Thursday 25 July 2024
The living puppets
I buy a newspaper now and then. You cannot imagine how strangely those world-echoes impress me. The sage gravity of leading articles, the momentousness of this or that piece of news, the precision of reports, the advertisements, - is it I who am moonstruck, or the living puppets that play in this astonishing comedy? Once or twice I have been so overcome with a perception of ludicrousness as to fall back in my chair and make the roof ring with laughter.
George Gissing - Isabel Clarendon (1885)
The odd thing about the current US presidential situation is how foreseeable the risks were. It must have been obvious to those close to him that Biden was on the way down before he became president. There were enough indications for outsiders, so we may as well conclude that insiders knew he wasn’t a good bet for a four year stint - and Kamala Harris was the spare.
In other words, the current political mess in the US isn’t some plan mapped out by master schemers who foresaw all eventualities and engineered every outcome. No capable political planner engineered this. The current mess looks like the result of a bungled failure to read the situation and the personalities because that’s what it is.
The choice of Kamala Harris as VP and the prospect of now having to invent a raft of obviously fake media enthusiasm for her fictitious abilities adds a good deal of support to the bungled mess standpoint. The people behind all this are not smart people. Evil but not smart.
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5 comments:
Well thank g for that. But they were smart enough to rig the 2020 election and deprive Trump of a legitimate second term.
Tammly - I don't think they did rig it, in the sense that it may have been enabled but the dirty work occurred lower down so no major fingerprints were on it.
Possibly we are talking about literal puppets. Biden has surfaced at last in a video, and people are saying that he looks and acts so differently that he's either on drugs, an actor with a latex mask, or an AI deepfake image. He definitely seems to have a bruise and swelling on his jaw.
All these may not be true, of course, but it's indicative of the times we live in that such things are even thought. Even Ted Heath was never accused of being a simulacrum.
Biden had to go after he showed that "his" administration couldn't even organise a simple assassination.
I wonder who is contemplating assassinating Ms Harris and framing Trump for it. Or vice versa.
Sam - yes he looked odd, a lot of makeup I suspect, but possibly bad enough for him to disappear from public view before he has to.
dearieme - there seemed to be genuine official anxiety about the Trump incident, as if a horrible thought occurred to them - "these clown can't protect our people either."
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