As explained in a reprinted post below:

A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter.  It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law.

Thus a ballot cast claiming to be a vote is not in fact one to be counted if any of the conditions are not met.  The image above presents the many ways supposed “votes” failed to be valid votes in Maricopa County, Arizona, in the 2020 federal election.  The total count of ballots cast was 2,089,563 and Biden won by 10,800.  Each of the many circles depict the % of total votes that failed to meet a particular criterion.  If the top row circles are summarized, the total number of invalid votes in that county exceeded 700,000. Jovan Pulitzer explains why he made the chart:

I think people need to visually see all the errors, all the information that shows, hey, Maricopa at its worst literally should be decertified, at its best could easily be redone…

…I just charted out a very simple way to understand how bad is the bad. If they’re just pie charts, if you think here in this election was won on .049047%, right? It’s such a small margin that it could have swung any way…

…There are eight charts across the top, those are just the low hanging fruit that show this election has serious issues because any one of these would demand that it can’t be certified or it needs to be rerun. 

Background at previous post What is a Vote Anyway?

Ted Noel writes at Town Hall In the Arizona Audit, Words Matter.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

This is one of those times when we wish that people would have used more circumspect language. Both the Arizona auditors and John Solomon committed a cardinal error that has allowed the Left to celebrate victory and ignore the fine print. Both note that Biden got more “votes” than Trump. That conclusion is incorrect, because it ignores the rest of the story.

A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter.

It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law. Anything else is not a vote. In Arizona, it is cast on paper ballots and read by machines. All the “accurate count” showed was that the machines counted the pieces of paper accurately. That’s all machines do. They do not count “ballots.”

The canvass did not answer the primary question, “How many of the pieces of paper were lawful ballots and how many should have been excluded because they were not lawful votes?” All the “accurate count” proves is that there was no outside effort to tweak the numbers by changing them by some direct internet chicanery. But it does not prove that Biden won. Or not. And that is the problem.  I won’t repeat all the details the auditors droned on through, but there are several key findings.

Over 50,000 “ballots” were unlawfully cast.

There were dead people, new addresses without re-registration, double votes, envelopes with no signatures, ballots received that were never sent out, and so on. Every one of those “ballots” were unlawful. They should have been rejected to remove them from the canvass. Since the margin between Trump and Biden was around ten thousand, this is far more than enough to cast doubt on the outcome. And then comes the drama.Maricopa County did everything it could to block the audit. If it was confident that it had done its job correctly, then one would expect that it would cooperate fully. Indeed, with the hand count matching the canvas, it seems that all should be well. But then we find that hundreds of thousands of election files were deleted from Maricopa County’s computer servers the day before the audit began. That smacks of guilty knowledge.

We also know that the servers allowed election data to be seen from the internet. Security was extremely lax, and even though it appears no votes were changed, other issues arise. Legally required signature matching on absentee ballots basically evaporated as the original tally went on.

Was someone watching from outside, then advising local officials on how to let unlawful ballots through to obtain the desired result?

At a bare minimum, the Arizona Presidential election was irretrievably tainted. The taint was large enough to make determination of the actual winner impossible. That’s why I wrote before January 6 that VP Pence should send several slates of electors back to their respective state legislatures for a final determination.

Those states, by repeated violations of their own state laws, did not hold elections. The processes they followed did not allow a tally of lawful votes.

The Arizona legislature should vote to decertify the electors for the 2020 election. This may have no legal effect, but if it leads two or three other states to the same conclusion, we may have a Constitutional crisis, and there are no guideposts for this trail. The Constitution simply did not foresee the compounding of raw power applied to prevent the proper administration of a Presidential election. The Supreme Court may deny cert based on the passage of time beyond the designated Electoral College date. Or it could decide to hear the case and ultimately find that Biden’s election is a nullity ab initio. Or something in between. Who knows?

What we do know is that we simply cannot declare who won the Arizona election with any degree of certainty. Even if that changes nothing else, it should give us a resolve to fix our elections so that they cannot be manipulated outside the law.

