Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden has sat silent while roving bands of outlaws tore American cities to shreds. He said nothing when an Antifa leader in Portland called for “the abolition of the United States as we know it.” His own vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, grinned as she warned that the riots are “not gonna stop. And they should not.”

Until about five minutes ago, Harris and Biden thought they could use the Marxist revolutionaries of BLM and Antifa as their own pet militia. They thought that once the brownshirts had made a hellscape of America, they could come sailing in to convince voters that Grandpa Joe and Mamala were going to make it all better.

But now that this “strategy” (read: protection racket) is failing electorally, Biden wants to put the insurrection back in the bag. In what I suppose counts for him as being quick on the uptake, Joe has announced that he plans to visit Kenosha, WI on Thursday after more than a week of ruinous looting, arson, and violence there. Trump already visited on Tuesday. He strode through the rubble and condemned the rioters as what they are: domestic terrorists, lavishly funded and egged on by a national coalition consisting of BLM, Antifa, and the Democratic Party.

It seems Biden has at last lurched toward the realization that this is a good look for Trump, and a bad look for him. So now he’s off to Kenosha to “hold a community meeting…to bring together Americans to heal and address the challenges we face.” The Biden team has also released, a few days before the visit, a halfhearted new ad in which Joe pitifully mimics Trump’s own robust law-and-order rhetoric. Biden is attempting something like political acrobatics here: he wants suddenly to condemn mob violence while also pinning it—get this—on the Donald. “If I were president my language would be less divisive,” Biden declares. “I’d be looking to lower the temperature in this country, not raise it!”

That poor man. Biden, I mean. At this point one can hardly imagine he holds even the faintest conviction that what he’s saying bears any connection to reality. Even with his buddies in the press running cover on this nonsense, it simply does not wash. Biden’s team has obviously realized that wanton destruction of life and property do not, uh, poll well with the American public at large. Maybe they’ve been listening to CNN’s Don Lemon, who got hot under the collar recently when he noticed the riots are “showing up in the polling.”

So Biden and the Dems are pivoting to a firmer stance on looting and violence. And truly, it almost makes one sorry for them. It’s quite the spectacle to see a presidential candidate fall so woefully into the clutches of his own crime syndicate that he can’t even sputter his way through a convincing repudiation of open lawlessness. Can he really stand there with his face hanging out and tell us all the toppled statues of Founding Fathers, all the calls to defund the police, all the chanting caravans rolling through quiet American suburbs are part of a violent uprising by *checks notes*…right-wing extremists?

Oh, no no no. Too late, Sleepy Joe: those arsonists and those gunmen and those revolutionaries you bankrolled as hired thugs? They own you now. They were never really in your pocket, and they’re not here to help you: they’re here to destroy America, with or without you. Having amassed appalling stores of wealth and corporate clout, they will not stop just because you no longer find it expedient to act as their ringleader. Nor will these tardy gestures of repudiation absolve you from being the repellant face of anti-American terrorism you have become.

So when I say I almost feel bad for Biden, I want to emphasize the “almost.” In point of fact I hope the people of Kenosha and of America make him own every business that now lies in ashes, every family fortune lost, every cop fallen dead on the ground because of the sniggering, fatuous, divisive garbage that has spewed without cease from the mouth of Joe Biden and the Democrat party, lo these many months.

The Democrats have unleashed an unprecedented threat, a viper in the bosom of America. They have no control over these riots, and they are not the people to end them. The big kids are going to have to bring down a serious hammer to make this thing stop, and Joe Biden is not a big kid. He is a scared little man flailing desperately for some way out of the terrible mess he’s made.