12-18-2020, 08:39 PM
(12-17-2020, 02:19 PM)User3451 Wrote:(12-15-2020, 11:34 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-14-2020, 09:21 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Joe Biden was born Nov. 20, 1942. A very late Silent, and already 78 years old. He will almost certainly be the only Silent president, as even the youngest of their generation is near their 80th birthday.
I'm not convinced that Biden will see the end of his one and only term. He seems hale and hearty, but the Presidency is an enormous burden that may weigh too heavily on a man his age.
(12-16-2020, 10:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(12-15-2020, 11:34 AM)David Horn Wrote:(12-14-2020, 09:21 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Joe Biden was born Nov. 20, 1942. A very late Silent, and already 78 years old. He will almost certainly be the only Silent president, as even the youngest of their generation is near their 80th birthday.
I'm not convinced that Biden will see the end of his one and only term. He seems hale and hearty, but the Presidency is an enormous burden that may weigh too heavily on a man his age.
How well do we really know Kamala Harris?
I can imagine Joe Biden resigning for reasons of health and being satisfied that he fulfilled his critical role in American history, especially should that diagnosis suggest him losing his ability to perform the Office of the Presidency. He seems to take oaths and scientific reality (which I assume includes medical diagnoses) seriously. There is hardly an incoming President on whom we have a more complete knowledge of his past through his voting record.
If Biden retires mid-term, we know exactly what one of the crises of this 4T would be.
Kamala Harris had very little support in the presidential primaries. She's not only despised by anyone left of Kissinger, but the right hate her as well.
At least the Crisis of 2020 is not a Second Term of Donald Trump in which he executes the Dictators' Playbook, this time competently, as with a secret police responsible to him alone, laudatory praise from anyone who whores away journalistic ethics for survival and lucre, government that does patronage at the expense of a free market (I think of him buying the farm vote with huge agricultural subsidies after he alienated them with a trade war about two years earlier), maybe a politicized youth group analogous to Commie Pioneers or Hitlerjugend of you-know-where, vote-rigging, maybe some massacres of opponents... Castro and Pinochet may have been quite different in style and official ideology, but their techniques were much the same. Run afoul of the Great and Infallible Leader and make sure that you have a ready exit or else you might end up dying horribly.
Can she grow into the job in the event of something going very wrong? Maybe.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.