Monday, July 8, 2019

Would President Joe Biden Become 25th Amendment Material?

Victor Davis Hanson
The epic hero Biden has repeatedly offered up fantasies in which he poses as a crusading avenger, either eager to beat up bullies or in fact as a veteran of such knight-in-shining-armor intercessions.He has now on two occasions mentioned Trump as just the sort of tormenter that Biden in his youth used to take behind the gym, and would thus “beat the hell out of him.”  . . .


"I speculate only because since January 2017 our popular culture and intelligentsia have suggested President Trump is crazy and should be removed under the 25th Amendment. Apparently, accusations about the mental health of presidents and would-be presidents are now legitimate political attack strategies under the new progressive rules.
"After all, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe once bragged that he tried with former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to remove a supposedly unhinged Trump. Democratic members of Congress called in a Yale psychologist, Bandy X. Lee, to brief them that such Ivy League experts had diagnosed Trump in absentia as certainly unhinged. (She later attempted to walk back those claims.) The 25th Amendment, along with impeachment, the ossified Logan Act, and the Emoluments Clause, have now been mainlined by progressives as the sort of natural suspicions we cast on an elected president of the opposite party.
"Yet, under these new progressive protocols, could a President Joe Biden be written off as delusional?
"Addled Biden?"Biden once suggested that George Bush get on TV after the 2008 meltdown in the manner that President Roosevelt had addressed the nation after the 1929 market crash: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.” Biden was referring to a time when neither FDR was president nor was television commercially available."  . . .

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).

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