Joe Biden's Free Pass (From Me)

President Biden and I have come through the last forty years together, connected by newspapers. Joe, if I may be so bold as to call an old friend by his familiar name, was often reported in the newspapers, and I have always been an avid newspaper reader. From his hair-plugs, to his dubious record of bipartisan legislation, to his carefully cultivated “hey, man!” working class facade, Joe has always been a gold mine for reporters. There was always a good story in Joe, from his vanity, to his activities, to his shenanigans. It’s quite a trail of malarkey, and easy to follow.

Which makes me wonder: with so many decades of gold there to mine, why do our current class of content providers stay so close to the optical-illusion scandals recently created by Republican operatives? Barisma; Hunter’s laptop; the Biden crime family; Joe’s new surprise grandchild. None of that means anything anyway, and it all pales in comparison to readily discoverable and extremely disagreeable material in his political history. There lies the true mystery of Biden’s presidency.

I made some notes about it in early 2019, but I have never shared the results herein. The country was in serious trouble already, and Joe was clearly going to be the best chance to beat Trump in 2020. I thought that it would be unpatriotic to expose the dirt that could cost Joe the nomination, or the election, because to do that would inflict a deep wound on our country, already rubber-legged in its brawl with evil.

I decided that I would give Joe a pass. I would smile and watch the parade go by. I would go so far as to support the suggestion that he was doing a great job and not making a bit of trouble, no, not a bit of it. Why should I not behave thus?

You may consider the pass to be in effect now, and also that it will remain so into the foreseeable future. We need Joe. He’s really selling it. He’s got good numbers. The last new gripe against him was that he appeared in public wearing white sneakers. (Which means they’ve got nothing.) Joe might get elected and endure another four years. He might live!

There is also a good chance that Trump will be elected again. After his own fashion, perhaps. The nomination, at least, will happen before any of these trials now in various stages of pretrial foot-dragging. If Trump is nominated by the Republicans, we can be sure that the cry of “let the people’s voice be heard” will ring out across the land. If Trump is one of the nominees, he will, like last time, act like the casting of all of the votes makes him president immediately. That’s irrespective of the vote count. It will either be a clear Trump victory, or simply another stolen election. What happens then is anyone’s guess. My Magic Eight-Ball is in the shop.

Problems

There will always be more than one way to look at a problem. You may look at the problem through a different filter. You may examine the problem in a different light. You may look at it in a mirror. Sometimes simply letting your eyes go out of focus will cause the problem to stand out in brighter relief. A problem is part of a pair that also includes a solution. Some problems are solved, and may thereby be resolved. Some are never solved, which may be for better or for worse.

All individuals face numerous problems in their lives. Problems big and small; important or insignificant; interpersonal or within the individual. Our greatest challenge is recognizing the existence of the big, important problems. This is easier said than done.

Many of us are plagued in life by a swarm of problems. We may understand that they are all related to each other in some way, but that understanding gets us no closer to seeing the essential problem itself.

This is where I find myself in this end-game of my life. We seniors live from day to day, waiting to die. Waiting for our turn. We dream of dead friends and family, and are cursed to live in the ruin that we have made of our life. Our decades of experience may give us some perspective regarding our problems. Identifying a problem when it is too late to fix it is much worse than never having identified the problem at all.

Here is a good question: is a problem that is never identified really a problem at all?

Life’s greatest joke might be to provide us with the intelligence needed to identify the important problems in our lives, while denying us the cleverness that would be required to solve them.