In an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Ronald Reagan (brilliantly played by Phil Hartman) pretends to be a doddering, out-of-touch dotard until the press leaves the room, and then suddenly transforms into an evil genius.
Is this what’s going on with Joe Biden?
In public he appears increasingly out of it.
He speaks nonsense, he shows flashes of inappropriate anger, he walks off stage in the middle of events, and he has trouble with stairs.
Even Democrats are beginning to admit to serious doubts about his ability to function as president.
But what if it’s all an act?
I ask that because the latest word is that, according to James Comer, President Biden had at least one pseudonymous email account that he used so he could secretly collude with his son (and alleged bagman) Hunter.
The only reason to run such an account is to make sure that the emails don’t get archived in official systems and aren’t available under the Freedom of Information Act, and to keep the communications out of the reach of critics, and possibly law enforcement.
Writing in National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke observes: “If this allegation is proven to be accurate, what could the defense possibly be? As with the claims that the Biden family created a network of more than 20 shell companies; that Vice President Biden joined phone calls with Hunter and his foreign business partners upwards of twenty times; and that Joe flew Hunter to China on Air Force Two to meet with one of Hunter’s CCP-connected Chinese business partners, I honestly can’t think of one.”
I can’t think of a defense either.
But I can think of an explanation, and that explanation is that Joe was all in on a vast criminal enterprise in which bribes from sources as diverse as China and Ukraine were solicited, received and laundered.
I suppose there may be other, more innocent, explanations, but like Cooke I’m having trouble thinking of anything that makes this pattern of behavior look innocent.
Which is why I’m wondering if when Joe Biden is acting senile, he’s actually acting senile.
Some New Yorkers may remember Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the mob boss who pretended to be crazy for 30 years to throw off law enforcement.
The press called him “The Oddfather” for his habit of wandering around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently. He was trying to look as if he were too crazy to be running the mob.
So is Biden putting on the same act, this time in the White House?
Gigante was part of the Genovese family crime mob, and the feds eventually nailed him.
The Biden family syndicate, meanwhile, has been raking in tens, possibly hundreds, of millions from shady foreign sources, something that begs for the kind of law enforcement attention that the Genovese family got.
The difference is, the feds seem more interested in covering for the Bidens than in investigating these connections, which have so far only faced investigation from congressional committees.
We need a full, complete, and transparent investigation of what’s going on here, but will we get one?
You’d have to be crazy to believe that.