We Told You So, You Fools

By Jeffrey Blehar

Friday, June 28, 2024

 

Allow me to share with you a well-known (albeit semi-apocryphal) story about the great Soviet historian Robert Conquest. His work The Great Terror — a thoroughly well-documented chronicle of the vast and horrific extent of the Stalinist purges of the mid 1930s — hit like a lightning bolt when it was first published in 1968.

 

That year witnessed the peak of radical political protest in Europe and America alike, all tinged rather uncoincidentally with a pro-Soviet and Marxist slant, so Conquest’s book — revealing Soviet Russia’s heretofore concealed slaughter of millions for purposes of political control — was roundly denounced in all the politically fashionable quarters of academia; he himself was subjected to reams of professional scorn by bien-pensants.

 

In 1990, as he prepared an updated version — thoroughly revised with new data emerging from the collapse of East Germany and from the thawing (and soon to be defunct) Soviet archives — he wondered if he should give it a new subtitle to indicate the updated state of historical knowledge. His good friend, the author Kingsley Amis, offered a suggestion: “I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”

 

Which is pretty much how I and everyone else here at National Review feel right now when it comes to the issue of Joe Biden’s age and accelerating decrepitude. We told you so. I’m not talking about you the reader, I’m speaking to those in the media (who knew better, as insiders) as well as the Democratic partisans who have happily gaslighted us all whenever someone deigned to point out that Biden was a mouldering remnant of what he once was in the 1990s. (This abruptly ended in late 2023, when polling data made it clear that all their attempts to suppress discussion about Biden’s age had failed to prevent voters from rating it among their highest concerns.) From that point onward, the Democratic strategy was pure “prevent defense” — keep Biden out of sight and angrily work the refs in the corridors of elite media who dare to notice.

 

How’s that working out for them now? To be honest, I don’t know what amuses me more: watching Democrats vomit up bricks while panickedly exploring whether they can replace Biden, or imagining that plummeting feeling in every Democrat politician’s gut when it finally sinks in that Joe Biden will not allow himself to be replaced. Remember the entire “cheap fakes” PR push from media partisans for Biden? Remember how vigorously the White House pushed it as a counter to voter concerns about Biden’s decay? I sure do because that, my friends, was only ten days ago. Spare a moment’s professional pity for the luckless partisans who sweated so hard to craft such a focused media initiative, attempting to answer fears about Biden’s senility by dismissing them as cheap and fake . . . only to see Biden immediately chime in with the most costly and authentic public-speaking disaster in modern presidential history.

 

But of course Biden’s slippage has been obvious for years — as noted in the piece above, I concluded as far back as summer 2021 that Biden was obviously too senile to run a second time, only to be told I was a fool. So if you thought I would pass up the opportunity to take a bitterly poisonous victory lap about all this, then you must not realize how capable my heart is of pure spite. The rest of us here might not be quite so angry, but I sure am, and I want to point out that we’ve been sounding the alarm — a genuine alarm, not merely the surly bray of partisanship — for years now, and with increasing frequency in recent months as his slide (or is it merely his forced visibility?) has increased. Here I am nearly a year ago, pointing out that Joe Biden’s mental frailty made it very possible for Trump to win. Why, poor Charlie Cooke nearly had an aneurysm about it this morning all over the page, and he’s still so apopleptic that we’re considering paying for an on-site EMT as a preventative measure.

 

And why not? Ladies and gentlemen, we are trapped. Perhaps you think Trump will make a fine commander in chief — I envy your optimism, if nothing else — but whether you do or not, the entire world now knows that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the job. I joked with my wife last night that this would be a great time for China to invade Taiwan, and it was the blackest sort of “knock on wood” humor — a ward against dark things. Because regardless of whether Joe Biden (God forbid) is elected to another four-year term as president and then dies in office (with Kamala Harris living out Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s post-Seinfeld acting career), he is still our president for the next half a year regardless.