OPINION:
It has long been said that those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
And then there is Congress.
No matter how hopelessly stupid, lazy or incompetent you may be, there is always a home for you in Washington, the town where nobody ever gets fired and everybody eats.
You might say that clowns who can, run off with the circus. Clowns who can’t, join Congress.
Washington is the dumping ground for the dumbest, most incompetent, most dishonest people, who could not be trusted to sell used cars anywhere in this country.
President Biden is the most obvious example. He has been here for 50 years. Never had a real job in his life. He is one of the greatest foreign policy “experts” Washington has produced in half a century — the other being the spectacularly inept John Kerry.
Mr. Biden has somehow become fabulously wealthy on a government salary. Yet you would not let him run the shoe department at the mall. You would not trust him to oversee the carpool lane at the neighborhood middle school — and not because of his bizarre hair-sniffing fetish with little girls. He simply could not manage such a complicated task.
To be fair, Mr. Biden is not the first idiot to make a living in Washington.
Back in 1974, the year after he arrived in the nation’s capital, a local magazine published a story identifying the 10 dumbest members of Congress. Mr. Biden had not been around long enough to make the list.
The dumbest of the Top Ten that year was identified as a man named Sen. William Scott, a Republican from Virginia.
According to reports at the time, Scott considered suing the magazine for libel. But he decided against that for fear of bringing too much attention to the list and his position on it.
Instead, Scott held a press conference in his office to formally declare he was not, in fact, the dumbest member of Congress.
“Obviously not true,” he told the gathered reporters.
Yes, obviously.
That seminal moment in the annals of congressional stupidity came to mind last week after Mr. Biden was spared an indictment by his Justice Department for his mishandling of classified documents. Though he had clearly broken laws, prosecutors determined Mr. Biden is too mentally unfit to stand trial.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” prosecutors explained. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Mentally unfit to stand trial, yet perfectly qualified to hold the most powerful position in Washington.
In a glimmering flash of mental acuity, Mr. Biden found himself offended that he had been found too mentally unfit to be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents.
So he did what only a profoundly stupid and mentally unfit person would do: He called a press conference to announce that he is, in fact, mentally fit to stand trial for mishandling classified documents.
What followed last Thursday night was the most comically absurd 12 minutes in recent political history.
Mr. Biden repeatedly lied about the central finding of the special prosecutor’s report. He tearfully invoked his dead son. He could not remember where his dead son’s rosary came from. He misstated the name of the president of Egypt and relocated the country of Mexico to the Middle East, and blamed Mexicans for not opening the Haffa Gate to allow the innocent civilians of Gaza to escape Israel’s “over the top” response to the worst terrorist attack since 9/11.
Clearly, as prosecutors said, there is no “mental state of willfulness” going on in Mr. Biden’s head. But it raises an alarming question.
With the lights out in the White House, whose “mental state of willfulness” is running things in the Biden administration?
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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