“If Joe Biden is elected,” Victor Davis Hanson predicts, “the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump.” VDH thinks the effort will be “far more insidious.”
White House insiders will leak stories to the New York Times and Washington Post describing Biden as he battles inevitable decline. Readers would learn “why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.” This scenario would not seem outlandish to anyone who recalls the 1972 presidential election.
That year the Democrat candidate was George McGovern, a veteran of 35 flying missions in World War II. After that conflict, McGovern opposed President Truman’s “aggressive anti-Soviet policy,” which he considered “dangerous,” and became an enthusiastic supporter of Henry Wallace, whose Progressive Party was a front for the Communist Party.
In 1962, McGovern won a Senate seat in South Dakota. About that time, the Soviets were moving nuclear missiles into Cuba, which McGovern did not consider an aggressive act. In similar style, Soviet attacks on democracy movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia did not disturb the Senator, who fought for cuts to the U.S. military budget. Despite his decidedly leftist record, Democrats judged McGovern the best candidate to take on Richard Nixon in 1972.
For a running mate, McGovern turned to Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, a Harvard law grad, devout Catholic and strong opponent of abortion. McGovern backed him “1000 percent,” but then came an anonymous call about Eagleton’s background. On three occasions during the 1960s Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and undergone electroshock treatment. As Eagleton explained, he drove himself too hard and that resulted in nervous exhaustion and fatigue. After only 18 days, McGovern dumped Eagleton for Sargent Shriver, husband of Eunice Kennedy and part of Democrat Party royalty.
Nixon crushed McGovern by 23.2 points, the widest-ever margin of victory in the popular vote, and the South Dakota leftist won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern ran again in 1984 but dropped out after the New Hampshire primary. In 2011 he made another visit to his “old friend” Fidel Castro, calling anti-Communist Cuban exiles “foolish” and railing against the U.S. embargo as “stupid.” McGovern died the following year, a faithful leftist to the end. As the 2020 vote approaches, the Democrat presidential candidate recalls McGovern on key policy questions.
According to former defense secretary Robert Gates, Joe Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. Sen. Biden supported the Soviet-backed “nuclear freeze” campaign and opposed Ronald Reagan’s military buildup and Strategic Defense Initiative, moves that accelerated Soviet Union’s collapse. Biden opposed aid to the Nicaraguan “Contras,” which forced the pro-Soviet Sandinistas to hold the 1990 elections. Safe to say, Joe Biden is a man of the left, but there’s more to the 2020 candidate.
Joe Biden believes the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks” and not competition for the United States. On the domestic side, Biden bears corporate entanglements, troubles with the “me too” crowd, and his serial plagiarism has now targeted Trump’s economic plan. For all but the willfully blind, Biden betrays serious cognitive issues.
“We choose truth over facts,” Biden proclaims. “Poor kids” are “just as talented as white kids” and if blacks don’t vote for him they “ain’t black.” Biden is unsure when he was vice president and seems uncertain of where he happens to be at any given moment. Thomas Eagleton never showed anything of the kind, yet McGovern dropped him after 18 days. This time around, the mental case is the Democrats’ presidential candidate.
Biden’s roster of far-left VP candidates now includes Congressional Black Caucus boss Karen Bass, a fan of Fidel Castro and his all-white Cuban Communist dictatorship. Whoever gets the call for vice president, Angela Davis could be Biden’s prime puppeteer and ventriloquist. The 1980 and 1984 Communist Party vice presidential candidate, on the CPUSA ticket with white Stalinist Gus Hall, has come out for Biden precisely because he can be “most effectively pressured.”
Meanwhile, as Victor Davis Hanson sees it, the Democrat campaign to topple Biden will begin the day after his election. Those disturbed by the prospects might recall that the Democrat-deep state campaign against Donald Trump began well before the 2016 election and continues after the Russia and Ukraine hoaxes. At this writing, not a single member of the coup clan is facing criminal charges. If anybody thought that John Durham, allegedly a man of integrity, is holding off until after the November election it would be hard to blame them.
Unlike 1972, the man at the top of the ticket is the head case and the ultra-left VP candidate will be the woman to watch. Unlike 1972, a pandemic and major violence overshadow the 2020 election campaign. As President Trump says, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
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