Pieces of paper with marks on them are not ballots until it is determined that those marks were made by a lawful voter in the time and manner prescribed by the legislature. Only after that bar is crossed for every ballot is it possible to have an election. Biden did not win the Arizona election because there was no Arizona election. It is impossible to truthfully say that he got more “votes” than Donald Trump. Nobody actually knows.

Daniel Lacalle, PhD, economist and fund manager, writes at CD Media Evergrande Isn’t China’s “Lehman Moment.” It Could Be Worse Than That. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The bankruptcy of the Chinese real estate company Evergrande is much more than a “Chinese Lehman.” Lehman Brothers was much more diversified than Evergrande and better capitalized. In fact, the total assets of Evergrande that are on the brink of bankruptcy outnumber the entire subprime bubble of the United States.

The problem with Evergrande is that it is not an anecdote, but a symptom of a model based on leveraged growth and seeking to inflate GDP at any cost with ghost cities, unused infrastructure, and wild construction. The indebtedness chain model of Evergrande is not uncommon in China. Many Chinese companies follow the “running to stand still” strategy of piling on ever-increasing debt to compensate for poor cash flow generation and weak margins. Many promoters get into massive debt to build a promotion that either is not sold or is left with many unsold units, then efinance that debt by adding more credit for new projects using unsaleable or already leveraged assets as collateral.

The total liabilities of Evergrande account for more than double its official debt figure (more than 2 trillion yuan). Evergrande’s financial hole is equivalent to almost a third of Russia’s GDP. Its annual revenues do not reach $70 billion, and it is more than debatable whether those revenues are real, since a relevant part comes from payment commitments whose collection is doubtful. Even if they were real, these revenues are not enough to address the bond maturities, which exceed $250 billion in the short term.

Evergrande is much more dangerous than it seems.

All the “Keynesian” solutions that you are hearing these days have already been implemented. Massive liquidity injections, low interest rates, full implicit and explicit support from the Chinese government … Let’s not forget that Evergrande was the largest issuer of commercial paper in China, $32 billion issued in 2020, a 390 percent increase from 2015, according to Reuters.

Evergrande represents less than 4 percent of the overall Chinese market but its model has been used by many Chinese promoters. The ten biggest real estate developers account for 34 percent of the market and aggressive leverage practices are widespread.

The real estate sector is huge in China. Its direct and indirect weight, according to JP Morgan, is 25 percent of GDP, more than double the size of the real estate bubble in Japan or Spain. The sector has been growing with an indebted model at 15 percent per year in the last three years. The Chinese government has introduced regulations to reduce the excess, but because it benefits from the increase in GDP and job creation, it has maintained a complacent position regarding the corporate debt model.

Chinese real estate companies, according to JP Morgan, have “reduced” their indebtedness to 92 percent of total assets from a monster 140 percent in 2018, with a profit margin of 9–13 percent. But those figures still show a larger and more concerning problem than what headlines imply. Most Chinese real estate developers have total liabilities of 50 percent to total assets, according to JP Morgan.  The problem is that the value of those assets and the capacity to sell them is more than questionable.

The implications of an Evergrande collapse are far greater than what investment banks tell us.

The first risk is a domino effect in a very aggressively indebted sector. There is also a significant impact on all those banks exposed to China and emerging markets, where China has financed ruinous projects in recent years. And there is also impact on global growth and countries that export to China, because the slowdown was already more than evident. Additionally, we cannot ignore the impact on the solvency of the financial system despite billions of dollars injected by the People’s Bank of China.

A Solvency Problem Cannot Be Solved with Liquidity.

The hope that the government will fix everything contrasts with the magnitude of the financial hole. Be that as it may, we cannot overlook the negative effect on those sectors highly exposed to real estate growth, infrastructure, electricity, services, and in the hundreds of thousands of citizens who have paid an upfront fee for flats that are not going to be built.

The problem with China is that the entire economy is a huge indebted model that needs almost ten units of debt to generate one unit of GDP, three times more than a decade ago, and all this catastrophe was already more than evident months ago. With total debt of 300 percent debt to GDP according to the Institute of International Finance, China is not the strong economy swimming in with cash that it was a couple of decades ago.

