The public is mostly unaware that a key motive behind the Democrats’ impeachment effort was to criminalize any interest in the Biden family’s shady dealings with the persistently corrupt country of Ukraine. As damaging news coverage of Hunter Biden’s multimillion dollar gig with Burisma, the troubled Ukrainian energy company, escalated in the fall of 2019 and threatened to derail Joe Biden’s third run for the presidency, the Biden campaign declared open season on journalists.

A Biden spokeswoman lashed out at the New York Times for publishing “malicious claims” about her boss and his son; the campaign warned social media companies not to run ads featuring the infamous clip of Biden bragging about trading U.S. foreign aid in exchange for the firing of a prosecutor investigating Burisma. The fervor quickly died down after Democrats successfully changed the subject, building an impeachment case against President Trump that portrayed his brief mention of the Bidens during a phone call with the Ukrainian president as “election interference.”

The gambit has worked so far. Hunter Biden and Burisma effectively disappeared from the pages of the New York Times, the paper that first revealed in 2015 the younger Biden’s ties to Burisma; all major news outlets followed suit. Hidin’ Biden no longer faces even softball questions from the press or the public about his past activities in Kyiv, where he served as Barack Obama’s “point person” and doled out billions in U.S. tax dollars to a grateful regime.

But Team Biden seems worried again. Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s spokeswoman who consistently threatens the media not to publish “disinformation,” a.k.a. facts, about the Bidens and Ukraine, issued another decree last month. 

This time, Bedingfield is gunning for Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee; Johnson is pushing ahead with his investigation into Burisma and its influence during the final years of the Obama Administration.

“In the coming weeks, Johnson will attempt to relitigate comprehensively discredited accusations that Donald Trump drove himself into impeachment trying to force others to legitimize,” Bedingfield, copping to the impeachment head-fake, wrote on July 22. “Johnson will strain to provoke Democrats into responding to specific truncated and out of context snippets from documents and bad faith questioning of witnesses.”

To add some much-needed Russian collusion pack to her punch, as I wrote earlier this week, Bedingfield accused the two-term senator from Oshkosh of acting as a Kremlin stooge for allegedly relying on information from a member of the Ukrainian parliament. She claimed Andriy Derkach, who met with Trump lawyer and confidante Rudy Guiliani last December in Kyiv, is the “Ukrainian Putin” and allegedly sent materials to key Republican lawmakers, which makes Johnson part of a “foreign interference operation.”

Derkach, it seems, has the goods on Biden. In May, he released recordings of phone calls that appear to document Biden’s threat to withhold U.S. aid until the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma was fired. The phone calls involve Biden, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and the Ukrainian president at the time. (Hunter Biden and Kerry’s son-in-law were business partners.) Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has opened up a criminal probe into his predecessor based on the tapes.

But perhaps Team Biden is rattled about more than just bad press right before election day. 

While all eyes are focused on U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into Crossfire Hurricane, Attorney General William Barr presumably is moving forward with various investigations into Ukraine. 

In a February letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the Justice Department confirmed that two U.S. attorneys are handling “several open matters . . . that in some way potentially relate to Ukraine.” 

A spokesman for the Eastern District of New York, one of the offices tasked with the Ukraine-related inquiry, declined to comment on the probe to American Greatness. As of press time late Thursday, neither the main Justice Department nor the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh responded to a request for comment.

Johnson, bruised after a rough interview this week with Hugh Hewitt (who roasted the senator for the GOP’s lack of action on Obamagate), later had to clarify his remarks, but he seems undeterred in pursuing his investigation. 

Johnson announced he would subpoena Jonathan Winer, a former top official in John Kerry’s State Department, which was heavily lobbied by Burisma-paid Democratic operatives in 2015 and 2016. (Winer also was a neighbor of Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson and a longtime pal of Christopher Steele; Winer helped circulate the Steele dossier.)

In a lengthy letter defending his work, Johnson posed several questions that both Bidens should be forced to answer. 

