I’m a fan of the old TV series “Gilmore Girls.” The show takes place in the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut and was filmed on the Warner Brothers’ set once used for the musical “Music Man.” Most of the buildings in the town are fake – just a façade front with nothing behind it.
And behind each façade are studio sound stages carefully hidden from view.
Here’s the overhead from my Apple Maps app:
But that’s part of the Hollywood magic, isn’t it?
A building façade held up by a lumber scaffold with carefully-positioned set decorations and camera angles so television viewers can’t see that half of Stars Hollow is, well hollow.
This might as well be an overhead shot of the Biden Administration.
There is no Biden Administration. It’s all a façade — with carefully-positioned set decorations to hide the fact that the public face is a phony as a movie set.
And hidden behind that façade are the sound stages where the real work is done.
I’ve been writing about this for a while. But today I read an outstanding column from Daniel Greenfield that really gets to the nub of it.
His column “There is No Biden Administration” is like taking a studio tour behind the scenes of the Biden White House TV show.
You really should give it a read.
Here are a few of my favorite pull quotes:
Biden’s face is everywhere, but there’s no real sign that he’s actually running anything. Instead the Biden administration seems to be exactly the kind of mess that the 25th Amendment was designed to prevent in which a non-functional president is the figurehead for the cabinet members and the special interests who are actually calling all the shots.
The Potemkin village that is the Biden administration was built in two tiers with establishment cabinet members who appear more moderate presented for Senate approval while extremists were being placed in key positions to set policy on everything from civil rights to Iran.
The big policy momentum though isn’t coming from the Biden administration, but from Pelosi.
I guess you could think of Nancy Pelosi as the Executive Producer of the Biden White House TV show.
You’d think the Chief Executive would be the Executive Producer.
But the Chief Executive is just a façade. He can’t be anything else because, much like phony buildings on movie sets, behind the Biden face, there’s no “there” there.
The role of the Chief Executive exists because one person needs to make those decisions.
In Biden’s mental absence, various appointees chosen by his cronies, think tanks, and donors are making their own policy and their own decisions for a figurehead government. It’s the “I’m In Control” moment from the Reagan assassination writ large and with no end in sight.
Biden’s term will test the question of whether it’s better to have a bad president or no president.
The 25th Amendment was created to protect the presidential transition. The Biden administration is giving us a field test of what would happen with no presidential transition. Instead an inexperienced VP, various cabinet members and appointees, carve out their own territories, and run parts of the government in their own way while trying to avoid clashes.
The only man who can decisively settle the clashes when they come is out to lunch.
I said a year ago that if Joe Biden won the White House, he would be nothing more than a vessel. The real power would be behind the scenes out of sight. All the old Obama people were clamoring to get back into the White House. And Biden was their ticket back.
This is exactly how Greenfield describes it:
The Biden administration was built out of the wreckage of the Obama and Sanders campaigns, but staffers and appointees are only loyal to whoever can get them their next job. That’s not Obama and it’s not Biden who can’t name his own Secretary of Defense. It’s the think tanks and non-profits who built the Obama administration and built an even more radical Biden admin.
But non-profits and think tanks can’t actually run a government. Neither can Biden.
That’s why there isn’t a Biden administration. There’s an ongoing Netroots conference on government property. That’s why Jen Psaki can’t answer any real questions. The press secretary is supposed to speak for the White House, but there’s no one to speak for. Like a plane with no airport, she keeps circling back because there’s no administration position.
Damn, this column is so good.
The facade of normalcy that readers get from the New York Times or that viewers get from CNN comes apart in a crisis. A divided government can run its own spheres of influence, but when faced with something bigger, whether it’s the pandemic, or the border crisis, it all falls apart.
The Biden administration is the equivalent of one of those cartoons of a bunch of kids standing on each other’s shoulders while draped in a trenchcoat so they can all pretend to be one adult.
The illusion holds up until they try to walk.
The Biden illusion holds up as long as all the various parts of the administration are busy dealing with their own problems, but when there’s a national or international crisis, then it becomes obvious that no one is making the overall decisions and no one knows how to do it.
The town of Stars Hollow holds up so long as the cameras are angled in such a way to mask the fact that half the buildings are fake. But all it takes is a satellite image from Apple Maps, and you can see that half the town is a façade.
The current out-of-control crisis on the Southern border is the equivalent of taking a satellite image of the phony “Biden Administration.”
When asked if he planned to go to the border, Biden brushed it off with a “not at this time.”
Reporters also asked Vice President Harris to comment on the border crisis. And the only answer she gave was she hadn’t been briefed on that.
We can see now that nobody in this Administration is in charge.
The chaos at the border reflects the chaos inevitable when a Presidency is nothing but a façade.
Greenfield is right. You cannot hide behind fakery in the midst of a full-blown crisis.
Greenfield also discusses at length Operation 25th Amendment. His take is fascinating.
You should read his entire column. It really is outstanding.
Check it out HERE at Front Page Magazine.