The market assumed that because it is China, the government was going to hide these risks. Even worse, the Evergrande collapse only shows a dangerous reality in several Chinese sectors: excessive indebtedness without real income or assets to support it.

This episode comes at the worst possible time, after the government has launched a massive crackdown on large companies. International investors are already concerned about corporate governance and intervention in China and now the fears of credit contagion make the risk even worse.

Evergrande is not an anecdote, it is a symptom.

Ted Noel writes at Town Hall In the Arizona Audit, Words Matter.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

This is one of those times when we wish that people would have used more circumspect language. Both the Arizona auditors and John Solomon committed a cardinal error that has allowed the Left to celebrate victory and ignore the fine print. Both note that Biden got more “votes” than Trump. That conclusion is incorrect, because it ignores the rest of the story.

A vote is an indication of preference cast by an eligible, registered voter.

It must be cast in the time, place, and manner prescribed by law. Anything else is not a vote. In Arizona, it is cast on paper ballots and read by machines. All the “accurate count” showed was that the machines counted the pieces of paper accurately. That’s all machines do. They do not count “ballots.”

The canvass did not answer the primary question, “How many of the pieces of paper were lawful ballots and how many should have been excluded because they were not lawful votes?” All the “accurate count” proves is that there was no outside effort to tweak the numbers by changing them by some direct internet chicanery. But it does not prove that Biden won. Or not. And that is the problem.  I won’t repeat all the details the auditors droned on through, but there are several key findings.

Over 50,000 “ballots” were unlawfully cast.

There were dead people, new addresses without re-registration, double votes, envelopes with no signatures, ballots received that were never sent out, and so on. Every one of those “ballots” were unlawful. They should have been rejected to remove them from the canvass. Since the margin between Trump and Biden was around ten thousand, this is far more than enough to cast doubt on the outcome. And then comes the drama.Maricopa County did everything it could to block the audit. If it was confident that it had done its job correctly, then one would expect that it would cooperate fully. Indeed, with the hand count matching the canvas, it seems that all should be well. But then we find that hundreds of thousands of election files were deleted from Maricopa County’s computer servers the day before the audit began. That smacks of guilty knowledge.

We also know that the servers allowed election data to be seen from the internet. Security was extremely lax, and even though it appears no votes were changed, other issues arise. Legally required signature matching on absentee ballots basically evaporated as the original tally went on.

Was someone watching from outside, then advising local officials on how to let unlawful ballots through to obtain the desired result?

At a bare minimum, the Arizona Presidential election was irretrievably tainted. The taint was large enough to make determination of the actual winner impossible. That’s why I wrote before January 6 that VP Pence should send several slates of electors back to their respective state legislatures for a final determination.

Those states, by repeated violations of their own state laws, did not hold elections. The processes they followed did not allow a tally of lawful votes.

The Arizona legislature should vote to decertify the electors for the 2020 election. This may have no legal effect, but if it leads two or three other states to the same conclusion, we may have a Constitutional crisis, and there are no guideposts for this trail. The Constitution simply did not foresee the compounding of raw power applied to prevent the proper administration of a Presidential election. The Supreme Court may deny cert based on the passage of time beyond the designated Electoral College date. Or it could decide to hear the case and ultimately find that Biden’s election is a nullity ab initio. Or something in between. Who knows?

What we do know is that we simply cannot declare who won the Arizona election with any degree of certainty. Even if that changes nothing else, it should give us a resolve to fix our elections so that they cannot be manipulated outside the law.

Pieces of paper with marks on them are not ballots until it is determined that those marks were made by a lawful voter in the time and manner prescribed by the legislature. Only after that bar is crossed for every ballot is it possible to have an election. Biden did not win the Arizona election because there was no Arizona election. It is impossible to truthfully say that he got more “votes” than Donald Trump. Nobody actually knows.

Ballot Drop Box in Georgia, USA

Exclusive — True The Vote Conducting Massive Clandestine Voter Fraud Investigation

True The Vote organization has spent the last several months since late last year collecting more than 27 terabytes of geospatial and temporal data—a total of 10 trillion cell phone pings—between Oct. 1 and Nov. 6 in targeted areas in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The data includes geofenced points of interest like ballot dropbox locations, as well as UPS stores and select government, commercial, and non-governmental organization (NGO) facilities.

