4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization

4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (ret)

On 4 June 1940, Winston S. Churchill, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, gave a speech to House of Commons. It was unarguably the most important moment of the 20^thcentury.

The question was not just of war or peace but also deciding the course for all humanity. In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the Commonwealth of Nations had stood, faced and battled the greatest alignment of evil in all history when the forces for good were at their absolute nadir.

Churchill was to announce whether evil indeed had triumphed or the fading forces of good would carry on come what may.

A Tragic Background

The terror had begun earlier. In March 1939, the German Nationalist Socialist war machine dismantled Czechoslovakia. In reaction, France and the United Kingdom enacted economic embargoes against Nazi Germany. Storm clouds of another Great War began to form on the horizon.

As the days of 1939 slipped away battle lines were drawn amongst the world’s seven great powers. A quick survey did little to encourage the embattled Free World leaders in London and Paris. In East Asia, Japan was occupied with its predatory war against China and the United States a neutral sleeping giant. As for the rest, the three great radical socialist states – nationalist socialist Germany, communist socialist Russian and Fascist socialist Italy – unexpectedly congealed into a tenuous mutual assistance bloc. How that happened is an often-ignored chapter of World War II.

On top of the economic pain inflicted on Germany, Hitler realized that in the event of war the Royal Navy would blockade their ports. That could cripple his war machine but there was a solution at hand: Soviet Russia could supply everything the Werhmacht needed. Conversely, if the leaders in London and Paris could win over Moscow then another world war might be averted.

In the months that followed the destruction of Czechoslovakia, gaining the support of Josef Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became THEpolitical drama waged between the liberal free-market democracies and Nazi Germany. Hitler emerged as winner when he formed an alliance with Stalin formalized in the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or German-Soviet Nonaggression) Pact of 23 August. 

That ensured Nazi Germany would not have to fight a two-front war – what Hitler believed to be a prime reason why Germany lost the First World War. But Germany gained even more. A second important piece of the German-Soviet alliance dealt with economic support. Due to the embargoes, the German war machine was in desperate need of oil, manganese, rubber, and other resources. 

By July 1939, German-Soviet trade negotiations had progressed and an agreement was signed on 19 August, just days before the Non-Aggression Pact. Later, on 11 February 1940, an expanded German-Soviet Commercial Treaty was penned that provided even more critical raw materials to the Werhmacht. The amounts provided by Moscow exceeded of 2,000,000 tons of supplies to include 900,000 tons of oil. It was no exaggeration to say that the Nazi German blitzkriegs of 1940-1941 ran on Soviet fuel.

Hitler had been able to join forces with Stalin because Nazi Germany was willing to give the Soviets what the Western Allies would not: A free hand to invade and seize neighboring nations in eastern Europe – all outlined in secret protocols within the August pact. Central to agreement was the joint invasion of Poland. 

On 1 September, Nationalist Socialist Germany simultaneously attacked Poland from eastern Germany and East Prussia. On 17 September, The Red Army invaded Poland. Hitler and Stalin, two radical socialist leaders, plunged the planet into the Second World War. 

The timing could be seen as an act of Providence for the Western Allies for if the Soviets also had invaded Poland on or about 1 September, they would have been compelled to go to war with both dictatorships. Instead, France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany alone on 3 September. 

When the Soviets struck Poland on 17 September, both Paris and London realized the battle for Poland was lost and they could not wage a war against the combined power of Nationalist Socialist Germany and communist socialist Russia. As a matter of survival, they found political expedients to restrict the war to Germany. It was a painful – even shameful – but absolutely necessary compromise. Europe continued to fall into darkness.

Dire June 1940

The subsequent events that led to Churchill’s speech read as an almost overpowering litany of depressing setbacks. Disaster and defeat seemed to be waiting at every turn and in culmination beat down the spirit of even the most ardent resister.

Stalin’s war making did not stop with Poland. The Red Army invaded Finland in November 1939 and in March 1940 the Soviets forced a peace on the Finns that strongly favored Moscow. To add to the lands gained in Poland and Finland, on 3 June 1940, Stalin secretly issued alert orders for the Red Army to prepare for an imminent invasion of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. While the West was appalled and watched helplessly, it was not a shock to the senior leaders of the two radical socialists regimes as Hitler and Stalin had agreed to everything in August 1939.

