Vacation All I Never Wanted

Reclined in a Tommy Bahama deckchair. The late August sun parching the earth. Legs outstretched, spindle shins browning, with lean torso and wisped pate safely shadowed in umbrella shade, body acutely angled with the sand. Sporadically snoozing under the watchful, if incompetent, eye of the Secret Service.

Joe Biden should feel like the luckiest man in the world. He occupies the most powerful, most respected, most prestigious, most purple, most martial, most armed, and most deadly office on earth. And he’s been relieved of all its boring public trappings. Ol’ Scranton Joe is the lamest of lame ducks, so nerfed, feathered, and sapped of commanding vitality that he might as well be waddling across the dunes on two bellowing legs, flapping his gaunt arms.

What a glorious senescence it is! Biden basks in the amber glow of a life well-lived, a perpetual sunset, watching the last pure spikes of light, soft yet resplendent, dwindle over the course of his accomplished career. The President should be resting comfortably deep his imperial throne, waxing reminiscent of challenges met, competitors bested, obstacles overcome. He was, of course, never supposed to capture the presidency—it was supposed to be an unwinnable station, kept just at arm’s length, a disciplining bauble to keep Biden a loyal Democratic foot soldier. Cast out for plagiarism during his first prize-run, trounced time two only to be revived for the subaltern conciliation, then precluding what was supposed to be his thrice attempt in 2016. Four years thence, when Biden again threw his graying hat in the ring, he was uniformly dismissed as a pitiable chance compared to younger, sharper upstarts. (And Bolshevik Bernie.)

Thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime (*knocks on wood*) pandemic, conniving of his party’s grandees, and an unprecedented push to boost voting amidst anti-social decrees, Biden captured the one shiny title he doggedly pursued since first upset Senate victory. He even happened to handsomely expand his family’s financial state along the way—a bamboozily truth we aren’t supposed to talk about, lest Facebook coshes us with its “kook misinformation” label.

So now we’re supposed to fault the guy for calling it quits and soaking up sun on the eastern seaboard? Well, technically, Biden didn’t gracefully bow out. He was cajoled out by a woman three years his senior with triple his cojones. Still, he conceded he was licked, issuing his six-month notice before extending his holiday.

Right-wing media acts aghast, positively perturbed, that the President is phoning it in from the sandy shores of Rehoboth, Del. “Biden Enjoying Extended Vacation as Presidential Term Ticks Away,” mews the conservative National Review. Independent journalist Nick Sortor all-caps whined at August’s end that “[t]oday marks Joe Biden’s 16TH STRAIGHT DAY on vacation. And once again, he’s at the beach, wasting away. This is RIDICULOUS. We have no President.” If only! Does Nortor not realize the device on which he dashed off his tizzy tweet enables anyone to cursorily work from anywhere, even the President of the United States?

The Republican National Committee joined the concern-troll dunk fest: “Biden spent today—his 16th straight day on vacation—lounging on the beach. He has spent a total of 532 days (40.3% of his presidency) on vacation. Who’s running the country?”

The worst president ever isn’t presidenting and that’s a problem… how? Nothing says owning the libs like fretting that the dozing-off old dude isn’t minding the store, locking up conscientious objectors and making misgendering a federal crime.

Biden’s deliberate, even mournful, low profile should, conversely, be an object lesson in the dispensability of the “President.” The commander-in-chief goes Gallic, knocking off for August, and there’s not so much as a bump in the federal operational machinery. Seniors are cut Social Security checks, our soldiers still serve as target practice for Mideast marauders, shipping waterways remain unimpeded (notwithstanding those pesky Houthis), airplanes still lift off and land, world leaders are jawboned at and mollified, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing keeps textiling pallets of Benjamin bedsheets, the Post Office still loses your letters. Bureaucracy keeps whirring.

Meanwhile, Biden’s appointed successor Vice President Kamala Harris, or “Kamey” as she likes to be called, is barely raising her index finger to campaign, snubbing media scrutiny, agreeing to only one debate with her opponent, not even publishing an intern-drafted policy platform, and just letting her Twitter hive do the fighting.

The fate of democracy, we’re near-constantly informed, is on the line. The Bad Orange Man is on the march again, this time with his harem-holding hillbilly Veep ready to shrink women’s rights to on par with the Paleolithic Age. The left is hysterically convinced, to quote Tom Wolfe, “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States.” Yet the selfless paladins who are supposed to defend our democratic republic against the Trumpian menace have little better to do than hit the hustings in a protective bubble.

Maybe, just maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, the left is overselling the entire “existential threat to democracy” just to gin up votes. Irrational mental maladies have a well-known liberal bias, after all. If it’s always doomsday in America, with an encroaching walled inferno and MAGA parademons threatening to feast on our charred bodies, Biden may not regret packing it in for the whitecapped views. He may have outsmarted us all.