I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Latin expression “de mortuis nil nisi bonum”, which exhorts us not to speak ill of the dead. Given the news we’ve just had about Joe Biden (carefully timed, of course, to pre-empt both the forthcoming book by the astonishingly hypocritical Jake Tapper and the damning release of the audio of Robert Hur’s interview of Biden), I’ve been wondering whether it applies equally to the merely dying.
Well, after watching the outpouring of fawning sentiment that followed the news of Biden’s terminal illness, I’ve decided it doesn’t. And so, rather than hold my tongue, I think I will, for just a moment, express myself with uncharacteristic asperity.
To be clear: I wouldn’t wish metastatic prostate cancer on anyone, but if I were to, I’d wish it on Joe Biden, who is, and who has always been, a thoroughly nasty man. I’m old enough to have witnessed his whole tawdry career, and he’s always been the same: a lying, grasping, fork-tongued weathervane of a politician, always ready to kiss any necessary ass or kick whoever’s down; a crooked, vindictive, boastful, arrogant, snotty, pugnacious little man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, prevented from reaching truly historic heights of infamy only by his bottomless mediocrity and the cramped horizons of his mind.
I’ll say this, also: that the Democratic Party and its lackeys in the media put this man forward as their champion, propped him up for all those years, lied and lied and lied to us as his deepening rot and caducity rendered him obviously unfit for office, and now have the absolutely astonishing cheek to pretend that they’re shocked to learn how far gone he was, should earn them all the unbending contempt and moral revulsion of every American citizen.
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Pretty harsh stuff Malcolm, but fair enough I suppose. Biden’s example 1,234,788 of Lord Acton’s oft-quoted maxim, the man having been elected senator right before I was born in November 1972. Even my boomer mother and step-father, thoughtful old-fashioned liberals to the point of parody, have had enough of the old codger.
I was treated for prostate cancer in 2009 after a rapid elevation in PSA and Gleason score of 7. Symptoms can show early and usually progress fairly slow though some strains can be more aggressive. Joe has had this a long time and most old men who have it go to their graves with it not because of it. I wonder about all those trips back to Delaware over the years.
A few years back I was speaking with a urologist acquaintance. He told me that he and his colleagues want to do well by doing good. They want the good things of life, but they want to earn them by doing good. Biden wants to do well whether or not he does good. The man is not rooted in any principle except that of self-promotion, which is why he will lie about anything. Mendacious and grasping, a grifter from the git-go. I’d better stop lest I warm to my invective as Malcolm has.
Politics is an arena in which the worst can and do arrive at the top, unlike other arenas of human endeavor.