“From this we have thus far developed precise patterns of life for 242 suspected ballot traffickers in Georgia and 202 traffickers in Arizona,” True The Vote’s document says. “According to the data, each trafficker went to an average of 23 ballot dropboxes.”

In other words, what the document says is that True The Vote was able to take cell phone ping data on a mass wide scale and piece together that several people—suspected ballot harvesters—were making multiple trips to multiple drop boxes, raising potential legal questions in a number of these states.

From there, the document continues, True The Vote gathered surveillance video on the drop boxes in Georgia and is attempting to gather similar such surveillance video from other states. The document states that True The Vote has obtained one full petabyte of surveillance footage on drop boxes—two million minutes of video—which it says is broken into 73,000 individual video files. The group is expected to begin releasing some of these videos, which purportedly show the same people going multiple times to the same drop boxes, in the coming weeks.

“We are building out video stories and have compiled videos of individuals stuffing ballot dropboxes with stacks of ballots, individuals depositing ballots in multiple dropboxes, unauthorized coordination between government workers engaged in the exchange of ballots, and several other tranches of video that capture unusual patterns such as the wearing of gloves to deposit ballots, taking pictures of ballot deposits, etc.,” True The Vote’s document says.

As for states other than Georgia, True The Vote’s document says that the status of such surveillance video is as of now unclear. “Video availability in other states is undetermined; open records requests submitted consistently since January continue to be met with conflicting communications and stalls,” True The Vote’s document says.

The group says also that it has at least three teams of analysts combing through the raw data and the surveillance video seeking out individual stories and other trends, and that it has been in contact with federal and state law enforcement in various states on what it has found and determined already.

There are several reasons why this revelation about True The Vote’s effort is significant. First and foremost, these revelations come amid several ongoing so-called “audits” in a number of states like Arizona nationally—the results of the Arizona audit are imminently expected—and other efforts by some allies of former President Donald Trump to continue the push for illuminating what happened in the 2020 presidential election. Most of the aforementioned have either not been fruitful, or perhaps have even damaged the former president’s cause by either not being factual or by being incomplete in their nature or for other reasons which cast doubt on their credibility. This self-described effort from True The Vote could change the discussion by providing proof—complete with cell phone data and surveillance video—of allegedly illegal activity that could lead to much more drastic action by law enforcement or political leaders in these various states.

These revelations could be coming amid a renewed push from national Democrats in Washington, DC, to pass some form or another of a federal election takeover plan – whether it be HR1, S1, or a new push for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which was HR4 in the last Congress. So far this year, such efforts by Democrats have failed and stalled out in the evenly-divided U.S. Senate as the filibuster has prevented their passage.

The best discussion comes from Josh Blackman’s article at Newsweek The Supreme Court Could Not ‘Block’ Texas’ Fetal Heartbeat Law | Opinion. Josh Blackman is a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and the co-author of An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know. He explains why the ruling is more about overinflated expectations of judicial authority than about the issue of abortion itself.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in a challenge to S.B. 8, Texas’ new abortion law. This unique statute empowers private citizens to sue those who perform or facilitate abortions. President Biden ripped the 5-4 decision, charging that the conservative justices followed “procedural complexities” “rather than use its supreme authority to ensure justice.”

© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images A person walks on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on September 02, 2021 in Washington, DC

Biden is wrong. The Court has no sweeping, majestic power to “ensure justice.” Indeed, it is a myth that courts can “strike down” laws at all. Rather, judges have a very limited power: to enjoin specific government officials from enforcing laws against specific litigants. The judiciary cannot simply erase statutes from the book. And when the government plays no role at all in enforcing a statute—as with S.B. 8—courts cannot “block” that law from going into effect.

In future cases, the courts can assess the constitutionality of S.B. 8. For now, the Supreme Court was right to reject the premature challenge.

In recent years, abortion laws in Texas have all met a similar fate. At each session, the conservative legislature imposes a suite of new restrictions on abortion. But before the law even goes into effect, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers sue the Texas attorney general. Federal judges in Austin agree, and prevent the attorney general from enforcing the law. And as the litigation drags on for years, all the way up to the Supreme Court, the law remains a dead letter.

