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Quid De Cogitatione? Glenn Rose
It seems the American voter is to be presented with two candidates who are unqualified to be president of the United States. We are to be offered the choice of voting for the lesser of two evils, or, more correctly, voting, not for someone we consider best qualified, but against someone we consider least qualified. The donkey in the room is the incumbent, Joe Biden.
Biden’s political career started when he was elected to the New Castle County (Delaware) Council in 1970.
Two years later he was elected to the U.S. Senate before being elected Barack Obama’s vice president in 2008.
As a senator, Biden “drafted and led the effort to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Violence Against Women Act.”
As vice president, Biden served as a close adviser to President Obama.
Biden was elected president in the 2020 election.
President Biden has strengthened NATO and thwarted Vladimir Putin’s attempt to violently take over the independent country of Ukraine.
The economy added 14.8 million jobs over the first three years of his term, more than any president in U.S. history. Unemployment has held below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s.
Insured Americans hit an all-time high of 92.8% in the second quarter of 2023. The number of people who signed up for Obamacare in 2024 surged to 21.3 million.
According to Bloomberg, “… the strong labor market bears the imprint of White House policies such as the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure act, the CHIPs act and the … Inflation Reduction Act.”
The most strident criticism of Biden is the canard that he is responsible for the ongoing situation at our southern border.
Biden has issued over 500 executive actions on immigration, but “executive actions” don’t come with the resources needed to execute them properly. At Trump’s urging, a recalcitrant Republican majority in the House of Representatives derailed bipartisan reform legislation that was making its way through the Senate.
It was better to hamstring Biden’s efforts on immigration to keep immigration a problem to run on.
Which brings us to “the elephant in the room.”
In the years that Joe Biden was serving as a senator and vice president, Donald Trump, bankrolled by his millionaire father, was promoting various building projects and himself.
In 1988, Trump acquired the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. It opened in April 1990. Financed with $675 million in junk bonds at a 14% interest rate, the project entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy the following year.
Although Trump never filed for personal bankruptcy, his hotels and casino businesses declared bankruptcy an additional five times between 1991 and 2009.
In an audio recording aired in 2016 Trump bragged about his entitlement to grope women.
In May 2017 Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a closed White House meeting. According to current and former U.S. officials, Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.
In 2020, as over 1.1 million Americans were dying of COVID19, Trump ridiculed science while suggesting that bleach in the blood might be a remedy!
On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump, touting the lie of a stolen election, provoked a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol while it met to ratify the 2020 election.
In May 2024 Trump became the only U.S. president convicted of felony crimes: 34 counts.
He faces three more criminal indictments.
Many of us reach an age where we narcissistically think we are entitled to say what we want.
That’s not an age-earned entitlement. All life lessons go for naught if we can’t learn the real lesson.
Wisdom comes when we realize that we are obliged to say what we should.
Republicans will be nominating Donald Trump without regard for the character we have seen and heard from Trump himself. An individual who disregards our Constitution and the laws that protect us, who holds our allies and treaty partners in contempt with no understanding for institutions that have protected the Free World for 75 years, should not be in an office with the world-wide responsibilities of the United States President.
Those who see these shortcomings in Donald Trump and wonder how good people can see these same things and vote for him should pause and reflect on their own fealty to Joe Biden.
Biden has had more than one “senior moment.” If his staff does what all presidential staffs do, there have been many more moments fudged or hidden to protect the president from unflattering reports.
He’s not going to get better. We could face four more years of deterioration.
In the last year of his second term Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke. He was mainly incapacitated, with the presidency effectively being run by his wife and staff.
Wilson wanted to run for a third term in 1920, but the Democratic Party nomination went elsewhere. Wilson died Feb. 3, 1924, during the third year of that term. He was only 68.
Times are very different now. We can’t have a president whose decision making could be hampered or impaired by a weakening mental capacity.
Biden should do the patriotic thing and take himself out of the race. He has too great a legacy to mar it with the waxing fog of old age.
It’s something Trump would never do.
