The Biden Benefit

 

Don’t worry. This won’t turn into charts & graphs. I also won’t be giving you a lot of highlights of rants, stumbles, and lost weekends in Delaware. In fact, my purpose here is to suggest a different perspective altogether. It came to me when I was notified of a thread at Instagram claiming Trump had confessed to fixing the 2024 election. It was early in the morning and I gave way to curiosity. Why, I asked him, was it so important to keep trying to dig up dirt on Trump after 10 years of frantic Democrat efforts of the sort had failed to stop his return to the White House. The reply was quick and consisted of the usual stream of adjectives, vulgar, rapist, convicted, Daddy’s money, guilty of every deadly sin in the book. How exactly, I wondered, was Trump so much worse than the corrupt, senile pedophile who had made every aspect of American life measurably worse? A speedy reply in 30 seconds flat: “We’re talking about this guy now.”

Why there’s this post. Biden had ceased to exist for this fellow. Delete file. I’m thinking the mass media are attempting the same feat. We suddenly have these books out by journalists who sound like Claude Rains discovering gambling in the Casablanca café. Shocked, shocked they are that they had been victimized by such a coverup. Proving they had been kept deftly outside the circle where any real information about the administration could have been found. Pretty perfect if you can get away with it. (Don’t know if they will, but they’re sure trying… probably why they won’t know much about the multitude of scandals that will slowly come to light in the years ahead.)

Never mind all that though. What occurred to me is that we have been given a unique opportunity to see how the darling technology called Artificial Intelligence works. The Biden Administration is a glimpse of the fictional SkyNet of movie fame. There is enough information available now to conclude rather decisively that during the Biden years we had no President at all. There was a figurehead, but what was really happening was that the Deep State was running itself, with no one firm human hand on the tiller.

My suspicions were strong about this for the entire time. I was among those calling for accountability from the rooftops, although my little rooftop is only two stories tall and is buried in the back country of rural South Jersey. Physically, I was only about 30 miles as the crow flies from the Biden Delaware encampment, but I was far enough away that no shouting on my part could accomplish a thing.

When I got disciplined by FB it wasn’t for anything I said about Biden. It was for climate change heresies and crapdoodle like that. Yet I wrote multiple posts demanding to know who Chief of Staff Ron Klain really was, since he was the chief suspect as the person who might be the Acting President of the United States. 

Then he resigned the post to pursue other opportunities, replaced by some other faceless non celebrity the mass media had no interest in whatever. I checked to see if anyone had done a post-mortem on the Klain tenure. Never found one. 

New suspicion, borne out since by other (non)developments. Klain hadn’t been the Acting President because no one was. There was, quite simply, no one person calling the shots. The White House, the country, was running itself with no particular executive direction from anywhere. You never heard about cabinet meetings or even cabinet members unless they had a personal stumble that made a brief splash. Buttigieg took a months long paternity leave while the supply chain fell apart due to stresses from the pandemic and invisible crises building in the shipping, rail, and commercial aviation world. Buttigieg was never held to account even when a hazardous spill caused by a preventable rail accident poisoned the town of East Palestine, Ohio. The Secretary said it was FEMA’s and EPA’s job, but they weren’t showing up either. Neither did the President, the First Lady, or the Chief of Staff. Trump showed up, (Buttigieg did too, after that) which caused a stir. but no real response to the problems in East Palestine.

That’s how everything was proceeding. The only time we heard about the Secretary of Defense was when he went AWOL for days of medical treatment and surgery for which he had to be anesthetized. What other cabinet officials did anyone hear from? Yellin was supposed to know about the economy but didn’t seem to know anything about inflation. Kamala Harris was supposed to be in charge of the border, but just like the President she served, she never went there. The Secretary of State was administering the flow of billions of dollars to Ukraine, but he was nowhere to be found in the Middle East or Taiwan or Japan.

Things were just running themselves or not. Organizations are their own kind of Artificial Intelligence. They have operating rules that kick in. Decisions aren’t made so much as procedures are carried out. When no one is is responsible, no one gets blamed, no one gets frightened, no one gets fired, and things just happen in the day to day dark of all automatic things.

The thing we might learn from is a very close study of actual daily transactions in the Biden White House. There may have been multiple people who thought they were in charge, but what they were in charge of was very much less than governing the United State of America. Everyone’s in charge of what they are in charge of, up to a point. Jill was in charge of Joe Biden, up to a point. Klain was in charge of the President’s schedule, up to a point. Blynken was in charge of foreign policy, up to a point. Garland was in charge of running the Biden lawfare campaign against Trump, but only to a point. Gen. Milley was in charge of the military, but only up to a point. Where they all had to back up a step was when they tread on somebody else’s toes, somebody else’s private agenda. It was practically impossible, by all accounts, for anyone to get quality policy time with Biden, and even if they did there was no guarantee that he would remember, repeat, or stick to his own decisions. What nobody wants to admit, even now, is that the easiest thing to do in the White House was ignore Joe Biden on matters of policy and any real presidential platform. The platform part was handled by ad hoc procedural routines, algorithms if you will, thst made it look like the ship of state had a captain, a destination, and a map for getting there.

What happened in all these little encounters between insiders, the off-the cuff meetings, the quick words in the hall (Chief of Staff and auto pen technician?), the grousing sessions over drinks after the President’s day was shut down (the “lid” put on) in the afternoon? We don’t know. But we should know. This series of deliberate/accidental confrontations and deals and compromises constitutes the only available record of fours years of a U.S. presidency.

There’s really no such thing as an autopilot, not even in aviation, where AI has distorted the meaning of plenty of words along the way. How many episodes of the plane crash series “Mayday” turn on the fact that there are always combinations of circumstances no piece of software could have anticipated. Computers deal with numbers that can be counted and measured. They can’t even see what is ‘between’ in the numbers, which is where real life intrudes and requires conscious decisionmaking.

We let this country run itself for four years on what we hoped was a 21st Century autopilot. It wasn’t. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Now we want to pretend that because the President was essentially absent from the decisionmaking processes that he didn’t exist at all and can safely be forgotten as a cause or effect of anything that went wrong.

We do have this opportunity to learn exactly what a nation state running almost purely on separated rote processes and procedures looks like. How vulnerable it is, how wasteful it is, how costly it is in terms of money, human lives, and future prospects of the citizenry.

The nation without a President. That should be the stuff of PhD dissertations for time ever after. And all we get is clowns like Jake Tapper claiming he never knew how bad the situation was. Right.

I’ll leave it there except for a couple of closing vids. The first is a song I looked up because it figured in the haunting end of a horror movie in which the ghosts of drowned children save the life of a living child from murder by her own father, who had also killed all of them. The song stuck with me, and I thought of it in connection with this piece for some reason.

Oh. That’s why. Empty streets. Here’s an empty street I think we’ve all been familiar with for several years…

Here’s the video from Rumble. I tend to turn the sound down halfway.