Hitler too carried on with his bloody campaigns of conquest. In a matter of two months, Nationalist Socialist Germany invaded and conquered Denmark (9 April), Luxembourg (10 May), the Netherlands (10-14 May), and Belgium (10-28 May). Norway, which also had been invaded on 9 April, still fought the Germans but its cause was hopeless. The same was true of France. Defended by what many considered the finest army in the world, the Third Republic was decisively beaten by 4 June.

The German Werhmacht seemed omnipotent.

Fighting beside the French Army was the British Commonwealth (the British Expeditionary Force or BEF) and it too had been pushed to brink of annihilation by Hitler’s panzers. Only through raw courage, daring, creativity, and at great risk, was the bulk of the BEF saved (Operation Dynamo). It was the one victory rising up in a sea of failures.

By 4 June 1940, the Commonwealth of Nations had lost it most powerful allies in Europe and stood alone in the face of relentless Nationalist Socialist aggression aided and abetted by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Finally, the Commonwealth of Nations had to be prepared to deal with socialist-fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, who had secretly informed his generals on 26 May at he soon intended to enter the war as Hitler’s ally. 

Britain’s Friends in the United States were of little use

While possessing tremendous latent power, the United States was of no material help on 4 June 1940. Lend-lease did not begin until much later – March 1941 – and the American armed forces woefully inadequate. The US Navy was America’s sole first-rate modern force of consequence. Naval aviation also was well developed consisting of 6 carrier air groups and 3 long-range patrol wings that were joined by 2 US Marine Air Groups.

In contrast, the US Army stood at just under 190,000 by the close of 1939 and modestly grew to 269,000 in 1940. As a comparison, the British Army held 1,650,000 soldiers in June 1940. The Commonwealth added about 400,000 more with most serving in the Indian Army.

The US Army only began to build its first main gun battle tank in 1939 and armed with an undersized 37mm cannon. By 1940, the US Army possessed 112 of these already obsolete M2 tanks (again in contrast, the British Army had over 800 main-gun tanks in 1940 although most were lost during the battle of France). Even the Italian and Japanese armored forces were superior to the Americans in June 1940. 

US Army Air Corps aircraft were more numerous (18 bomber and 30 fighter squadrons) and capable but lagged behind the other major powers – the one bright light shone on the limited presence of modern P-39 and P-40 fighters along with A-20, B-25, and B-17 bombers. The rest of the Air Corps was obsolete.

Eighty years ago the world teetered on the brink of great unspeakable darkness. 

Whole books can be written on how 20^thcentury radical socialism created police-state societies that repressed every type of freedom from speech, music, and architecture to every other form of art and creative activity.  The socialist dictatorships decided what information people could or could not have access to as well as where could live or work or even travel. But let us refine the inhumanity to the grimmest of human rights abuses: State sponsored murder.

The Soviet Union killed over 20 million “enemies of socialism.” The top three methods of extermination were (1) direct murder, (2) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor gulag camps, and (3) starvation through man-made famines.

Nationalist Socialist Germany murdered 11 million “enemies of the state.” Like the Soviet Union, the Nationalist Socialists used a modified version of Soviet “big three” methods: (1) direct executions, (2) death camps for mass-scale genocide, and (3) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor concentration camps.

While fascist socialism did not devolve into a concentration camp-mass murder gulag system it enacted anti-Semitic laws in 1938 and allowed the Nazis to send Jews and other enemies of Nationalist Socialism in Italy and other Italian controlled areas to Nazi concentration or death camps.

Imagine a world dominated by Communism, Nationalist Socialism and Fascist Socialism.

How many millions of innocents would have been slaughtered under the radical socialist behemoths had the Commonwealth surrendered? How many millions or more would have been condemned to slave labor camps? And the remaining billions of all humanity would have been doomed to a life of soul crushing oppression under the boot of radical socialism.

Those were the stakes in June 1940. 

The Commonwealth’s Reply

For the war leaders in London, outwardly there was little or nothing to look to in hope of getting past the omnipresent gloom. Only internal strength could see the Commonwealth of Nations through its moment of greatest peril. In the face of all that, on 4 June 1940, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill gave Hitler his answer:

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

What the Commonwealth of Nations achieved by refusing to surrender and battling back sewed the seed for liberty and justice to be enjoyed by billions of people for generations after. 

