…was the caption of a famous Carl Rose/The New Yorker cartoon of Adolf Hitler addressing a roomful of uniformed Nazis in the Reichstag in the early days of the then newborn Third Reich, before the outbreak of war.
But Hollywood had beaten this real Monster to the scene with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in 1931…
And we got to see the real deal last night at Independence Hall as Joe Biden went on a scripted and rehearsed rant about the enemies of his state.
But Carl Rose depicted Germany, who’d always had a “thing” for authoritarians, (and still do, it seems) and this is America. Megalomania was not hard to imagine, or find, in Germany, especially if you had been on history’s receiving end of one of their forays into that realm.
Rose mocked the antics of Germany from what he believed to be a safe distance…until they ceased to be antics.
Mary Shelley, who created Herr Doktor Frankenstein and his monster, was herself the daughter of a privileged feminist, Mary Wollenscroft. She wrote “Frankenstein” in 1818 over a century before Hitler.
And yes it was a story of a mentally deranged, what we called in my day, “mad scientist”, and less about that poor schlub who had been put together from used auto parts that didn’t always fit, ugly as all git-out, lumbering around stiff-legged, scaring people.
But as a romantic, in the end, Shelley found some sympathetic virtue in Dr Frankenstein’s motives, while Carl Rose could summon up none about Adolf Hitler.
American history has never seen more open and notorious conduct from its government than it has in recent years, culminating in a fast-paced run toward an imaginary finish line over the past twenty-one (21) months, which appears to be hellbent on serving up a totally different soup for the American people to stew in.
What we do know today is that is not an alert, competent Joe Biden behind that microphone, back thrown back, fists clenched or hands on his hips. If Biden is anything, he is playing out memories from his younger days, for he has always often provided tales of courageous deeds and bravado that never occurred, (at least to him), even borrowing other men’s words to describe those feats.
Perhaps that is why they selected him for president in the first place? Maybe they always knew, only we still aren’t sure who “they” are.
But there is clearly someone, more likely plural, who use Joe Biden to strut their stuff.
There is, of course, Jill, married to Joe 45 years. She knows where all the warts have been hidden since the 70s.
And it was she who oversaw his basement exile during the 2020 campaign, pitting two extraordinary political events which the courts, even today, still find too unbelievable to step in and actually take evidence to see which one had the greater likelihood of being true;
1) first that a political neophyte could actually win the GOP nomination, and then, bring thirty million voters out of the dark, from nowhere, to win several key states, and then do a very good job as president in reversing all sorts of institutional maladies confronting America;
only to 2) then lose to a former vice president who hid out in his basement for the larger part of the campaign and still win by some very strange vote-counting in the early morning hours;
Of course, Jill had to be written into the screenplay.
But if I were to consider the megalomaniacal vanity of a candidate who best fit the mold of Dr Frankenstein himself, it would be Barack Obama…
…only, in all likelihood, like Joe Biden, this too is an image of the Himself he sees in the mirror. His charisma did not seem to carry forward past his immediate circle, except to the younger, more worshipful minds full of mush Saul Alinsky taught was the best sort of voter to develop.
Obama projects neither a really deep mind nor exudes the natural attributes of leadership.
To the mirror he says, “Leadership, yeah, leadership. That’s the ticket! If I can just fake that, I got it made.”
So, 3) a committee of minds must be scripting behind this person standing at the podium, saying “I Think I May Say, Without Fear of Contradiction…”
Eight years we endured Barack Obama yet never seriously inquired into who that committee behind him might have been, or what might have been the nature of their relationship; their give-and-take.
And after 18 months of Joe Biden, while his disabilities have been patently clear, enough for six justices on the Supreme Court to notice if they’d just put on their wide-angle spectacles and put the fine-print specks away, it’s been easy to see that there were always elements inside Obama’s orbit who wanted to set up re-education camps for what are euphemistically called “MAGA’s” today, but were originally called “Christians”. Those elements had already fenagled their way around the ban against executing American citizens abroad, and by selling-for-export thousands of rifles into the hands of smugglers in order to track their distribution, resulting in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Mexicans…mostly based on “findings” by then Attorney General Eric Holder, leaving Barack Obama’s hands clean.
When Carl Rose drew that cartoon before the Third Reich went to war, (1933-1938) no one knew what was coming, not even the Europeans. Remember Kate Smith introducing “God Bless America” in 1938 just after Hitler invaded Poland? Everyone knew then what was coming, just not where or how. It took Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 to get us mobilized out of our seats.
This next one is easier to figure out and should be exponentially less bloody. Process still can play a role.
These are (power) madmen and women we are dealing with.