“Did Burisma, its owner, or representatives receive special access to, or treatment from, U.S. agencies or officials because of Hunter Biden’s role on the board of directors?” Johnson wrote August 10. “Exactly when, and for what reasons, did the U.S. government decide to condition a $1 billion loan guarantee for Ukraine on the termination of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin? What exactly had Shokin done that caused you to threaten to withhold $1 billion in desperately needed aid from Ukraine if President Poroshenko didn’t fire him?”

Investigative reporter John Solomon also is making inroads on his independent inquiry into the Bidens. State Department memos released under a Freedom of Information Act request confirm Burisma’s successful outreach and use of Biden’s name to gain access. 

“They show far more contact between Burisma and the U.S. embassy in [Kyiv] than was acknowledged by witnesses during President Trump’s impeachment proceedings earlier this year,” Solomon reported on August 12. “The memos show Burisma’s lobbying efforts were led by a Democratic firm called Blue Star Strategies and aided by the nonprofit Atlantic Council foreign policy think tank, stretching from the State Department’s executive suite in Washington at the start of the election to the U.S. embassy in [Kyiv] in the waning days of the Obama administration.”

The memos also acknowledge contact between Burisma representatives and key impeachment witnesses including Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent.

The media, of course, will continue to take its marching orders from Team Biden until Election Day. Johnson is the newest Russian collusion villain; Ukraine, American voters will be told, is old news and a liability for the president, not his Democratic opponent.

But plenty of Biden bombshells could come to light by Johnson’s committee, the Justice Department, and conservative media over the next several weeks; it will be too late for a rushed impeachment trial to save Biden again.

This has been a year of such astonishing and unforeseeable events that it seems to be taking some time for the full impact of what has tumbled onto the daily and political life of the United States to be assimilated. The year has been building steadily towards its November 3 climax like a Wagnerian opera, through the worst medical pandemic in 100 years, which is playing a role in the fierce combat zone of American politics.

As the primary season unfolded, the Democrats were faced with the selection of an outright Marxist, though a sincere Democrat, and the powers that be in that party intervened to assure the nomination of a presidential candidate who is unique for other reasons.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, a venerable wheel-horse of 50 years of elective service who has never demonstrated any vote-winning ability outside his little state of Delaware (400,000 voters), bombed badly in the early primaries—placing fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, behind the Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, the only slightly less socialistic pseudo-Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a fluent gay young mayor of a city of about 100,000 people, Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, and the un-frightening but somewhat plodding and Mondalean Senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar. 

Democratic Party elders were so disconcerted at the prospect of Sanders as the nominee, they performed the Lazarene feat of resurrecting Biden, who in his long career has generally been thought a centrist. But his political precepts had never been tested outside Delaware, and he went with the party leadership in the Senate through six terms. 

In these circumstances—that is, in order to reconcile with the Sandersites, who had been questionably deprived of the nomination for the second time in four years—Biden has effectively signed on to the Sanders program. He rightly proclaims himself the most leftist candidate in the party’s history (“progressive” in the current jargon, but that misconceives progress). 

Sanders and Biden sully the great name of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a statesman role model; FDR was a well-educated man who believed that without contented working and agrarian classes, which were, in any case, an equitable ambition in a rich country, the system would be unstable and possibly even unsafe for those who lived in 40-room houses in thousand-acre estates as he did.

The Democratic Party is now committed to a far more radical socialist platform than has ever been remotely hinted at by a serious American national party. This includes open borders, and effectively the full right of undocumented residents to the benefits of the American welfare and education systems as well as the right to vote. They are also intent on the seizure of firearms in private hands. All those without comprehensive health insurance will be offered a “platinum” federal government health plan covering all contingencies which will soon be “free” healthcare for up to 150 million people. Minimum wages and taxes on anyone earning above the average income will be sharply increased. Most of the liberalizations of business and corporate regulations enacted by the Trump regime will be reversed, and unionization of the workforce heavily favored. The Democratic socialist caucus’ Green New Deal will be enacted, banning as quickly as possible (or even more swiftly than that) fossil fuel production and use, the internal combustion engine on land and in the air, and discouraging the consumption of beef to spare the environment the challenge of bovine flatulence with which it has coexisted for all of known history.

More than $1 trillion of student loans gradually will be forgiven over 20 years, university education will be guaranteed to be available and free to all families with incomes below $150,000 a year, and private, chartered, separate, and home schooling will all be discouraged to promote the monopoly of the underperforming, heavily unionized state school systems. 