But this session, Texas tried something new. S.B. 8 allows private citizens to sue those who perform abortions. The government itself is expressly barred from enforcing the law.

With a clever flip, S.B. 8 spiked Planned Parenthood’s playbook. It is now impossible to sue the attorney general, because the attorney general cannot enforce the law. The law can only be enforced by millions of Texans. And there is no way to know in advance who would sue which abortion providers. So Planned Parenthood tried a different strategy: It sued Judge Jackson of Tyler, Texas, who might one day hear a case involving S.B. 8.

This suit never made any sense. Judges do not enforce laws. They can only adjudicate specific disputes between plaintiffs and defendants. If a Texan actually sued Planned Parenthood for performing a seven-week abortion, the judge would have to dismiss that suit. After all, S.B. 8 expressly stipulates that citizens’ suits must comply with Roe v. Wade. And you don’t sue a judge to stop him from hearing a case in the first place. You let him decide and then appeal, if need be.

Despite these problems, a federal judge in Austin still ruled that Planned Parenthood could sue Judge Jackson. The Austin court was poised to block Judge Jackson from even accepting a case emanating from S.B. 8. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit promptly put that federal court’s proceedings on hold. Planned Parenthood then filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

This appeal was doomed from the start. Because Planned Parenthood only sued one judge, the Supreme Court could only have issued an order against that single jurist. No other judge in Texas was a named party to the case. An order against Judge Jackson would have been meaningless for Planned Parenthood, as all other judges in the state would have been able to accept suits based on S.B. 8. The abortion rights group was stuck.

Late Wednesday evening, the Supreme Court split 5-4. The majority opinion was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The conservative quintet recognized that Planned Parenthood likely could not prevail. The justices explained that “federal courts enjoy the power to enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves.” In short, the justices cannot erase S.B. 8 from the statute books. They can only prevent a specific person—in this case, Judge Jackson—from hearing a case involving S.B. 8 against Planned Parenthood and other groups. That’s it. Even then, the Supreme Court recognized that the suit against Judge Jackson was on shaky ground, as “it is unclear whether” he “can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against” the abortion clinics.

The Supreme Court could not, as President Biden suggested, exercise “supreme authority to ensure justice could be fairly sought.” No such power exists. In this case, the Court could only enter an order against one state judge—and that judge had no role in actually enforcing the law. The justices were absolutely correct for declining to intervene.

Indeed, this case should have been unanimous. Alas, it was not. Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s three progressives each wrote separate dissents. Chief Justice Roberts would have “grant[ed] preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante.” But a remedy to preserve the status quo ante would be impossible in this case, which only concerned Judge Jackson. Roberts wrote that he would “preclude enforcement of S.B. 8 by” Judge Jackson. But, again, Judge Jackson cannot actually enforce the law in the first place. The chief justice, usually a stickler for procedure, was willing to invent new procedural rules to stop what he saw as an “unprecedented” law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor made similar mistakes in her own dissent. She said the “Court should have stayed implementation of” S.B. 8. But courts cannot block laws. Courts can only prevent specific parties from enforcing the law against specific litigants. None of the dissenters had any clue how to actually stop S.B. 8—not even Justice Elena Kagan, a brilliant former civil procedure professor. She had bupkus. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged that Texas “may be correct.”

Why, then, did the dissenters offer a remedy that simply could not be granted? This quartet endorsed President Biden’s mythical account of the Supreme Court.

At least three of the four dissenters deeply felt that this law was substantively unjust, so there must be a way to stop it. But not every alleged wrong has a remedy in federal court. In time, actual Texans will file suit against abortion clinics, and those who fund the organizations. And the courts can then decide, at that time, if those suits are consistent with Roe v. Wade and its progeny.

But for now, the Supreme Court was right to stay on the sidelines.

Footnote:

Regarding the delusion of judicial authority for social engineering, do read Francis Menton’s expose of the same mythology running rampant in Europe with respect to global warming/climate change (not to mention genderism and diversity).  More On European Climate Change Litigation: These People Are Crazy

And once again Team Biden acts to divide and destroy anything they touch.  How prescient was I when creating this image a year ago.

