There have been times since the Edward Snowden revelations, continuing through Trump’s campaign and of course his election, on and on and on through his presidency and now, just this week, when I have half-seriously but on many wholly separate occasions, wondered if I were not in a coma, maybe I had a car accident and suffered brain damage, or maybe I’m dead and reaping in the afterlife what I sowed in real life. It's a nightmare that's all, maybe a long nightmare, maybe a permanent one for me, but in the real world that I cannot get to it’s not really happening.
I have wondered whether I am in touch with reality, so unfamiliar and unreal are these events to me. Did we really have an off-the-shelf, parallel judicial system? Did we really elect a mental defective and pathological narcissist as president? Is President Biden really rowing with both oars in the water? Did “This is the United States of America!” truly deflate to “this is the united states of america gulp” on the Delta variant and Afghanistan? Did we really not plan for Delta in any effective way? Did President Biden truly make the decision to withdraw and “forget” the follow through? Is President Biden mentally degraded? Have we really elected two presidents in succession with alarming mental profiles? Did Biden just have a series of episodes this week that gesture with force for the first time, after almost seven months of crafty intelligence and diligent work, that his elevators do not go all the way to the top? Did the most serious foreign policy debacle in quite some time, eminently foreseeable and avoidable, happen over several months when no one else recognized that this cake was not even put into the oven until this week? Did he really say those things at his press conferences on Afghanistan that lead friends and neutrals to begin to think about his grasp of reality? Or am I in a coma or actually dead?