Abortion, including the disposal of newly born children, will be available without cost to everyone. The military will be substantially downsized; the agreement assuring Iran its right to deploy nuclear weapons in five years will be reaffirmed, and there is no indication that this administration’s activities to protect American jobs and industry from unreasonable competition and trade arrangements will be continued. 

The Democrats are also pledged to look seriously and positively at a program of trillions of dollars of reparations to descendants of emancipated American slaves and to native people.

This is a blueprint for a pacifist, socialist republic presented by a party that, as Attorney General William Barr remarked at the House Judiciary Committee on July 28, does not condemn mob violence, approves the reduction of police forces in the country’s cities, accepts that those who attempt to burn down federal buildings, churches, and police precincts, and to destroy monuments of traditional American heroes including Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass are “peaceful protesters” whose rights to do so are apparently protected by the First Amendment.

This absurd political program is now widely supposed by the 90 percent anti-Trump media to be on the verge of electoral approval. 

When confronted with the obvious total unacceptability of this fact, the standard response is that Biden is a reliable moderate and has generally avoided comment on the more controversial measures, which in the normal course will simply not be enacted. Biden does appear at the moment to be a narrow favorite in the polls, largely because the Biden-Sanders program has not really been examined and because of the success of the anti-Trump media in panning Trump’s anti-COVID-19 performance as inadequate. That is a harsh judgment. He acted early to close off direct travel from China and Europe (to a chorus of criticism from the Democrats), and showed great executive ability in swiftly producing ventilators, hospital beds, and other medical requirements, but the public relations could have been better handled at times.

Crime—especially violent crime—is rising sharply in most cities and the mainly Democratic city governments are hopeless and inert (e.g. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle). The president outmaneuvered the Democrats by reverting to executive order to continue assistance to the economically afflicted, but at levels that incentivize their return to work. 

Trump faces the challenge of selling a two-track recovery: epidemiological and economic, concurrently. It is the only way to avoid either a terrible depression or hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and in the meantime, it should sink in on the country that a vote for Biden is a vote for hardcore authoritarian socialism, strengthened by mailed-out ballot-harvesting, unrestricted voting by illegal immigrants, and an assault on the Electoral College with spreading state legislation delivering all electoral votes to the leading overall vote-winning candidate regardless of the vote-breakout in each state. 

The pell-mell descent of events has made it possible for the Democrats to represent Trump as President Chaos, but if COVID-19 fatalities continue to decline alongside receding unemployment, it will be impossible for the American public to elect the Sanders proletarian revolution with the amiable stumblebum from Delaware as its Judas Goat. 

As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.

Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.

In the past, it was to Biden’s advantage to postpone his selection of his female-mandated vice presidential running mate, given the lose-lose choice of either picking a woke young African American female who may polarize swing voters while spending the next three months being vetted in the fashion of California Representative Karen Bass’s Scientology and Fidel Castro issues, or selecting a vetted, but off-putting former National Security Advisor Susan Rice or Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who does not especially like Biden and would be seen as hovering and rummaging about as an impatient president-in-waiting.

Biden, remember, is one of the few primary candidates in history who promised in advance to pick a running mate on the basis of gender and, as events would dictate, and by inference, race as well.

But now there seems an additional urgency to select a running mate, given the Democratic ticket is a construct, with no visible or viable presidential candidate. While traditional polls show a sizable Biden lead, at some point voters will want more than the current contest of Trump alone versus the media, the virus, the lockdown, the economy, and the rioting. But so far, it remains a one-person race, in the fashion of Clint Eastwood’s weird 2012 Republican National Convention appearance speaking to an empty chair.

Perceiving the Inner Biden

So we are witnessing a campaign never before experienced in American history and not entirely attributable to the plague and quarantine. After all, the fellow septuagenarian Trump, with his own array of medical challenges, insists upon frenetic and near-constant public appearances. His opponent is a noncandidate conducting a noncampaign that demands we ask the question, who exactly is drafting the Biden agenda and strategy? Or, rather, who or what is Biden, if not a composite cat’s paw of an anonymous left-wing central committee?

