Between a crook and a codger

Advertisement

Australians are very poorly served by Canberra, which should be razed with everybody still in it.

But spare a thought for the Americans who are served by their own brand of capital city scum.

On the one hand, is criminality:

Donald Trump and his real estate company suffered a major defeat in New York’s civil fraud suit over his inflated asset valuations, after a judge barred the former president from running any business in the state for three years and ordered $364 million in penalties plus interest.

Advertisement

On the other hand, is decrepit:

It was one thing to have Republicans, up to and including former President Donald Trump, call Biden senile. That’s how politics works, and it can easily be dismissed as such. It’s something else entirely to have it on official Justice Department letterhead.

Although Hur didn’t call Biden “senile,” that was the effect. He chose not to charge Biden, he wrote, because “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. 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.”

In the choice between lunacy and senility, I will take the latter, but I am not an American, and god only knows what they will decide as Biden slides into miasma.

The good news is, either way, they’ll continue the end of China.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.