Victor Davis Hanson explains in his American Greatness article The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

A cognitively challenged Biden is pulled in every direction, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts,
by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his hatred of all things Trump.

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.  

The Afghan Catastrophe

Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans.

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance.

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor.

Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

At the same time, he has alarmed employers with braggadocio threats that higher capital gains, income, payroll, and estate taxes are all on the way. More lockdowns only further eroded small businesses. The result was price inflation of all the stuff of life—homes, lumber, gas, food, appliances—as well as historic shortages of everything from cars and houses to the work of contractors and electricians. Any increase in wages due to labor shortages was soon erased by spirals in the consumer price index.

So, what was Biden thinking or, rather, not thinking? By paying workers not to work he would be evening out the ancient score with employers? Did workers need a vacation from the quarantine? Printing money was a way to spread the wealth—and diminish what the rich possessed? Was a $2 trillion deficit and $30 trillion in aggregate debt a way of bragging to Trump that he doubled the Trump red ink in less than a year? Would he pile up more debt than both Barack Obama and George W. Bush in half the time?

The Border Disaster

Biden took a secure border, along with increasingly legal-only immigration, and then destroyed both. He stopped construction of the border wall, encouraged an expected 2 million illegal entries over the current fiscal year, promised amnesties, and resumed “catch and release.” He did all that at a time of a pandemic, exempting illegal aliens from all the requirements of COVID testing and mass vaccinations that he had hectored his own citizens about getting. With planned mass amnesties and millions more invited to cross illegally in the next three years, was Biden seeking to found a new American nation within the now passé old American nation?

Did he believe that Americans did not deserve their citizenship and newcomers from south of the border were somehow more worthy? Did he see the 2 million new residents as instant voters under new relaxed rules of balloting? Did he think in a labor-deprived economy they would supply nannies, gardeners, and cooks to bicoastal elites? We strain to imagine any explanation because there is no logic to any.

Energy Insufficiency

Biden did his best in just seven months to explode the idea of American self-sufficiency in natural gas and oil. He canceled the Keystone Pipeline, froze new federal energy leases, put the Anwar oil field off limits, and warned frackers their end days were near.

So, what drove Biden? Did he object that motorists were saving too many billions of dollars per year in decreased commuting costs? Or was the rub that we had slashed too many imports of oil from the volatile Middle East and no longer would launch preemptive wars? Or perhaps the transition to clean natural gas instead of coal as a fuel for power generation had too radically curtailed carbon emissions? Did Biden feel that Middle East producers, the Russians, or the Venezuelans could better protect the planet while extracting oil and gas than could American drillers?

The Race Calamity

Biden blew up race relations by greenlighting the new hunt for the mythical “whiteness” monster. Were a few buffoonish white rioters who stormed the Capitol the tip of the spear of a previously unknown massive white supremacy movement, the most dangerous, he swore, since the Civil War?

Biden took affirmative action and the Civil Rights-era “disparate impact” and “proportional representation” ideas and turned them into disproportionate representation and reparations on the cheap. Biden made it acceptable to damn “whiteness,” as if all 230 million white Americans are guilty of something or other in a way that the other 100 million “nonwhite” are not.

The Crime Explosion

After Biden entered office, violent crimes ignited from the embers of the 120 days of mostly unpunished looting, arson, and organized violence in the streets of America’s major cities during summer 2020. Under Biden, jails were emptied. Federal attorneys and emulative local DAs exempted offenders. Police were defamed and defunded. Punishing crime was considered a racist construct.

The result is that Americans now avoid the Dodge City downtowns of most of America’s crime-ridden blue cities. They accept that any urban pedestrian, any driver after hours, any commuter on a bus or subway can be assaulted, robbed, beaten, raped, or shot—without any assurance that the media will fairly report the crime, or that the criminal justice system will punish the perpetrators. In Biden’s America looters prance into drug stores and walk out with shopping bags of stuff, under the terrified gaze of security guards who guesstimate at least they did not steal more than $950 of loot.

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!”