When Biden speaks for more than a few minutes without a script or a minder in his basement, the results are often racist of the sort in the Black Lives Matter era that otherwise would be rightly damned and called out as disqualifying. If his inner racialist persona continues to surface, Biden’s insensitivities threaten to expose a muzzled BLM as a mere transparent effort to grab power rather than to address “systemic racism” of the sort the exempt Biden seems to exude.

Biden needs the minority vote in overwhelming numbers, as he realized in his late comeback in the primaries. But the continuance of his often angry, unapologetic racialist nonsense suggests that his cognitive issues trump his political sense of self-control.

The inner Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.

For Biden, if any African American doesn’t vote for him, then “you ain’t black”—a charge fired back at black podcaster with near venom. Biden more calmly assures us, in his all-knowing Bideneque wisdom, that Americans can’t tell Asians in general apart—channeling the ancient racist trope that “they all look alike.”

In his scrambled sociology, blacks are unimaginatively monolithic politically, while Latinos are diverse and more flexible. Biden seems to have no notion that “Latino” is a sort of construct to encompass everyone from a Brazilian aristocrat to an immigrant from the state of Oaxaca, and not comparable to the more inclusive and precise term “African American.” Moreover, while the black leadership in Congress may be politically monolithic, there are millions of blacks who oppose abortion, defunding the police, and illegal immigration. The best minds of the conservative intellectual and political movement so often are African Americans.

When asked questions, Biden’s answers so often reveal racist subtexts. A few days ago, CBS reporter Errol Barnett, who is black, asked Biden whether he would take a cognitive assessment exam. Biden fired back to him that such an unfair question would be as if he had asked Barnett whether he was getting tested for cocaine before going live. “That’s like saying,” a perturbed Biden exclaimed to Barnett, “before you got on this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not . . . What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?” Note the tell-tale Biden trademark of racist insinuation delivered with punk-like braggadocio.

Note, too, Biden’s racist assumption that an African American professional journalist might be likely to be defensive about being a cocaine addict. Yet Biden should know—from the drug struggles of Hunter Biden—that cocaine is in fact the favorite drug of the white elite.

Mental Lapses as Force Multipliers

The problem is that in the past, a cognizant Biden was already racially edgy with his various earlier-career riffs about inner-city criminals, blue-collar chest-thumping about busing, and his more recent ideas about donut shops, accomplished black professionals on the verge of returning to slave status (“put y’all back in chains”), his racist descriptions of candidate Obama’s supposedly exceptional personal hygiene and ability to speak well, his corn-pop braggadocio, and on and on.

His mental lapses now serve as force multipliers and accelerants of the old Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease and render him often a caricature of a racist.

Politically, the point is not that he will not win the majority of minority voters, but rather that he won’t win enough of them at a margin necessary that carrying large swing-state cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and others, will make up for the likely loss of rural areas and working-class whites, supposedly the “clingers” that “good ’ole Joe from Scranton” was supposed to own.

Even more disturbing, the media simply is unconcerned about Biden’s racial putdowns, stereotyping, and uncomfortableness with the proverbial “other.” And the more the inner-Biden racialist sounds off, the more ridiculous such contextualizing becomes and the less people listen when journalists and activists spout off about a systemically racist America.

Recently, when Biden has attempted to speak without prompts, indeed to clear up “rumors” of his cognitive problems, he simply loses his train of thought and utters a series of unstructured and unsettled thoughts that refute the very premise of his interview. The understandable Democratic strategy is to run out the clock and to choreograph a few post-Labor Day public appearances, to outsource campaigning to his running mate and future cabinet secretaries, and then to hope, in the manner of a 2016 Hillary Clinton, that he has amassed a large enough September lead to outlast a closing October Trump campaign.

There are problems with such a strategy, as we saw in 2016. If Biden late in the campaign stumbles in the debates, there is no post-convention remedy to reassure the public he is compos mentis or otherwise can be replaced by a majority consensus. Then the country would be entering something eerily similar to, but far graver than, the McGovern debacle of desperately looking for a new running mate after it was disclosed that an apparently perfectly cognizant Tom Eagleton—his running-mate for 18 days—had undergone two electric shock treatments in his past as well as undisclosed prior hospitalizations for bipolar disorder.

