It's much worse than I thought

America's doomsday clock is ticking at five seconds to midnight. Plus: Tucker Carlson's yellow journalism.

Candidate Trump is a 77 year old repeat offender who steals from the poor to make himself and the remora attached to his dorsal fin rich. Candidate Biden—the current Commander-in-Chief of the world’s most powerful military—is an 81 year old who, according to his own Department of Justice, could not pass the exit exam for the local dementia ward.

You know when you hit a sensitive spot. For Trump, it was the size of his…hands. For Biden, it’s when the New York Times reports “In a hurriedly arranged nighttime televised appearance at the White House, a defiant Mr. Biden offered a feisty defense of his actions and his capacity to run the country.” (Emphasis mine.) He’s feisty:

Fox News: "I'm well-meaning, and I'm an elderly man and I know what the hell I'm doing," Biden said. "I've been president. I put this country back on its feet. I don't need his recommendation." Biden could not get worked up like this trying to pass a border bill, or aid for Ukraine. Mention his age, or his memory, and he’s all feisty. This is the kind of moment that sticks with people.

And it’s an election year. I can only conclude that if there were a doomsday clock for our Republic, it would be ticking at five seconds to midnight. A proper metaphor is the scene from “My Cousin Vinny” — “is there any more s**t we can pile on to the outcome” of this election? I feel like Mona Lisa Vito: This country is going down in flames, and it’s bringing us with it, and—well, is there anything we can we do about it?

You’d think that a special counsel not charging President Biden for willfully retaining and disclosing classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen (paraphrasing Robert Hur’s report) would be good news. Instead, Hur’s brutal reason why Biden should not be charged is much worse than any court could deal out.

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Eiden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.

In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.

It’s stuff like this that leads me to believe there is a Deep State, and a very swampy swamp, and they’re all in Donald J. Trump’s back pocket, or he’s got the goods on half of them at least.

Just to review: the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments why Colorado should be allowed to keep Trump off their primary (and presumably general election) ballot under the 14th Amendment. This sets the Court up to try and define a test for what it means to “engage in insurrection” and if a state can disqualify a candidate based on its own constructed test. There’s more facets to this case than the Hope Diamond, and it’s likely the Justices will each have their own take, making it difficult to predict with any certainty an exact outcome. However, most legal eagles looking at the drift of the oral arguments think it’s much more likely Trump will be restored to the Colorado ballot.

Also: a three-judge panel U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit unanimously ruled that Donald Trump’s legal theory of immortal presidential immunity was an “irrational ‘impeachment first’ constraint on prosecution of federal officials.” This leaves Trump’s legal team the option of appealing the ruling to the full panel, who will almost certainly uphold the ruling, or to petition the Supreme Court, which has once declined this question when special counsel Jack Smith tried to fast-track it. Smith wanted the issue disposed to save the timeline for Trump’s felony trial dealing with his role in the January 6th Capitol riots and attempt to subvert Congress’ certification of the 2020 electoral college results.

It’s likely Trump can gain at least a few more weeks, if not a few months, of delay from this legal detour, plus if the Justices take the case and do not rule unanimously, it will leave some question for Trump supporters of the ruling’s legitimacy. (As if they’d accept it anyway.)

And also: as I wrote before, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis has displayed a shocking (even for a Democrat) level of hubris and stupidity, hiring her then-married (not to her) lover to lead the RICO case against Trump, paying him over $600,000 in taxpayer money, while taking expensive (he paid) trips and cruises with him. How she can possibly hope to continue with the case, never mind win it, with this cloud over her head is beyond my ability to resolve. Neither of them, standing in front of a Fulton County jury, would carry any moral weight. To me, the case is hopelessly tainted.

But…the case has already been made to the American public—the ones willing to hear it.

I read Liz Cheney’s book. Though, as most politicians tend to do, she inflated her own role in the story, I do believe she got the bones of it right. Trump did what he did, consisting of finding people who “yes!” him on his chances of overturning an election he lost, executing an ill-conceived, illegal plan to make that happen, approving overt acts designed to put people in power (at DOJ and DOD) who would allow his plan to work, enticing and summoning a giant crowd of his supporters peppered with armed and violent extremists to come to Washington D.C. on January 6th, and sending that crowd to “fight like hell” at the Capitol. He would have joined them had the Secret Service relented to his wishes, but instead he sat watching TV for hours while everyone in the Capitol was subject to great danger.

Trump should not be allowed to run again for any public office, never mind president. But our laws were never designed to handle the situation this country is in. We have an entire party in Congress that refuses to stop Trump or stand against him. We have voters who would vote for Trump over any reasonable alternative, even if he were convicted.

We also have an alternative: We have Nikki Haley, who is staying the in fight but turned on Trump way too late in my opinion. She’s also in a mountain of political jeopardy, despite having a mountain of cash.

And the Democrats have a president who should be considered for a 25th Amendment determination of incapacity. Either Robert Hur’s version of Biden’s interview is a fabrication in which case, Biden meant to keep classified files at his house, something Trump is currently charged with doing; or he’s incapable of standing trial because his lawyers can “emphasize these limitation” regarding Biden’s mental lapses.

If Hur is right, the image of an aging, addled Biden will haunt the campaign all the way to the polls in November. If Hur is making it up, then Trump can claim he’s been railroaded by a weaponized government set to take him down by any means.

The sane path would be for Biden to withdraw and support someone who could win in November and who isn’t Donald Trump. But who? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? God, please, no.

Things are much, much worse than I thought. I believed that we had two bad candidates, one I will never vote for, and the other merely distasteful. And maybe that’s how it really is? But I have a hard time believing that version right now.

If it didn’t really matter—if nothing was going wrong and we were merely concerned with our retirement funds earning 5% or 10%—sure, let Biden sit for another four years. But it does matter. The southern border and the fate of millions of illegal aliens; the fate of Ukraine, and the ascendency of Russia; the Middle East exploding into genocide; the fate of Taiwan and the brutality of China; and the public debt of this country and our ability to repay it—these are just some of the issues whoever is running the government has to deal with in the next four years.

A guy who can’t remember when he was and was not vice president is not able to do it. A guy who has a moral center the size of a ragworm’s brain can’t be trusted to wield any amount of government power. Neither of these guys is likely to be knocked off their collision course toward November.

Right now feels like when, for a brief time at the turn of the 20th century, crashing two steam locomotives head-on was a spectator event. Except instead of locomotives, we have two wheelchairs and two feisty old men, neither of whom should be running our government.

If only the country would wake up and do something about it, but no. Instead, we sit in morbid fascination as the doomsday clock strikes midnight.

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*** TUCKER CARLSON: PUTIN STOOGE. Carlson is now working for Elon Musk, and posted an exclusive interview with Vladimir Putin on X/Twitter. Musk seems to trust Putin more than American media, and Carlson will do anything to get some kind of bizarro relevance, a story tuned only to ears that hear a particular frequency of untruths.

A good take.

“Mr. Putin sincerely believes…” and there you have it. Growing up in the snowy north, we always quoted this little poem, “Don’t eat yellow snow, watch where those Huskies go.” Carlson is serving up a big bowl of yellow snow, freshly made by the evil, lying, would-be Tsar and conquerer, Putin.

Don’t say it’s “not journalism.” It’s bad journalism, just like all the times when Reuters stringers happen to be members of Hamas, or the Washington Post libeled a high school kid who wore a MAGA hat, or Walter Duranty, or Rolling Stone and “A Rape on Campus.” Carlson is engaged in a time-honored American kind of journalism, known as shilling for a dictator. He does it for fame and money. He earns shame.