The big story of the week is that the Hunter Biden plea deal fell apart. The government proposed to accept a guilty plea on minor charges in exchange for no investigation of serious charges, including acting allegedly as an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine and China. The judge said, “No, You cannot do that.” Now this might seem a small process step in a courtroom far, far away. But the judge’s independent act of decision may prove to be the flapped wings of a butterfly that cause a political cataclysm in the USA.
It had looked like the President’s son was going to get off scot free; notwithstanding that he had been caught in flagrante delicto, on his own laptop by his own handheld iPhone, in many immoral and allegedly illegal acts. The press has finally begun to report the documents, testimony and evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden and the alleged, and prima facie well-documented, links to the President. One outlet even used that infamous cliche of the Trump years that the “walls were closing in” on Joe Biden. Of course, in 2020 the infamous laptop was suppressed, and the story was put out that all this funny business in Ukraine was Russian disinformation. Documents and investigations have since proven this smokescreen to be disinformation spread by operatives of American security agencies and the Democratic party.
Jonathan Turley, the distinguished legal scholar, has written an important piece on the evidence of wrong-doing, and how traces of evidence that point to the President have been revealed in Congressional hearings. Turley wrote:
While the media can continue to suppress the evidence and allegations within their own echo-chambered platforms, truth like water has a way of finding a way out. The scandal is moving forward with or without the media.
The issue may explode. More than one finger has been taken out of the dyke that protects the Biden clan from the flood of justice. The waters will rise and surge around the weakened swimmer, Joe Biden, as he prepares for the 2024 re-election campaign. Those waters around Biden are turbulent. There is an insurgent candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, who, although he is yet another representative of American oligarchy’s political clans, makes noises that he wants to dismantle parts of the American war machine. On the Republican side, Trump looms, and some polls suggest many voters may switch from Biden, who had only won 2020 by 40,000 votes. Since then voters have learned the laptop story was true, and the RussiaGate story was a hoax. They have learned that Kabul was not safely in Joe’s hands, and that Ukraine is not winning the war for democracy. They also see Joe Biden work methodically to persecute his political opponent for records management disagreements, while appearing to protect his son and family on serious charges of corruption and worse. As these surging waters rise, will frail old Joe, that old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, be able to summon the political machines to secure his re-election?
But the Bidens are just one clan in America’s geriatric oligarchy. All would have seen the footage of Senator Mitch McConnell freezing before the cameras in a health incident that betrayed his age and debility. It is not an isolated incident since there is an astonishing number of very old political leaders in the USA: Mitch McConnell (81), Joe Biden (80), Nancy Pelosi (83), Maxine Waters (84) Chuck Grassley (89), Dianne Feinstein (90). There are ancient oligarchs, like George Soros (92), and indispensable diplomats, like Henry Kissinger (100). Kissinger actually visited Xi JinPing, leader of China this week, more than Joe Biden can do.
Peter Turchin (End Times) claims there is “elite over-production” and intensified competition in America for high status, powerful positions. If true, this production is high quantity and low quality, and the competition is not driving innovation, but entrenching the established. How did the American political system become so ossified that despite elite competition and over-production it is dominated by a long list of people who need to step aside?
I have forsworn predicting elections, although I once believed I had strong political intuitions. But elections, in the end, are just one of the rites of our political order. Whatever the outcome of the 2024 USA elections, the next 16 months in America look like they will be a time of troubles. Could political disintegration of the gerontocratic American republic occur over the next two years? Or will it just become a slowly crumbling shambles, like American cities? Scandal, impasse, gridlock, and factional squabbling do not make the best conditions to fight a war against Russia, against China, and against the independence of the multipolar world. American exceptionalism has regressed to Old Corruption. Which country in the world wants to be ruled by a family like the Bidens or a Senate of Broken Elders?