Greetings and welcome to this 20th and postinaugural edition of the Carnival of Fools. A new administration is in town, and I can feel the freedom coursing through my veins. Everything is different now! To celebrate, I’m blasting The Who’s music throughout my household as I tip my cap to the new constitution and take a bow for the new revolution, smiling and grinning at the “change” all around me.
And so, with nothing better left to do, I now sit down at my keyboard and play. It’s just like yesterday. And then I get on my knees and pray that God forgives us as fools, for we are all likely to be fooled once again. Before the next four years of this great circus commences, however, let’s take today to finally sweep away the remnants of the last four.
Nobody Was Fired
As you no doubt already know, on his way out the door, Joe Biden decided to pardon his entire family (minus his wife Jill, with whom he must have had an argument) alongside the January 6 Committee. I don’t care! I know it’s appalling, but the time to be appalled about it was back when he pardoned his son Hunter Biden — after that, these subsequent pardons were foreordained. (In particular, anyone paying attention knew that once Hunter got a full pardon another one was coming for Joe Biden’s equally buck-raking brother James, a man who suppurates corruption and whose misdeeds have received almost zero public attention because Hunter’s drug escapades stole the spotlight.)
Instead, I am struck by an observation that few others seem to have made about the Biden era: Nobody really ever got fired. (Yes, the luggage thief with nuclear top-secret clearances got canned, but he was a low-level appointee, caught on camera, and also shudderingly disturbing in all respects.) It is, in fact, a historically remarkable milestone; further, most of his cabinet remained constant from start to finish.
And surely it was not due to his cabinet’s peerless performance — Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas would have been sacrificed ten times over in any prior administration over the border situation alone. Instead, while Biden was in office, cabinet officials seemed to be capable of getting away with murder, just so long as they stayed loyally onside: The secretary of defense, General Lloyd Austin, quite literally went AWOL for several days to deal with a medical issue he had concealed from his own president and was welcomed back into the fold by the administration with no questions asked. Why?
I remember that Donald Trump had only one good line during his first (and only) debate against Joe Biden — primarily because he needed do nothing else but remain functional while Biden melted like a wax candle beside him — and it was his point that Biden had never fired anyone for poor performance, not even once in a presidential term that all voters could agree was wrought with massive, avoidable, personally accountable failures. Why not? I flagged it back then (even amidst the chaos of Biden’s meltdown) because I felt that it subtly got to the point that Trump, in that debate, was not expecting to deal with: Biden’s presidency had been a sham from its very first day, a project managed by a group of advisers rather than an actual president, and that cabal couldn’t fire anyone who might reveal the secret.
It really boils down to that: We were stuck with the useless administration Biden announced on Day One, because, on Day One, Biden was already mentally unfit for office. His aides and family hid him, and every single person who accepted a berth working for this fraud of a team inevitably realized it (or came to realize it) as well. That’s why nobody could be fired or let go. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Remember when America’s entire transportation infrastructure, from plane to highway to rail, suddenly convulsed early in the term under Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who at one time happened to be secretly vacationing? Of course you don’t, because no disciplinary action was taken after that PR malfunction. Ask yourself why. The obvious answer is that a Buttigieg cashiered for political purposes would be a Buttigieg free to remark about how he suspected Biden to secretly be a mental vegetable. (Mayor Pete has ambitions, so perhaps he could be trusted to maintain omertà; how about Lloyd Austin?) That’s why they were all forgiven, I suspect. How nice it must have been to work in a presidential administration run with the same mindset as a failing Mafia enterprise, where you weren’t even expected to “produce numbers”; only loyalty to the secret of the dying don was required to keep your sinecure.
If nothing else, we have thankfully bid farewell to this era. We now enter one where the capos acutely fear the don, because he is awake — and forever angry. Meet the new boss — perhaps not the same as the old one but resonant nonetheless in different ways.
Are the Washington Commanders Actually Good?
Since I can’t help mentioning all the time that I’m a Chicagoan, you would be surprised to know that none of my sports affiliations have any relationship to the Windy City. For I am actually a Washingtonian born and raised (born in D.C., schooled and churched in the nearby Montgomery County, Md., suburbs), and even though I more or less permanently departed the D.C./Maryland/Virginia region 20 years ago for law school, I’ve kept all my ancestral sports loyalties. (Why? Because you never forget where you come from, that’s why.)
Except one, that is: NFL’s Washington [X] team. I say “[X]” because, of course, they were the Redskins in my childhood — a controversial name that never bothered me in the day but does admittedly seem slightly tasteless now — and then briefly the “Washington Football Team,” a delightfully generic name I wish they had kept. (I would happily attend a “Washington Football Team” game while drinking a can of beer labeled “beer.”) Now they are the Washington Commanders, and now they are suddenly good.
Those who were not raised in the Washington area will not properly comprehend how unusual this is. For they did not suffer through the horrible decades of Dan Snyder’s ownership, from the mid-’90s onward, when the Jack Kent Cooke/Joe Gibbs–era Redskins were stripped and sold on the black market for parts — not just as a team but as a brand — and the entire region’s fiercely loyal fan base was driven away. I was one of those people. Even as a confirmed Midwesterner now, I still root for the Capitals, hapless Wizards, and even more hapless Nationals. (Hey, the Nats at least gave me the last real World Series victory in MLB history — everything post-Covid is a farce.) But I am too stung by the decades of abuse by Snyder’s Redskins to trust in these Commanders, not yet. That said, I wish them luck from afar.
Until next week.