We have a golem in the Oval Office

Watching Joe Biden’s stunningly inept political behavior, I am reminded of the Jewish legend of the golem. According to one version of the story, a famed late 16th-century Prague rabbi, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, decided to create a humanoid that would be of assistance to his harassed Jewish community. The rabbi’s handiwork, the golem, was made of clay and mud taken from a local river. His creator infused him with life and mobility by reciting various incantations over the material he collected. The golem was produced initially to protect Prague’s Jews from their enemies, but the rabbi soon learned that it could respond to a wide range of commands.

Unfortunately, the rabbi’s creation had no real intelligence and just mechanically went on doing whatever it was programmed to perform. We might recognize how an adaptation of this Jewish legend provides the storyline for Mary Shelley’s portrait of Frankenstein. The monster’s creators in both accounts conjures into existence a humanoid, but then learns that his handiwork can be dangerous because of its lack of human feelings and reasoning powers.

Biden the humanoid can’t turn off his repetitious behavior because no one has reprogrammed him.

In my view, the same narrative relates to Biden, who just can’t be deprogrammed from what he began doing from the time he entered his present office. Both his handlers and the corporate press pushed him toward the woke left, which is the constituency he now serves, come hell or high water. But that mechanical obedience does have drawbacks. Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer has expressed amazement that Biden continues to “govern to the far left to his detriment.”

His catering to embattled feminists, who remain fixated on the goal of nationwide unqualified abortion rights, did help his party win elections following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. But why does Biden insist on other positions that are likely to hurt him in this year’s presidential race — e.g., encouraging a massive invasion of the country by over 10 million illegal aliens, including drug traffickers, career criminals, and terrorists? Why hasn’t the president learned the obvious: that his deliberate open-borders policy may doom his chances for re-election?

And why is Biden pushing Green New Deal policies that burden the economy and will drive away voters who believe that Biden has been bad on bread-and-butter issues?

Finally, why did Biden needlessly offend American Christians by playing up International Day of Transgender Visibility on Easter this year? Adding injury to insult, Biden forbade the placing of religious symbols on the eggs that were rolled by children of National Guardsmen on the White House lawn on Easter Monday. Meanwhile Biden is planning an executive order that forbids a ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports programs. It’s hard to think of a move that is more likely to anger parents with daughters participating in athletic competitions.

Allow me to note that up until a few weeks ago, I assumed Biden could still win the presidential race with the usual Democratic-media establishment bag of electoral tricks. There would be lots of questionably “harvested” write-in votes, hosts of Harvard-educated lawyers protecting Democratic voting procedures, and perpetually indignant suburban women, voting on the basis of their belief that Donald Trump, the Hitlerian orange monster, would take away their “reproductive freedom.” I still think all those forces, plus media-manufactured crises, will be at work in the November election.

But what may tip the scale decisively against Biden is his uncontrollable Golem-like demeanor. This humanoid can’t reason about the course of action he’s on, and he won’t reverse course no matter how imbecilic his actions seem to everyone but the most engaged of the woke left.

It is hard not to notice that Biden’s politics have always shown the same dismally mechanical character. He spent almost his entire political career seconding what other congressional Democrats were doing. Once he became president, he did what his handlers told him to do and what the media, which downplayed his gaffes and cognitive vacuity, expected of their client. During Biden’s half-century career, he has taken strikingly divergent positions, for example on race issues, crime, and immigration, but he took those stands at different times in accordance with the instructions of others.

Biden must have grasped what was expected of him from that day forward when U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) handed him the presidential nomination in 2020. Clyburn elevated Biden to the honor of being the preferred candidate for black Democrats nationwide. But this came at a price that Biden never stops paying. Thus, he continues to monotonously denounce white racism while calling for more government favors for black people — that is to say, for their noisiest spokespeople.

Our president has turned his role here into, among other annoyances, the imposition of diversity directives for all federal agencies, beginning in June 2021. Unfortunately, Biden the humanoid can’t turn off his repetitious behavior because no one has reprogrammed him, and given his mental decrepitude, such a reset may no longer be possible.