The United States plunges further into lawless idiocracy

Few if any care about America's retrogression to the Dark Ages

As the Roman Republic degenerated into a despotic and corrupt Roman Empire, Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar, “O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts. And men have lost their reason.”

The United States is witnessing the same vertical plunge. A wise Republic that celebrated liberty and the march of the mind as its glory has regressed to laureling the armored knight and craving the infantile hormonal gratifications of raw power, money, sex, creature comforts, and fame.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden, with their respective brainless flocks, in their separate ways are illustrative.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that a second professional firm hired by Mr. Trump to unearth fraud in the 2020 presidential election for more than $750,000 discovered nothing to disturb 61 judicial decisions to the contrary. The firm, Simpatico Software Systems, examined more than a dozen voter fraud theories or allegations hallucinated by Trumpers in late 2020 and found all were false. Ken Block, founder of the firm and former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Rhode Island, elaborated: “No substantive fraud claim was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at. Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”

The Simpatico Software Systems’ discrediting of Trump’s electoral fraud concoctions echoed the finding of Berkeley Research Group, also hired by Trump for more than $600,000, in a 29-page report concluding his electoral fraud claims were uniformly untrue.

Trump spent approximately $1,350,000 on hand-picked investigators hoping to find the Golden Fleece that was not discovered before 61 independent, impartial, judicial tribunals and came back empty handed. Not a single, sapient human being with a reputation for veracity has vouched for Trump’s electoral hallucinations. Disproof of electoral fraud in 2020 is as overwhelming as zero plus zero equals zero.

Trump’s public communications poodle, Steven Cheung, predictably and fatuously denounced the twin Trump funded reports as politically motivated witch hunts of Trump against himself. And Trump’s unschooled mass cult believed every word. They think that the absence of evidence of electoral fraud proves the opposite because honest politicians would leave fingerprints of their crimes. They rely upon the case of State v. Knave in Alice in Wonderland in which the King convicts the knave of stealing the Queen’s tarts because his name was omitted from an incriminating letter:

‘Please your Majesty,' said the Knave, `I didn't write it, and they can't prove I did: there's no name signed at the end.'

`If you didn't sign it,' said the King, `that only makes the matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you'd have signed your name like an honest man.'

Trump’s world is crazier than the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Yet he could capture the White House in 2024 when he should be either in prison or a mental institution.

Semi-addled Mr. Biden lives in a Constitution-free world. Its apex power which dwarfs all others is the war power. It is entrusted exclusively to Congress as vouched for and understood by every participant in its making. James Madison, father of the Constitution, praised the exclusive congressional war power as its crown jewel. Presidents would fight over a straw at extravagant costs in lives and money to aggrandize power and politically exploit jingoism.

Mr. Biden, despite lackluster academic credentials and a proclivity for endless blather, comprehended this marquee constitutional principle as a United States Senator seeking the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency in 2008. Then, Mr. Biden vociferously proclaimed that President George W. Bush would commit an impeachable offense if he attacked Iran without a congressional declaration of war; and, that he would lead the impeachment campaign.

When he ascended the White House, Biden blithely defected from the Constitution to limitless executive power, including the war power constitutionally entrusted to Congress. President Biden has repeatedly vowed to go to war to defend every inch of NATO territory if a member is attacked, to go to war to defend Taiwan if attacked by China, and to go to war against North Korea if it attacked an ally or partner with nuclear weapons.

“Look, a nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its allies or partners is unacceptable and would result in the end of whatever regime were to take such an action,” Biden said in a press conference from the Rose Garden alongside South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

Not a single voice in Congress or the media has rebuked Biden for unconstitutionally thieving the war power from the legislative branch. The theft is accepted with bovine yawns. No one cares. It is all reminiscent of Tacitus’ observation about the end of the Roman Republic: “The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more and tolerated by all.”

Biden’s weaponizing Ukraine makes the United States a co-belligerent legally exposed to Russian retaliation without a constitutionally required declaration of war. The Constitution has become a museum piece.