Previously in August Victor Davis Hanson suggested several theories that might explain how Biden’s administration has destroyed everything they touch.  A summary of that essay is reprinted later on, but this post presents another possible explanation.  James Lewis writes at American Thinker Biden’s cobra presidency.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Have you noticed how Joe Biden says he wants to lower gas prices, so he cancels the Keystone pipeline?

He wants to lower unemployment, so he pays people not to work?

He wants to beat inflation, so the Fed prints more money?

Biden is President Perverse.

The Cobra Effect is economics slang for “perverse incentives.” If you give your kid money every time the kid misbehaves, that’s a perverse incentive. Every parent knows that mandates are perverse. You don’t give your teenager money to buy cocaine. (Or maybe Joe does.)

Conservatives wonder if Joe’s brain is beyond its sell-by date, but that isn’t quite right.

The resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave isn’t just failing; he does the opposite of a competent president. He’s perverse.

The Cobra Effect is a sort of an economics joke based on the story that New Delhi had too many cobras at one time, so the city paid a bounty for dead cobras. Then smart Indian people started to raise more cobras to get the bounty, the opposite of the intended outcome.  Economists use that story to explain economic stupidity.

But Joe Biden has topped stupid and is now the most deliberately perverse POTUS in history.
It’s the only explanation I can think of.

Do you want to stop racism? Teach people how to hate white folks. Are you laughing yet, America?

These are angry, bitter, hateful people with more than a little sadistic glee in their makeup.

You say you love America, and you do your worst?

This is the twisted face of hatred.

It’s Joe Biden’s Cobra presidency.

Background from previous post Biden Has the Destructive Touch

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.  [For details on the listed failures see the article linked in red.]

The Afghan Catastrophe

The Inflation Fiasco

The Border Disaster

Energy Insufficiency

The Race Calamity

The Crime Explosion

So why does Biden so willfully exercise this destructive touch that blows up anything he taps?

There are several possible theories:

1) Biden is non compos mentis. He has no idea of what he is doing. But to the degree he is alert, Biden listens—sort of—only to the last person with whom he talks. And then he takes a nap. When Afghanistan blows up or inflation roars or the border becomes an entry door, his eyes open, and he becomes bewildered and snarly—like an irritable and snappy Bruce Dern waking up in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

Biden has no clue about the actual destructive implementation of his toxic policies, and no concern upon whom these destructive agendas fall. He vaguely assumes a lapdog left-wing media will repackage every Biden incoherence as Periclean, and every daily “lid” as Biden’s escape for presidential research, deep reading, and intensive deliberation. Biden appears to be about where Woodrow Wilson was in November 1919.

2) Or is Biden a rank opportunist and thinking he will ride woke leftism as the country’s new trajectory? He resents his prior subservience to Obama, and now feels he can trump past signature leftist administrations as the one true and only socialist evolutionary. He is not so much the manipulated as the manipulator.

Biden fantasizes himself as a hands-on dynamic leader who bites at reporters, snaps from the podium, and issues his customary interjections. He is therefore “in command” for four or five hours a day. He enjoys acting more radical than Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, or “the squad.”—and especially being far more leftwing than his old and now passé boss Barack Obama. Joe is in control and that explains the dross touch. For the first time in his life, such an incompetent has complete freedom—to be powerfully incompetent. Biden is then not demented as much as delusionally running things.

3) Biden is unfortunately what he always was: a rather mean-spirited plagiarist, liar, and nihilist, from his Clarence Thomas character assassination infamy and Tara Reade groping to his foul racist talk and his monumental habitual grifting. His disasters are the same old, same old Biden trademark, performance-art screw-ups.

Biden likes the idea of conservative outrage, of chaos, of barking at everyone all the time. Biden accepts that no omelets can be made without broken eggs, and sort of enjoys screwing up things, as Robert Gates and Barack Obama both warned. “Wokening” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, encouraging hundreds of thousands to pour across the border, and abandoning our NATO allies in Afghanistan—who cares when tough guy, brash-talking Joe on the move jumbles stuff up? The disasters in the economy, foreign policy, crime, energy, and racial relations? Biden is just shaking things up, stirring the pot, baiting people to watch Mr. “Come On, Man” in action, as he blusters and preens and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.

4) Biden is nothing much at all. He’s just a cardboard-cut out, a garden-variety Democratic Party hack, who is against anything conservatives are for. He assumes he will undo all that Trump did, on the theory it is simple and easy for him in his lazy, senior moments. And he is tired anyway of thinking much beyond such Pavlovian rejectionism. A closed border is bad; presto, open borders are good. Improving race relations is bad; deteriorating relations must be good. Energy independence bad; dependency good. Biden works on autopilot in his minimalist day job: just cancel anything that Trump did and worry nothing about the effects on the American people

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target. The Left ensured the base would not bolt in 2020. So, he owes them. Biden, more or less, signed his presidency over to the squad, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and the Obama holdovers. They hand him a script; he tries to read it; and they follow up with the details. He is the old “Star Trek’s” tottering John Gill.

The Left may hope their own nihilist agenda sort of works. When it inevitably does not, then Joe, the delivery man, is blamed: so much more quickly, then, will be Biden’s necessary exit. They kept their part of the bargain by getting the basement denizen elected. Now he keeps the deal by handing over the presidency. Biden’s utility had about a six-month shelf life.

Now ever so slowly the leaks, the West Wing backstabbing, the furrowed anchor brows, and the unnamed sources will gently ease him out with 25th Amendment worries (e.g., “Perhaps President Biden might find taking the Montreal Cognitive Assessment of some value after all, for his own benefit, of course.”) Kamala Harris is not so inert as we are led to believe.

A cognitively challenged Biden then is pulled in every direction, by his own senility, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his neanderthal hatred of everything Trump was and did.

The problem for America is that theories one through five are not always mutually exclusive, but more likely force multipliers of the present insanity. At some point, some brave congressional representative or Senator will finally have to say to Biden, in the spirit of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

My Comment

It should also be noted that Biden governance follows the classical pattern for leftist autocracies.  The massive spending programs already enacted and proposed serve not only to greatly expand the federal bureaucracy but also to perversely make the population financially dependent on government largess.  Down the line such dependency ensures compliance with diktats constraining citizen’s rights and freedoms.  Trotsky explained how the Soviets got there by nationalizing the means of production.