Bad moon rising for Biden, us as issues here, abroad
“April is the cruelest month,” wrote T. S. Eliot in the opening line of what is regarded as his greatest poem, “The Waste Land.”
For President Joe Biden, the cruelest month is surely August of 2021, which is now mercifully over.
When has a president had a worse month?
On the last Sunday in August, Biden watched solemnly, hand over heart, as the coffins of the American dead in the Kabul airport terrorist massacre of Aug. 26 were carried off the plane at Dover.
The American dead had been carrying out an evacuation of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies from America’s lost war, a defeat dealt to us by the same Taliban we ejected from power in 2001 for providing sanctuary for the al-Qaida terrorists of 9/11 . ...
That same noon hour on Sunday that Biden honored the fallen at Dover, Hurricane Ida was coming ashore. Ida’s 150-mile-anhour winds were raking the same Louisiana coast that Hurricane Katrina hit 16 years ago.
By nightfall Sunday, a million residents in and around New Orleans had lost all power, for days and perhaps for weeks.
Also in August, the U.S. moved ever deeper into the fourth wave of the COVID19 pandemic, with new infections, new hospitalizations and new deaths approaching the numbers they had reached at their worst last winter.
August also brought hundreds of thousands more illegal aliens across our southern border in the largest peacetime migrant invasion in memory . ...
Nor is this all. In August of 2021, American politics seem at their most poisonous.
Race relations are as raw as they have been since the ’60s. In the wake of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis cop, an outpouring of hostility against police has brought record retirements and resignations by cops across the country. Result: an unprecedented surge in urban shootings and killings, with children prominent among the victims.
When President John F. Kennedy gave his approval for the invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba that ended in the Bay of Pigs debacle, Americans rallied behind Kennedy because, though he had blundered badly, he was our president, the personification of America’s nationhood. His support soared to 80%.
We were one nation then, and one people. And today? Demands are being heard for the impeachment or resignation of Biden.
This piling on of the president is surely in part payback for what the Democrats did to former President Donald Trump.
Two weeks before Biden took the oath, a mob had invaded the Capitol to protest his formal certification as president.
For that mob intrusion, Trump was impeached a second time for what was variously described as “inciting insurrection,” “an attempted coup,” “domestic terrorism,” “treason” and mounting a mortal threat to “our democracy.”
“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith’s observation after the British lost the decisive Battle of Saratoga, is often invoked these days.
And justifiably so. For how much ruin can a nation endure and remain a nation? How much of this can we sustain and survive ...?
Our media are as partisan as they have been in our lifetimes. Our cultural elites endlessly mock the traditional values and beliefs of Middle America. Our national parties appear ever at sword’s point.
Our goal, it is said, is to ever move “toward a more perfect union.”
Does it seem like that is the direction where we are heading?
Are the divisions between us becoming too great for us to remain one nation and one people?