Jeffrey Blehar offers National Review readers an interesting observation about the outgoing presidential administration.
[O]n his way out the door, Joe Biden decided to pardon his entire family (minus his wife Jill, with whom he must have had an argument) alongside the January 6 Committee. I don’t care! I know it’s appalling, but the time to be appalled about it was back when he pardoned his son Hunter Biden — after that, these subsequent pardons were foreordained. (In particular, anyone paying attention knew that once Hunter got a full pardon another one was coming for Joe Biden’s equally buck-raking brother James, a man who suppurates corruption and whose misdeeds have received almost zero public attention because Hunter’s drug escapades stole the spotlight.)
Instead, I am struck by an observation that few others seem to have made about the Biden era: Nobody really ever got fired. (Yes, the luggage thief with nuclear top-secret clearances got canned, but he was a low-level appointee, caught on camera, and also shudderingly disturbing in all respects.) It is, in fact, a historically remarkable milestone; further, most of his cabinet remained constant from start to finish.
And surely it was not due to his cabinet’s peerless performance — Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas would have been sacrificed ten times over in any prior administration over the border situation alone. Instead, while Biden was in office, cabinet officials seemed to be capable of getting away with murder, just so long as they stayed loyally onside: The secretary of defense, General Lloyd Austin, quite literally went AWOL for several days to deal with a medical issue he had concealed from his own president and was welcomed back into the fold by the administration with no questions asked. Why?
I remember that Donald Trump had only one good line during his first (and only) debate against Joe Biden — primarily because he needed do nothing else but remain functional while Biden melted like a wax candle beside him — and it was his point that Biden had never fired anyone for poor performance, not even once in a presidential term that all voters could agree was wrought with massive, avoidable, personally accountable failures.