And a special debt is owned not just to the heroes from the British Isles and Commonwealth nations but to the heroic Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis and many others who fought for all our freedoms even though they would not gain their own full independence until years into the future. And also a great debt is owed to the French, Poles, Norwegians, Czechs and other Europeans whose nations had fallen under the yoke of totalitarian socialism but carried on the struggle by whatever means possible – and at great cost.

Peter Navarro hits Stephanopoulos curveballs out of the park

Peter Navarro hits Stephanopoulos curveballs out of the park 
Frank Miele, Heartland Diary

“Trade adviser” Peter Navarro gave one of the best performances ever by a senior Trump official during an ambush interview today. 

Appearing on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Navarro was textbook perfect in his ability to avoid being tripped up by the loaded questions thrown out by Stephanopoulos. 

From the first question, asked about Barack Obama’s latest attack on Trump, Navarro was ready for anything. 

 “I’m glad Mr. Obama has a new job as Joe Biden’s press secretary,” he started, getting in his zinger but then following it up with a cutting critique of Obama’s fake commencement address. “I note for the record in his speech that I read there was no mention of manufacturing, no mention of China. As far as I’m concerned, his administration was a kumbaya of incompetence in which we saw millions of manufacturing jobs go off to China. His new normal was a flatline in terms of wage growth, and I’m happy to report that this president, Donald J. Trump, in 3 1/2 years built the most beautiful economy in modern history, and the Chinese did take that down in about 30 days, but we are in the process right now of rebuilding that, and this president, Donald J. Trump, is the one who has the skills to do so. Because you know what George? What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go back to the future here. Buy American, deregulate and innovate. What do I mean by that? Bring jobs home. Make it here.” 

 Did you get all that? And that was just in the first minute. Navarro didn’t even break a sweat and you could sense Stephanopoulos wishing he had stayed in bed and let Martha Raddatz handle this interview! 

 If there was any doubt who was in charge of this interview, it evaporated when Stephanopoulos asked his gotcha follow up question:

 “You say the Chinese took down the American economy. So you’re saying they deliberately unleashed the COVID virus on the United States? You have any evidence of that?” 

 This is the typical Fake News trick of “interpreting” a response (i.e., lying about it) to try to get the guest to go down a rabbit hole. But Navarro was having none of it. 

 “I did not say they deliberately did it, but their China virus, let’s go over the facts here — correct me if I’m wrong: The virus was spawned in Wuhan province. Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York, and around the world to seed that. 

 “They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic. So, that’s why I say the Chinese did that to Americans and they are responsible. “Now, George, one other thing that I think is unconscionable about the Chinese behavior, as we speak, they signed a trade deal on January 15, and they promised not to steal our intellectual property, big part of that deal. 

 “Guess what? The FBI has now issued warnings that the Chinese government is hacking the intellectual property, so that they can steal vaccines for the world. And what would they do with it? It wouldn’t be a benign experience. They would use that vaccine to profiteer and hold the world hostage. 

 “So, yes, I do blame the Chinese. And it will be really interesting, George, as to how this election unfolds, because you have got Joe Biden, who has been a long friend of China, vs. President Trump… who is the only president who has ever stood up to China.”

 Question after question, Stephanopoulos looked for a chance to his Navarro with a haymaker, but Navarro sidestepped him on all his far-left propaganda and hit back hard with the facts. 

When Stephanopoulos quoted Joe Biden’s words against Trump for not standing up to China, Navarro turned it right back around against Biden:

 “Joe Biden’s has got 40 years of sucking up to the Chinese, including the eight years as vice president. And we know about the billion dollars that his son took from the Chinese.” 

 That of course raised a red flag for Democrat Stephanopoulos, who immediately tried to cover up the truth about the Biden family corruption. “That’s just not factual, sir. That is not a fact. He did not take a billion dollars from the Chinese.” 

 Oops, Navarro admitted. Yep, the billion dollars “Went into that hedge fund” run in part by Hunter Biden! Hit ’em where it hurts! 

 On every question, Navarro was prepared and knowledgeable. My favorite answer was his dismissal of fake whistleblower Rick Bright who said President Trump wasn’t doing enough to fight coronavirus. 

