Tuesday night Joe Biden was confirmed as the Democratic presidential nominee.

First there was a virtual roll call conducted from historical and civil rights landmarks around the country, places of personal significance to Biden, and a Vermont park featuring a masked and quite begrudging Bernie Sanders. Then the master of ceremonies, Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, certified the democratic nomination on-screen from his home base in Jackson.

Cheered on by a mosaic of zoomed-in supporters and ostensibly ready to lead the Left back to the presidency after four years of the Literal Satan Administration, Biden addressed the convention:

“Well, thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart. Thank you all, it means the world to me and my family, and I’ll see you on Thursday. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

13 seconds, 36 words. No problem. Good ’ol Joe.

Cutaway.

Nothing to see here, folks!

This is an asterisk of a convention. Biden’s remote acceptance speech, soon to follow, will be a first. Unlike the recent blowout bashes for Hillary in 2016 and Obama in 2008 and 2012, there will be no adoring crowds, no balloons, no collective effervescence.

Just like Hillary and Obama, however, Biden will have to take the podium for an hour-long acceptance speech.

Tonight, Joe Biden will stand alone for far longer than 13 seconds to accept his party’s nomination and make the case to the American people that he deserves to take the helm of our great nation.

Will this address be Biden’s moment of vindication as the nominee, removing all doubt that he is ready and up to the task? Or will it prove his most spectacular and public undoing?

The elder statesman’s gaffes and glitches on the Campaign Trail that Wasn’t have been staple re-runs in past months. A super-cut of them has been making rounds online in recent days. These election amuse-bouches have accompanied the all-you-care-to-eat dumpster fire buffet offerings of pandemic, protests, and violent riots that our televisual and digital master chefs have kept hot and fresh.

Those catastrophic attacks on our country, made daily by the Left in their rolling bid for regime change, are the real story of the election. The Democrats want us to think that giving them complete control is the only way to stop their frustrated fringe tearing the country apart. But Joe Biden—unlike, say, Kamala Harris—is palpably unfit to enforce this protection racket.

Biden’s deterioration is sad to watch. He has trouble stringing together basic thoughts and sentences, wildly distorts facts and figures, and often looks lost.

Increasingly, it seems that his camp keeps him tucked away. News outlets and pundits all of a sudden don’t see the need for the candidate to take on the sitting president in head-to-head debate. How convenient.

Anyone with eyes can see that Joe Biden cannot meet the cognitive demands of the presidency. Any occasion when Biden has to speak for an extended period of time, alone, and without the failsafe send-to-commercial button risks laying bare this fact. If the people realize how out of it he is, they are likely to connect the dots: a doddering Joe will do nothing but cave to the woke mob and its identity politics puppet masters. Rather than letting up on the agitation, they will give it the full force of law. Bill Clinton’s 1991 promise to “end welfare as we know it” has given way to a new vow—to end America as we know it.

The Man Behind the Curtain

The Democrats are desperate to deny the truth about Biden. “He will restore our moral compass by confronting our challenges,” former Representative Stacey Abrams assured us, beaming in from Georgia to announce how the Peach State’s delegates voted. If Joe Biden’s inability to tell New Hampshire from Vermont or his sister from his wife is anything to go by, he is not the navigator America needs to help plot a course through the uncharted waters of the second—and, thus far, perilously choppy—decade of the millennium.

Let’s not let ourselves be kidded. The man is 77 years old. He is in obvious, rapid, and accelerating cognitive decline. Does even Biden himself believe he is capable of governing effectively? Are sheer determination, the will to power, and the fact that he’s within spitting distance of the greatest prize in American politics keeping him going?

Or is this shell of a political climber—a former Vice President with 36 years in the Senate and two previous runs at the Oval—acknowledging that his third attempt to summit the electoral Everest will be his last? Is he willing, as they say, to die on that mountain?

The drama of Joe Biden is political theater at its most tragic: a hardscrabble kid becomes a lifelong insider only to peter out as an understudy to a careerist and opportunist nearly 20 years his junior.

He’s waited his turn; he’s put in the time. Yet, when his moment comes and the curtain rises, he steps onstage only to find that the orchestra has been replaced by a webcam, the public is distracted by plague and cold civil war, and he can’t remember his lines.

The End Game

How did the Left get here? Biden’s age, race, gender, and experience were all leveraged as assets to beef up Obama’s credentials and soften his radical edge. Joe was the perfect foil and complement to America’s first black president.

Now that it’s time for Biden to ascend to the presidency, the fact of his being an old white male with a track record (or baggage) has suddenly become a liability needing to be offset by his perfect foil and complement: Harris, a suave first-term senator with a radical edge and aspiring first woman president. It is sickeningly clear that Biden’s own party intends to ride him like a mule and discard him once he’s served his purpose. At which point Kamala—transitioning seamlessly from top California cop to federal thought policewoman—will impose woke rule on every level of Americans’ public and private life.

Harris is the incarnation of the Left’s fantasy presidential candidate: A chimerical, neoliberal Überfrau with the looks, intonation, and woke corporatist ethos needed to unite every faction of the Democratic party and carry to term the dream of an intersectional utopia—all with saccharine, politically correct panache. What? Their own voters soundly rejected that package, handing more delegates to Tulsi Gabbard? No matter. The Democratic Party isn’t a democracy. Harris-Biden 2020!

The wager is simple: a large swathe of the American public are naïfs who can be duped into believing that a vote for Biden will put them on the yellow brick road back to the Oz of ‘normalcy’—and not the sendero luminoso toward Caudilla Kamala and ever more ruinous California-style progress: more arbitrary rights and abortion for all, less religious freedom, no school choice, higher taxes, mandatory vaccinations for COVID and bigotry, and enthusiastic participation in the goose-stepping spectacle of neo-Marxist corporatism in America.

Perhaps the bet will pay off. Given the exhaustion Americans are feeling over pandemic lockdowns of dubious effectiveness, smashingly successful mostly-peaceful riots, low-level anarchy imported to most major cities by the dregs of society that make up Antifa shock troops, and the ceaseless, demented chirping coming from cultural jihadists, deep statists, and Never Trumpers, maybe the average American will grit their teeth, put their faith in the pendulum swing of American politics, and pray that mailing in a ballot for Joe will mean an end to the madness. The other side can’t do any worse than this, right?

The biggest hurdle the Dems will have to clear to make this con a reality and seize the presidency will be convincing Americans that Biden is in fact in control of his faculties and will keep his draconian heir—who endorses lockdowns and government overreach, quietly takes great pleasure in the riots, and is herself a distinguished scold—off the throne.

The key to all this will be keeping the nominee hidden away in his basement—yes, to protect him in his old age from the virus, but also (shhh!) to try to make absolutely sure it doesn’t become absolutely obvious that Joe Biden is no more than a puppet.

Yet, try as they may to hide Uncle Joe forever, this attempted revolution will indeed be televised.

On the final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Joe Biden will do his utmost to read the teleprompter in front of him accurately, accept the Democratic nomination, and speak about his vision for uniting America and moving us “forward out of constant chaos and crisis” without further emphasizing the reality of his dire neurological condition.

But even if things go off without incident, it’s still a long road to November.

And as the pages fly off the calendar and we stumble towards the end of the zigzagging trail we’ve been on since November four years ago—regardless of whether Biden shows his face or tries to pull a disappearing act—the American people will hopefully see the Biden-Harris ticket and the Democrat plan for what it is: a bait-and-switch.