by John Kendall Hawkins
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- WB Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1919)
Joe Biden has the dubious distinction of being the Lesser Evil promoted to replace the fatuous and casually seditious fuckwit who riveted the mainstream media's attention for four years (plus) and made us all wonder -- through the empathetic expressions of talking heads like Chris Hayes -- if the bailing Ship of State could long last with Trump at the helm and the shoals straight ahead.
Well, we made it (hug?), just barely, no better for the wear but still kicking -- an "insurrection" led by a MAGA group, the Proud Boys, whose name was taken from a Disney mommy's boy song about needing to be spanked for miscellaneous naughtinesses. Channeling the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson (as opposed to George Jefferson) in taking quaking umbrage at the historical sleights to "the pursuit of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" in the white trailer parks, the Prouds, the MAGA Louds, and probably quaalude-driven QAnon (the new Synanon?) to assert that "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government." In short, if what the bouncy-eyed pundits say is true, we came that close to having a replacement government led by the chief of the Hekawis from F Troop. F that.
Phew. Now we have normalcy back. A return to rock-steady. Obama II, some say. And picking up where Obama left it in his transition departure, Uncle Joe has already oiled-up the chain he used to ward off a razor-wielding Corn Pop, back in the '60s, prepared to take on the Man from Vlad Putin. (If you're keeping score at home, we gave them clownshow Yeltsin, then they gave us circusfreak Trump ("we" claim), and now it's "our" move to install a new Bozo in Russia -- thus, the sudden MSM pu(t)s(c)h to see Alexei Navalny as a beleaguered hero and champion of anti-corruption. Are you laughing? Viktor Shokin, the Ukrainian anti-corruption guy Biden guffawed about shitcanning, last year tried to "indict" Biden for interfering in Ukrainian state affairs and seems intent on continuing.) Ed Snowden, the most famous American since Lee Harvey Oswald to "defect" to Russia, must feel right at home.
It's still the honeymoon period in Biden's presidency and he has generously pleased the MSM by spending the early days pissing on the bed the Trumps once occupied, canceling executive order after executive order that Trump gassed out with his balloon-speak tweets. But soon he'll settle into what he is. In The Center Did Not Hold: An Obama/Biden Balance Sheet, Robert Eisenberg strongly holds with those who believe Biden will offer up a continuation and extension of Obama Nation. Eisenberg delineates more than a hundred points of liberal hopelights that went out under Obama/Biden and he sets us up with the sense of a messy divorce to come not long after the honeymoon ends, presumably in a different bed.
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