There was a macabre familiarity to the sight last week of a dead man in Brazil being wheeled into a bank by a greedy relative to sign a loan document.
The woman is seen on social-media video talking to the corpse in the wheelchair while trying to hold up his floppy head with one hand.
In her other hand she clutches a pen lodged between the dead man’s fingers as she attempts to sign documents to secure a loan of $3,250.
“Uncle Paulo, are you listening?” the woman, named by CNN Brazil as Érika de Souza Vieira Nunes, tells the late Paulo Braga, 68. “Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches. I can’t take it anymore.”
Uncle Paolo does not respond. His eyes are closed. His mouth is agape.
“He doesn’t look well,” the bank teller says, in the understatement of the year. “He’s very pale.”
Rio De Janeiro police who arrested Nunes said Uncle Paulo, who was actually her cousin, had been dead for at least two hours. They charged her with fraud and abuse of a corpse.
Isn’t it a pity we can’t charge the Democratic Party with the same offenses? After all, the barbaric treatment of Uncle Paolo in Brazil is a metaphor for how Democrats are using an infirm 81-year-old Joe Biden to defraud the electorate.
Those of us not in on the scam are the bank teller saying: “He doesn’t look well. Are you sure he’s OK?”
It’s as if the whole country is strapped in with the corpse in that wheelchair as it hurtles toward a cliff edge.
Most Americans agree that the “Weekend at Bernie’s” presidency has not turned out well.
It’s not just Biden’s sepulchral presentation, but his administration’s increasingly unpopular policies covering the economy, the border, foreign affairs and a raft of fringe social engineering projects, such as Friday’s rewriting of Title IX, which effectively abolishes the distinction between women and men.
The nation was not exactly crying out for this Orwellian policy, but it’s part of the curious tapestry of bespoke pandering that constitutes Biden’s re-election platform.
Pretending you’ve stopped inflation, pretending you need Congress to shut the border, pretending that your uncle was eaten by cannibals: these are not vote-winners for Biden.
Whether he’s walking “like a toothpick,” as Donald Trump describes the president’s stiff gait, falling over, garbling teleprompter scripts, or breaking into sudden angry yelling, in the normal political calculus, such a candidate should be heading for a car crash.
Even worse, the back-up plan is Kamala Harris, who doesn’t even have the benefit of the vapor trail of Honest Joe’s self-mythology that has fooled America for 50 years.
With Harris, what you see is what you get: a complete phony spouting condescending claptrap.
The polls reflect the Democrats’ problem.
You could sense their heads exploding as they watched NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday, where a new poll showed Trump smashing Biden by between four and 22 points on “Handling a crisis” (46% to 42%), “Strong record as president” (46% to 39%), “Dealing with inflation and cost of living” (52% to 30%) and “Necessary mental and physical health” (45% to 26%).
The ouchiest of all was Trump’s 9-point edge on Biden over who was “Competent and effective” (47% to 36%), a category where Biden had a 10-point edge over Trump in 2020.
There were more head explosions for the Dems over at CNN where voters in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin viewed Trump more favorably than Biden by four points, 47% to 43%. In 2020 the situation was flipped, with Biden ahead 50% to 45%.
“Donald Trump is, in fact, better liked than he was four years ago — and is better liked than Joe Biden is right now,” declared CNN polling analyst Harry Enten. Double ouch.
As if to emphasize Biden’s disconnect from the voters, his campaign rolled him out three days in a row last week in Pennsylvania, the state pollsters say he cannot lose.
The motto was “Scranton v. Mar-a-Lago: Making the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share,” as if Biden doesn’t live a billionaire’s lifestyle in a bespoke mansion he built on a lakefront estate in chateau country in one of the ritiziest parts of the country, and as if his son isn’t facing tax fraud charges in California over the family influence peddling operation.
The folksy “Working Class Joe” schtick appears to have worn thin, judging from the lackluster reception he received from regular folk when he made supposedly “unscheduled” campaign stops at eating establishments to pick up food.
The true purpose of these stilted interludes seems to be so the campaign videographer can obtain footage of the president interacting with real people. But you really don’t want to look too hard at how the sausage is made.
When he entered a Sheetz gas station mart in Pittsburgh, for instance, Biden never took off his trademark Aviators. Video footage shows him standing in front of a woman and a little girl, gawping at them wordlessly, before he moved through the store, not interacting with a soul until he reached the counter where the shop assistant was primed to ask for a selfie.
Biden posed, and then woodenly exited stage left. Reporters tried to call out questions: “Are you concerned the new steel tariffs will hurt your relationship with Xi Jinping?”
“No!” said Biden, pausing in the doorway before delivering his inexplicable and well-worn riposte: “Don’t jump!”
The comparison with Trump’s crowd-engagement charisma is inescapable.
The former president was mobbed in Harlem last week when he took a post-courtroom opportunity to visit the bodega where Jose Alba fatally stabbed an ex-con in self-defense and then was unjustly charged with murder. Unlike Biden’s random campaign pit stops, there was a point to Trump’s visit.
He wanted to highlight the skewed priorities of an unjust justice system, which has been weaponized to neutralize him as Biden’s opponent.
At one point in Pittsburgh, a reporter pointed out the obvious to Biden: “When you drive around the area, you see a lot of Trump signs, not very many Biden signs. Do you feel like you’re in trouble here?”
That didn’t go down well with the president, who is only animated by anger.
“Well, you haven’t been driving in the right places, pal,” he snapped.
Snarling denials of reality probably aren’t a recipe for electoral success. But these days that isn’t the only way to win elections, and turnout will be key this year as voter enthusiasm sinks to all-time lows.
Even if Biden is a dead man walking, you can bet Democrats have plenty of dirty tricks up their sleeves.
No comments:
Post a Comment