 “Here’s what happened with Rick Bright, and it’s an American tragedy, George. This guy is quite talented, but he was asked to be the field commander over at NIH to storm the testing hill with a billion dollars behind him. Instead of accepting that mission, he deserted. He went into a fox hole, wrote up the complaint. And now he’s part of a Capitol Hill partisan circus where he’s just become another pawn in the game. And the tragedy, George, is this man has talent. He’s a smart man. We could have used him on the battlefield. He’s not there now. And it was because of the decisions that he made.”

 Stephanopoulos tried to defend Bright, saying, “His expertise is vaccines. He wants to work in vaccine development. They’re putting him in diagnostic testing. Why shouldn’t a vaccine expert be working on vaccines?” Navarro hit this one out of the park! 

 “Here’s the thing, George, I was — I’ve been with the president since the campaign, right? I came here to do trade policy, right? What am I now? A conscript in the war on the China virus. I’m like a quartermaster and a shipping clerk half the time.

 “Do I complain? No. That’s my mission for this president, for this country. We do what we have to do when we have to do it for this country.

 “And Rick Bright, he made a choice. He could have been making a tremendous contribution over at NIH to testing and you and others have been complaining about testing. He could have been the field general. And now, he’s off the battlefield and it was by his own choice, sir.” 

 Bravo. 

 Everyone in the Trump administration should be provided with a copy of this interview and told to study it carefully. This was a master class in taking on the Fake News Media and turning their own questions against them.

Obamagate explained...

The Dems' least offensive candidate is still strangling them

The Dems' least offensive candidate is still strangling them

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic presidential nominee. After all, he had a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates going into the rescheduled August convention in the postponed Democratic primary race.

Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.

Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.

The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.

On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as "fat," "damn liar" and, weirdly, "lying dog-faced pony soldier."

Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully's face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.

Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.

The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden's wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden's own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden's boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.

During the year-long rise, fall and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places or dates. Biden would try to speak ex tempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.

The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.

With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.

At first the media complied -- as it always had with Biden's troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.

But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media's utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.

So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden's increasingly obvious cognitive decline.

In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.

In the three months before the Democratic National Convention, Americans will witness some of the strangest political scrambling in presidential campaign history. Simply put, how does the Democratic Party cut from its neck an albatross -- one who has the most delegates but is likely not up to serving as president?

And how to do the deed without inciting the moribund Sanders campaign and his army of Bernie bros?
A host of Democratic donors and operatives would like Biden to disappear, clearing the way for a replacement such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, failed 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton or former first lady Michelle Obama.

But even if Democrats know why Biden must go, they haven't a clue about when or how.

Joe Biden Is Cooked

Joe Biden Is Cooked

Apart from the accumulated limitations of the former vice president’s performance as a functioning candidate, there are other problems already clawing at him or waiting to pounce.

Conrad Black, American Greatness 

Despite polls showing that he leads President Trump in key states and in the country overall, there remains something seriously missing and not credible in the putative presidential nomination of Joe Biden.

The polls are never accurate with Trump, and there is both a reticence by his supporters to identify themselves and some sampling errors by the main polling organizations because of the unusually high numbers of people this president draws to the polls in his support who are not otherwise frequent voters. 

The real test of these matters is how the people vote, and the country saw Joe Biden come in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, and descend to 11 percent in that state’s Democratic primary. Generally, no candidate in either party is nominated who loses badly in New Hampshire.

It did not require a resurrected Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that Biden’s sudden emergence from punch-drunk Palooka on the ropes to the anointed nominee in two weeks was not entirely spontaneous. In a formidable display of professionalism, the Democratic Party elders carried him to the finish line on March 3, knocking Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren out of the race and obtaining endorsements of Biden from three of them.

With Bloomberg spending $937 million in a few months to collect just five delegates from American Samoa—the costliest pursuit of votes per capita in world history—there was no one else to snatch the nomination from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who would have lost all 50 states (but not the District of Columbia) to Trump with his Marxist nonsense.

Biden won most of the Super Tuesday primaries. Once reestablished as the Democrats’ leading candidate, he is now awash in the endorsements of the Obamas, Clintons, and Sanders himself. But this is still the same person who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

The putative nominee was just getting into high gear as a human gaffe machine when the coronavirus pandemic mercifully rescued him from much direct exposure to the public and confined him to a little podium in his basement in Delaware, from which he skypes a somewhat moderated number of malapropisms and amnesiac lapses to the Trump-hating media.

