As the weather turns colder, the days get shorter, and another Trump presidency looms, James Carville, like most Democrat honchos, is down in the dumps, and increasingly given to muttering into his beer about what might have been. The if onlys pile up in Carville’s reptilian mind, often in contradictory fashion: Old Joe Biden, you see, is as honest as the day is long, and now, dadgummit, he has gone and tarnished his own legacy by pardoning Hunter, which was as obvious a corrupt and self-serving act as there ever has been. But if only that same upright public servant had just gotten out of the way in time, the Democrats would have won the election and continued unimpeded their merry work of destroying America. Oh sorrow, oh woe!
“The most tragic figure in American politics in my lifetime is President Biden,” said Carville, and he seems to have been serious. Now hold up a minute, Jimmy. You might want to sit down for this. Let me tell you about another figure in American politics. This guy actually wasn’t a politician at all. He was a wealthy man with a beautiful wife, a comfortable life, and a taste for philanthropy, and he could have enjoyed a retirement of playing golf and making cameo appearances in movies, beloved by all.
Instead, because he loved this country and was alarmed at its direction, he entered politics, ran for president, and won. Meanwhile, his enemies, deeply threatened, determined to destroy him, and pulled out all the stops to do so. They fabricated evidence of his collusion with a hostile foreign power. They framed him for various crimes stateside, elevating misdemeanors to felonies to do so. They charged him with criminal activity for actions he did not do, and for acts such as doubting the veracity of election results that numerous others, including many among his foes, had done in the past without penalty. By the summer of 2024, he was looking at the very real possibility of an extended stay in prison.
And for what? Solely for opposing the agenda of those who had vowed to destroy him, and for proving to be an effective obstacle to their plans. Now that, Mr. Carville, is a tragic figure, although for a story to be a tragedy in the classic sense, it has to have a sorrowful ending, and right now this one ends as anything but a tragedy, with this much-maligned and vilified figure improbably triumphing over all his powerful foes and getting elected president again.
Of course, the final chapter of this story has not yet been written, so Donald Trump may not turn out to be the most tragic figure in American politics in James Carville’s lifetime, and we can hope for all our sakes that in the end, Trump’s story is more triumph than tragedy. But Carville couldn’t be more wrong: there is nothing, absolutely nothing, tragic or heroic about Old Joe Biden. He has been for decades now a serial liar, a conscienceless corruptocrat, and a glib and unprincipled demagogue, plaguing the American public with a dispiriting longevity. His imminent final departure from the national scene will be a day of rejoicing.
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Carville, while shedding tears over this utterly unpitiable man, paradoxically thinks he should have departed from the scene sooner, and then everything would have been hunky dory for the socialist internationalist cause. “All right,” the serpentine strategist continued, “so he said, ‘I’d never pardon a kid.’ Okay.” Recalling his old boss, he drew an analogy: “When anybody says, ‘I never had sex with that person’ or ‘I’d never pardon my kid,’ I don’t pay any attention to it because I think everybody lies about sex and everybody is going to do whatever they’re going to do with their own children.” Like making them serve as their bag man and go-between in influence-peddling schemes.
In this case, however, Carville thinks Old Joe gave away the whole ballgame: “But the different scenario would be if he would’ve in September of 2023 or August, said that he wasn’t going to run. G** d**n, we would have won this election. And it wouldn’t have been that close because we’d have had so many freaking talented people that were running.”
Carville, like his fellow Democrats, seems simply to have no capacity whatsoever for self-reflection and cannot conceive of the possibility that his side lost because the American people prefer the policies of the opposition. Nah, that couldn’t be it. It must be because Tragic Old Joe, the martyr of inside the Beltway, didn’t compound his tragic status by bowing out even sooner than the day he was forced out. Yeah, Jimmy, that would have fixed everything. Keep telling yourself that.