Biden’s Race Against Time

Right now, the Democrats have a virtual campaign and a virtual candidate and a strategy of running against the Trump news cycle. That may work, but it assumes Americans under quarantine don’t mind that they do not really know who is the Democratic challenger, or that Biden is, in fact, not physically or mentally able to function as either a candidate or president. It also assumes that the Trump-owned news cycle will remain as dismal over the next three months as it has the last five or six weeks, and that the virus will spike in late October again, rather than slowly burn out as it seems to be doing in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.

Add it all up and the question is no longer whether Biden could fulfill the duties of the presidency but whether he can finish a traditional campaign over the next three months—without outsourcing his duties to a committee, or serially saying something blatantly racist, or simply disappearing to the nether world of his basement where saying nothing beats saying anything.

The Left projects more than a drive-in movie theater. The latest case in point is the febrile effort to stoke the “Trump won’t split” riff.

The Hill on Monday offered a prime example of this regressive riff, this time emanating from MSNBC columnist Mike Barnicle during an appearance on “Morning Joe.” Fraught with intimations of a prospective civil war, Barnicle’s analysis proffered both an electoral dilemma and his solution for it:

One thing we all learned in the year 2000 is that Republicans are good at fixing the way we count ballots in the country. Now, with this furor over mail-in votes, we could be sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner not really knowing specifically who the president-elect of the United States is. So we all have to pray that there’s going to be a landslide for Joe Biden in order to avoid this conflict.

Of course, in 2000 it was the United States Supreme Court that ultimately resolved the Florida recount, which Democrats had hoped to drag out until they could somehow show Al Gore as the winner. But let us not quibble over the past, when it is Barnicle’s proposed solution that gives away the Left’s game.

The Left usually has a method to its madness—at least the Democratic establishment does. The “Trump won’t split” riff has been pushed to accomplish practical political objectives, all of which stem from one elemental problem.

For all the collusion media’s cheerleading and intensifying gaslighting, the Left has an enthusiasm gap. One of the few benefits of the intensity behind the Left’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is that it allows the Left finally to glean, albeit negatively, the ardor Trump’s base has for him. Yet despite all the TDS in its ranks, the Left also is acutely aware their nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has nothing like that ardor among his supporters—including regressives and the centrist voters his campaign is courting. Even a TDS-enthralled vegan would find it hard to get enthused about electing a turnip president. 

In consequence, the Democrats have a turnout problem. After all, polls mean squat if your voters don’t vote. Cue up the “Trump won’t split” riff.

Following its modus operandi of ascribing its own sins to its opponents, the Left’s resistance to Trump’s 2016 victory is projected onto Trump and the GOP regarding the 2020 election. The Left’s aims are twofold: First, to undermine any attempt by Trump and the GOP to verify any questionable election results, especially given the potential for irregularities with mail-in voting (as distinguished from traditional absentee voting). And second, to maximize Democratic voter engagement, participation, and turnout.

These two aims are concomitant and complimentary. They are not solely about electing Joe Biden president. If a voter is unenthused about the top of the ticket, he or she is far less likely to vote, volunteer, or donate to any campaign. As a result, the Democratic Party is concerned the lack of enthusiasm for Biden will also hinder its efforts to retain the U.S. House, seize the U.S. Senate, and take a host of state and local offices. 

This is why the Left is resorting to its same old cynical song and dance of motivating voters through “fear and/or greed.” Just as it has tried to do with its “systemic racism” trope, the Left remains in full fearmonger mode with the “Trump won’t split” riff and its accompanying threat of a constitutional crisis and then . . . well, who can really say? 

Fortunately, the polls also show the majority of the public believes the media is biased; and that any post-election violence will come from the Left. Come November, despite the obstreperous Left’s strenuous projecting, the majority of the electorate will tune out the “Trump won’t split” riff and punish a Democratic Party that refuses to condemn—let alone penalize—rioters who believe violence is the answer.

This outcome is good news in general for our free republic and in particular for Barnicle, who can eat his Thanksgiving meal in peace thanks to the coming Trump landslide.