More Troubles for Biden Await

Apart from the accumulated limitations of his performance as a functioning candidate, there are other problems already clawing at him or waiting to pounce.

There is no reason to believe that the issue of his and his son’s involvement in questionable financial activities in Ukraine and China will not return. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has assured President Trump and his representative, Rudolph Giuliani, that he will look into the matter of Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm. The Bidens deserve the presumption of innocence but, to use the clichés of the public relations business, the optics and externalities are not great.

Special counsel John Durham will be along some time in the next few months with indictments (or not) in the origins of the fraudulent Trump-Russian collusion outrage. It was clear from the December report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that there were many illegalities and improprieties in the FISA aspect of the matter: internal espionage, conducted under the spurious rubric of a counterintelligence investigation against a major party nominee and then a president-elect. Ample evidence exists that Biden was present when these matters were discussed with President Obama. That doesn’t make Biden guilty of anything, of course. But if there is a slew of indictments over activities that he was aware of, it isn’t a great election year image-builder either.

And then there is the Tara Reade affair. This is a responsible, credible, stable person. A Democrat, whose friends say they remember how upset she was when she left the employ of then-Senator Biden in 1993 claiming she had been raped by him. This isn’t a dippy Blasey-Ford rerun with a pseudo-anonymous frequent flyer who hates flying and has no corroboration of any kind and who can’t remember where an incident stopping far short of rape 36 years before had occurred, as in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Nor is it a recording of an 11-year-old bawdy comment unconnected to any act or plaintiff, as with candidate Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape that almost killed his 2016 campaign. This is a real rape charge from a substantial person.

Reade’s is a serious allegation from a believable woman with some corroboration and a consistent story. Biden has avoided all comment, and the anti-Trump media with whom he converses from his virus-shelter basement haven’t got around to asking him about Reade (showing their customary no-holds-barred professional impartiality).

The Democrats embarked en bloc in the Kavanaugh nomination battle over two years ago on the credo “believe all women,” and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said that her former patron, President Bill Clinton, should have resigned because of his sexual advances on various women.

Of course, this is not a sustainable position and we can’t just take a woman’s word for the assertion that a sex crime was committed many years before because she says so. We have to end this practice of career destruction by mere denunciation. But this, too, could profoundly shake the Biden campaign, which has not been conducted to this point by a tidal wave of well-earned popularity.

Another Nominee Waiting in the Wings?

There is an aura of otherworldly unreality about the Biden candidacy: a man who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire is effectively the party’s nominee a month later, and takes to his basement to avoid exposure to the media while he and his backers ignore several impending problems, any one of which could blow up his candidacy. Yet there are polls from ostensibly serious polling organizations claiming if the election were held today, Biden would defeat the president.

I believe that all of these supplementary problems will blow up during the spring and early summer. At that point, Biden could do the honorable thing and stand aside and ask his delegates to support a more presentable candidate than himself, well to the right of Sanders. After such a shuffle, when the delegate selection was over and too late for Sanders to restart his campaign, someone like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo could be nominated.

There is some precedent in the Democratic Party for former unsuccessful contenders for the highest office effectively nominating more promising candidates.

In 1912, with the convention deadlocked between Missouri’s House speaker Beauchamp Champ Clark and New Jersey governor and former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, three-time unsuccessful presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan threw his weight behind Wilson, who was nominated and elected (as the Republicans were split between President  Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt).

In 1932, legendary media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had once entertained some political ambitions, permitted Franklin D. Roosevelt to be nominated by causing his own candidate, House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, to withdraw in Roosevelt’s favor, in exchange for the vice presidency (an office Garner memorably disparaged in scatological terms).

Unless Biden comes out of hiding and takes some serious positions and looks and sounds like a leader, and can neutralize the Ukrainian, Durham, and Reade issues, his utility will have been to deny the nomination to Sanders and keep the place warm for a more plausible candidate. Whatever some polls say, this candidate cannot defeat the incumbent, unless Trump takes complete leave of his senses and starts to live up to the Democrats’ hideous caricature of him as a monster who incarnates corruption and incompetence.