The Richelieu Files: Why Biden?

Editor's Note: we received the following submission via e-mail from someone who referred to themselves as 'Armand Jean du Plessis, 1st Duke of Richelieu'. The submission was good, funny, and incredibly well-written and nobody else has submitted in a while, so we're going to roll with the premise that this was written by a French statesman and prelate of the Catholic Church who died in 1642.

We all know Joe Biden is a terrible president. He pursues stupid liberal policies that are stupid and liberal and destroying the country. But, even worse, he’s been a failure at president-ing. He can’t do the basics of the job.

That makes him different from Bill Clinton. When Bubba wasn’t getting hummers from 22-year-olds in the Oval Office (gross), he was okay at the basics of the job. Biden is not.

First, Biden is a dumb human being. Everybody knows this. Because he’s from Delaware, a state with three people but 400 credit card companies, he managed to get a job in the Senate.

The Senate is full of morons, so of course he blended in for the most part.

He was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, so he was responsible for the “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas. But because Thomas was a conservative, that didn’t matter to the people who run the country. Everybody took him to be a nice old fella who talked too much and didn’t think enough. Obama made him vice president, and it was sort of funny how he would say idiotic things all the time that would just annoy Obama. But he seemed harmless enough.

His intellectual bovinity only became a problem when he got real power for the first time, in 2021 — when he was already as old as Methuselah.

That’s the bigger problem. He’s fucking old. His birth date is closer to the outbreak of the Civil War than today. Of course, age is more than a number. It’s a state of mind. And that makes it worse. Watch a bit of Biden’s 1987 announcement for president (scroll ahead to about the 20-minute mark). Don’t watch too much. It’s dumb and stupid and Biden has a very creepy affect. Just get the feel for how he seems like a typically dumb, arrogant middle-aged man. Then go look at his 2008 announcement. Again, dumb. Old dumb. But not super old. Then his 2020 announcement. Yikes. Getting older, probably too old? And is his eye bleeding? HIS EYE IS BLEEDING. Ok, this is too old.

Now go look at him today.

The guy has fallen off the proverbial cliff. Biden thinks Mitterrand is still alive. The guy has been dead for almost thirty years (Mitterrand, not Biden).

And it’s not just the gaffes. It’s everything. The tempo of his speech has slowed to a crawl. He randomly loses his train of thought and just mumbles, “Nevermind.” The pace of his movements is glacial — not just that he’s stiff, but he’s uncertain of what to do next.

He falls off his bike and trips all the time. They won’t let him walk up the steps on Air Force Once. He doesn’t do press conferences. He slurs his words even when reading from a teleprompter. Whenever he finishes a speech, he doesn’t know where to go. He wore a hard hat backwards.

If he was your grandpa, would you let him take the car out on his own? I wouldn’t. If it was after 8 and Grandpa Joe hadn’t come home yet, would you worry? I would. Would you make a point to call Grandpa Joe every few hours to make sure he hadn’t fallen and couldn’t get up? Ditto. If grandma had died a few years ago, and Grandpa Joe was living alone, wouldn’t you try to talk him into assisted living? Of course. And if he refused, wouldn’t you just move him, anyway, knowing that sooner or later he’d forget the whole thing? Me too, buddy. Me too.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Old people are a treasure. They are a vital link to the past. They provide wisdom and knowledge and love and support and all that crap.

My point is not to make light of the vicissitudes of aging or mock the difficult decisions middle-aged children must make about their parents. My point is that there is just no way this guy is actually in charge. Not even a little bit. It’s not that he’s bad at president-ing. It’s that he literally can’t do it and so he isn’t doing it. Somebody else is doing the job.

Sometimes, Biden seems dimly aware that he’s not in charge. He always talks about how “they” won’t let him stay and answer more questions — as if the president is responsible to any “they.” But for the most part, he thinks he’s president-ing. He attends meetings. He gets the president’s daily briefing. He tells his staff what to do. He gives speeches. He hears the “Hail to the Chief” theme song and Jill assures him it’s for him. He gets the jacket that says “President Biden” on it. And sure, he probably has some input at meetings, at the margins where he can’t do any harm. Biden, being the same old arrogant blowhard he’s always been, probably thinks he’s doing a damn good job at it.

But he’s not. He’s doing very little. The business of government is still getting done … so who’s doing it? There’s a regency council sitting in the background somewhere. When the king was a kid or an old man, the aristocrats wouldn’t let him run the country. They would form a regency, with a handful of people operating behind the scenes, governing in the king’s name.

Who’s on the regency council? Jill Biden, probably. She seems to be Biden’s minder on the day-to-day. But she’s over in the East Wing. The West Wing regents are just sock puppets for Obama. Take Jeff Zients, who is Biden’s chief of staff. He was the director of Obama’s National Economic Council. That’s the tell.

This is typical Obama. That guy could give two shits about the Constitution. The 25th Amendment creates an orderly process for mentally incompetent presidents to be removed from power. But Obama’s pleased as punch to run the country from his swanky digs in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

It’s good to be the king.

And that is why everything the Biden administration does is so terrible. Obama is still in charge, and he is terrible.

This is why the Democrats are nominating Grandpa Joe for another term. It’s not just that the only realistic alternative is Kamala Harris. It’s that they have no problem with an Obama-helmed regency quietly running the country for another four years.

Just remember that next time you hear the libs explain to you that this election is about “saving democracy” or some such nonsense. A vote for Grandpa Joe is a vote to give Barack Obama a fourth term.

Armand Jean du Plessis, 1st Duke of Richelieu was minister to Louis XIII of France from 1624 until his death in 1642.