THIS IS THE WORST DAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Donald Trump’s real reason for running for re-election in 2024 was to stay out of prison. He knew that only a return to the White House would prevent him standing trial for initiating the January 6 insurrection, and standing trial for the theft of top secret documents. Conviction in either case would mean he would end his days as a convicted felon, quite possibly dying in prison.

Mission accomplished.

November 25, 2024, will be remembered in American history as the day the constitutional rule that no individual is above the law was ended.

Whether this leads to the end of the democratic constitutional republic - that has existed because of that rule - being overthrown by Donald J. Trump is unknown at this point, but it is at a minimum a severe blow to the foundation of that republic that will be difficult if not impossible to repair.

This morning, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to drop both cases. This afternoon, that motion was granted in the case of the Seditious Insurrection by Juge Tanya Chutkan. The action was taken “without prejudice,” meaning that the charges could be brought again at some time in the future. Does anyone think that one of the first acts of Attorney General Pam Bondi will not be to drop the cases in such a way that they can never be reinstituted?

This is the worst defeat of the forces of democracy in the history of this country.

Two men are solely responsible for this outcome: President Joseph R. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

As productive as his presidency has been, Joe Biden suffered from the fatal flaw of being unable to see that his bedrock belief in “go along to get along” congressional bipartisanship had been decisively overthrown over the 20 years before he took office as president - something he hold have learned from his botched handling of the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 - and was no longer an operating philosophy that could be successful. His Irish stubbornness led to his inability to see modern Republicans as the deadly enemy of everything he believed in that they were - which he only began to clearly see in the final two years of his presidency, when it was too late - was directly responsible for this defeat. His inability to take the kind of decisive action against that enemy - commencing the investigation and prosecution of the criminal Trump and his fellow conspirators on Day One of his term of office - meant that the enemy would be able to use the rights and privileges of a defendant when the investigation and prosecution was finally authorized too late, and defeat the system by retaking power, using the rules of the system to defeat it.

Biden’s inability to understand the true nature of the threat he faced was compounded by his decision to nominate the exact wrong candidate to be his Attorney General. Merrick Garland did not and does not have the heart of a fighter, which is the quality that was most needed in whoever took that office at that time. His judiciousness would have been excellent had he been able to become the Supreme Court Associate Justice President Obama nominated him to be. It is tragic that neither Garland - the victim of the “conservative movement” that had consumed the GOP - nor then-Vice President Biden who took part in making the nomination and was an eyewitness to the treason of Mitch McConnell as President of the Senate - took the proper understanding from what they had been part of.

Both men desperately held on to obsolete beliefs with the tenacity of French Generals who stared uncomprehendingly at the German panzers that thoroughly defeated them in 1940. They clung to the idea that they could “look forward” and ignore the Great Crime that had been committed, but this time papering over the recent past only made the defeat inevitable. How thorough this defeat will loom in the history of the United States cannot be known at this time, but it cannot be seen as anything other than the Major Defeat that it is. There is no argument to be made that it is anything other than a disaster.

Those who fail to understand when the knowledge on which they have based their lives becomes obsolete cannot end other than how Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have arrived at the end their careers. This failure will outweigh all their other successes, viewed with the 20-20 hindsight of history.

Joe Biden should have listened to the counsel of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said: “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

I would give anything not to have to write this.

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