Double Double Toil And Trouble - Lady Jill And Kamala, A Witches' Coven To Reelect The President

Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most famous villains.  No one - not even Tamora, Dionyza, or Goneril and Regan - can match her vicious ambition. 'What are you waiting for', she shouts at her husband.  It is time to kill the king. 

Yet Macbeth demurs.  He has none of his Lady's resolve and her unmatched ferocity.  She is a fearsome vixen, a harridan, a woman with no compunction, hesitation, or doubt.

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. 

Lady Macbeth could be the fourth weird sister of the coven of  witches who meet the Thane of Cawdor and prophesy the murder of Banquo and the King and Macbeth's accession to the throne

Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake; / Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog, / Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, / Lizard's leg and owlet's wing, / For a charm of powerful trouble, / Like a hell-broth boil and bubble 

 

All of which brings us to  Kamala Harris who along with the President's wife, Jill, will stop at nothing to keep the President alive, upright, and running for re-election.  Double double toil and trouble Kamala says as she and Jill stir their witches brew, and prophesy Biden's succession, his immediate fall, Kamala's rise to power, and Jill's sinecure in the White House. 

'It will take that', said an aide to the President when someone reminded him of Shakespeare's weird sisters and their unholy brew. The idea of Kamala Harris as the chief witch in the coven was not farfetched at all.  She need only assure Biden’s return to the White House, for it would only be a matter of months for the President to drift irretrievably into a doughy future.  She, demonstrating public concern, but with Lady Macbeth's resolute, unholy ambition would see to it that the President be declared unfit for office and removed. 

Finally she will be in her rightful place, the President of the United States, a black woman of intelligence, intrigue, and limitless resources - a woman of power and authority.  She will have the fiery will of Margaret Thatcher, the canniness of Indira Gandhi, and the fierce courage of Golda Meier and will stand astride the world like a Colossus. She will be supreme, unstoppable, and legendary. 

The aide was worried because The First Lady joined the Vice President in stirring the witches brew.  With a failing, inconsequential, and lost President, she could be more powerful than Nancy Reagan, a first lady whom everyone knew ran affairs in the Oval Office.  She, after she comfortably seated Joe in his comfortable rocker with a cup of chamomile tea, would take over the affairs of state.  She would no longer be ridiculed as Doctor Biden, PhD, doctor of letters from a third rate school in a fourth rate discipline.  She would do the ridiculing of those who demeaned and isolated her husband.  She would show them. 

The two witches would battle - Lady Jill to keep her husband in office, and Kamala to send him packing. A cat fight of epic proportions.

The men in the White House, veterans of the worst that the Capitol, Foggy Bottom, and the Presidency could offer, were afraid of the vixens hovering around the President.  Harris might be rambling, weird, and incomprehensible when she spoke, but Lady Macbeth was not famous for her brains or elocution either. It took no intelligence to unman her husband and assure the crown; and so it was with the Vice President and her coven sister Jill. 

The President's re-election would be a good thing, keeping advisors and aides in their jobs and padding their resumes; but it would be a bad thing because of the certainty of a Harris presidency.  That woman would certainly trash the lot of them, and replace them with a vixenish cabal of her own. 

'Remember how she ended up', reminded one aide referring to Lady Macbeth who went mad with guilt and kept washing imagined blood off her hands.  'Our Lady Macbeth is not exactly a Richard III', meaning of course that for all her vile ambition she had nothing of Richard's brilliance.

Actually they all forgot King Lear as the most apt metaphor for the Biden situation.  Lear was an old, foundering, and increasingly feeble king given to fantasy and illusion.  He was an easy mark for his daughters Goneril and Regan who, like Lady Macbeth and Kamala Harris want the demented old man out of the way. 

You see how full of changes his age is. The observation we have made of it hath not been little. He always loved our sister most, and with what poor judgment he hath now cast her off appears too grossly.... 

The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash; then we must look to receive from his age, not alone the imperfections of a long-ingrafted condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them 

 

Which is why the moves of Democratic Party insiders in Congress and their media shills to assure his withdrawal from the presidential race before it was too late had to be encouraged.  At least the Buttigieg would stay the course without the incendiary and self-serving intrigues of the Vice President.  No bright light himself, the Buttigieg would at least increase the chances of Democratic victory and at least four years of moderate progressivism. 

Who knows? Right now the White House is as gaudy as a Shakespearean tragedy - or rather a Renaissance melodrama; and perhaps it is a good thing that President has no clue what's going on.  If there's any upside to dementia, it's that.  Poor Joe's fate will be decided while he dreams of his mother and playing in the sand at Rehoboth Beach.