and once again it is real "Morning (Gloomy Twilight, really) in America.
The Mighty Legions of the United States stand watch ceaselessly from the Baltic to the Oxus, from the endless blue seas of the Central Pacific to the Muslim sands of Arabia. The restless, Southern-accented Protestant American God with His ludicrous combination of arrogance, certainty and crass hick ignorance is lecturing the Rest of the World and Nothing Has Changed. Nothing Will Ever Change.
In fact Everything Has Changed and the American people themselves, to their credit largely clearly realize it. Biden Talks the Talk of Peace and Reconciliation but his first key foreign policy and national security appointments make clear that he is clearly incapable of ever learning to actually Walk the Walk.
Anthony Blinken, Biden's designated choice as secretary of state and Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Adviser were both at his side through the awful, catastrophic eight years of the Obama administration. During all that time, both of them ceaselessly endorsed the catastrophic policies that brought revolution, civil war, Nazi reemergence, slavery, chaos, mass dying and ruin to scores of millions of people from Ukraine to Libya and from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan.
Pontius Pilate in the New Testament put Biden, who claims to be a practicing Catholic Christian yet who reflexively supports abortion on demand and Democrats who even advocate infanticide on botched end of term abortions, to shame.
For Pilate rightly found no fault in Jesus Christ: But Biden has made the same pronouncement to absolve Blinken and Sullivan after the eight years of suffering and cascading risks of thermonuclear war they brought upon the world.
The irony is that if Biden had the self-awareness and common sense to actually practice what he preached during his election campaign, he could yet prove to be surprisingly popular, respected and ultimately revered president.
For the abortion-loving, Russia-hating Democrats did not elect Joe Biden: He won in spite of his party. He personally won over five million votes more than his opponent, incumbent President Donald Trump.
Even if one accepts the perfectly feasible proposition that the Dominion vote counting machines, manufactured by a Canadian company ultimately controlled by the Ageless George Soros, shamelessly delivered secure majorities to Biden in one key battleground state after another he trailed for most of the election count by double digit margins, it is perfectly d feasible that overall Biden won more votes than Trump.
After all, Trump had clearly failed to end the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic despite his many other solid accomplishments. And Biden, to his credit, was manifestly not Hillary Clinton, a chilling presence not even Hannibal Lecter could love.
Yet, somehow, the Democrats, while purporting to win a clear majority in the overall popular vote, managed to lose.
The secure Democratic majority of 36 seats in the House of Representatives won in the November 2018 congressional elections has now been reduced to a paltry four seats. If things go badly for Biden and 81-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues her unprecedented performance of tone deaf partisanship, selfishness, stupidity and limitless incompetence, it is extremely feasible that the Republicans will win the majority through interim elections well before November 2022.
Here again, the Dark Shadow of a stolen election raises its spectral head, as implacable as Banquo's Ghost in Shakespeare's Scottish Play. How could Biden win so decisively in the popular vote when the Democratic congressional vote melted in key races across the United States?
The 2020 election outcome was in fact the worst of all possible outcomes for the Democrats. They lack the majority in the House to push through any effective legislation and they remain a minority in the Senate, where fuming Republicans seething over four years of endless de-legitimization against Trump are determined on payback. There is no popular Mandate for the Democrats such as Barack Obama gave them - and they then threw away - in November 2008.
Instead, the Dems already face the prospect of a Red Tidal Wave blowing them away in 2022, provided they do not totally destroy the country by then.
No Blue Tide Coming then, to boost Biden's Boys - and Girls. Instead, in the unforgettable warning words of Julia Ward Howe's"Battle Hymn of the Republic,"the Lord God of Justice and Truth is treading out the Vintage where the Grapes of Wrath are Stored.