The Crowdstrike-caused, world-wide computer outages on July 18 reminded me of an old joke that, in retrospect, doesn’t seem quite as funny now:

If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

I wrote a bit of software myself long ago in another life, and I still play around with some pretty complicated Excel spreadsheets, so I can attest to its truth. Which brings to mind a piece of advice from one of my computer science instructors:

Always have a paper backup.

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The assassination attempt on Donald Trump wasn’t the least bit surprising.  What’s surprising is that there haven’t been more; or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that there haven’t been more that progressed as far.  The FBI and Secret Service are always arresting crazy people who send threatening letters to the President and other high-ranking officials, and every now and then they’ll get one who’s gone as far as stockpiling weapons, making bombs, and/or taking an amateurish stab at planning.  Not to excuse the Secret Service’s bungling of security at the Butler rally, but the sad fact of the matter is that every now and then one of these lunatics is going to slip through the cracks, because (1) even really smart people are going to make a dumb mistake occasionally and (2) one must never underestimate the ingenuity of lunatics.

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So, Biden is out of the race.  Well and good for everyone concerned, even though his withdrawal comes with its own set of, shall we say, interesting problems, which we’ll save for another time. 

I’ve long felt sorry for Joe Biden, something which has puzzled some of my friends on the right.  But take away the politics and ideology for a moment.  This is a man who’s suffered terrible personal tragedy – the loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident, the loss of a son to brain cancer, and the humiliation caused by another son’s degraded lifestyle, drug addiction and “business” deals that were nothing more than influence peddling (we’ll pass over whether or not Joe was actively involved). 

But the great and defining tragedy of his life is that he is a man of little talent but pathological ambition.  Talented enough to be elected to the Senate, true, but from a state in which it’s almost impossible to lose if you’re a Democrat, and starting in a time when Republicans were at a low ebb following the Nixon years.  His own, real accomplishments were few, and he quickly developed a reputation for just making stuff up.  His Senate career is hardly worth mentioning, other than for his regrettable role in the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.  He ran for President in 1988 and 2008, and both times his own party just shrugged because they recognized a blowhard when they saw one – an outcome far more humiliating than losing a hard-fought battle.  His time as Vice President can be summed up in the comments of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said that Biden had been wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue for 4 decades, and President Barack Obama, who informed us that we should never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.  In 2016, he couldn’t even get the support of the President he had loyally served for 8 years and was passed over in favor of Hillary Clinton who, the pollsters soon let us know, was one of the two most-disliked presidential candidates in the history of polling (the other being Donald Trump).

After all this heartbreak and humiliation, any near-normal person would have called it a day and, with what little dignity he had left, gone into quiet retirement at Rehoboth Beach.  But not Joe Biden.  In 2020, though old, worn out and a proven mendacious mediocrity, he offered himself up as the savior to a party about to fall prey to Communist-adjacent Bernie Sanders.  The party, to its everlasting discredit, accepted the offer.  Even though the country had had more than enough of Donald Trump, it was all Joe could do to eek out victory in an election that was decided by a handful of votes.

As for his Presidency, suffice it to say that Robert Gates and Barack Obama were right.

And even that wasn’t enough.  Even political failure, manifest senescence and obvious decrepitude weren’t enough.  Joe Biden was finally forced to quit only after his own party abandoned him after coming to the belated, horrifying realization that he was going to cost them the 2024 election.

It’s a tragedy when a man doesn’t know his own limitations. Joe Biden could have been a successful attorney in Wilmington, and maybe even a successful governor of Delaware.  He could have had a good life, with the fortune but without the fame.  Instead, he is a failed President who did untold damage to the U.S. and its interests.  He earned and deserves the contempt of the nation and the world.  His pathological ambition drove him to attempt things well beyond his ability, to his and our lasting regret.  History will judge him harshly.  And that’s a pity.

• Kenneth D. Gough © 2024