Is Biden Obama's Puppet?

I ran into this take on Barack Obama, or maybe Obama and Biden, at Gateway Pundit:

I’ve always had Obama’s number. I understand what makes him tick. I understand his goals.

First, let’s get the “gay issue” out of the way. I’ve reported on both my radio and TV shows for 15 years that my wealthy, connected friends in Chicago have always said, “Obama frequented gay bathhouses and gay clubs. Everyone in the know, knows Obama is gay.”

Now that we’ve heard from Obama’s biographer that Obama wrote about his daily gay fantasies, I think it’s pretty clear my Chicago pals were right. Tucker is onto something!

I've got to say that I'd been off Gateway Pundit since Sidney Powell released the kraken or whatever she did, but mainstream Conservative Inc has kept extending spring break into summer vacation and now an extended Labor Day, and only sites like Gateway Pundit have been fun to visit. The writer, Wayne Allyn Root, moves on to the meat:

But all of this is small potatoes. This is not the big story.

Why does any of this matter now? Because Joe Biden is a brain-dead puppet. This is the third term of Obama. The proof is we are all reliving the nightmare Obama economy. Great for Wall Street and billion-dollar multi-national corporations. But a disaster for the American middle class and Main Street.

. . . I’ve had Obama pegged from the first day. Obama is the ultimate “Manchurian Candidate.” Gay is unimportant. What matters is he was groomed to be president by the Deep State and communist, fascist, globalist enemies of the United States. What matters is Obama is a radical Marxist tyrant carrying out the destruction of America.

. . . Now he’s working behind the scenes to finish the job. He is the man who ordered the spying on Trump. The framing of Trump.

I'll go for Joe as a brain-dead puppet, but I don't think Obama is pulling the strings. Just for starters, for Obama to pull Joe's strings would be a hellacious amount of work, and I don't think Obama wants to work that hard. When Obama left the White House, I had an inescapable sense he said, "I'm done", and he was perfectly happy to retire into high society. The biggest Obama headline in recent memory has been the drowning of his longtime personal chef. This man is gay. He is not a Soviet plant.

Second, I've been studying Joe since 2020, and the information that's slowly trickled out about him substantiates my surmise: he seriously believes he's the smartest guy ever. Not just the smartest guy in the room, he's the smartest guy ever. After all, he's Caesar. The most we've heard specifically about the Obama-Biden relationship is this:

Former president Barack Obama, at a private lunch with President Biden earlier this summer, voiced concern about Donald Trump’s political strengths — including an intensely loyal following, a Trump-friendly conservative media ecosystem and a polarized country — underlining his worry that Trump could be a more formidable candidate than many Democrats realize.

At the lunch, held in late June at the White House residence, Obama promised to do all he could to help the president get reelected, according to two people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversation.

The story is pretty clearly from the Obama camp, including Obama's promise to do "all he could" to help Joe, but of course, now Barack's got to hire a new personal chef, so his ability to help Joe out might be more limited. And notice the need for tact in handling Joe:

During their lunch, Obama made it clear his concerns were not about Biden’s political abilities, but rather a recognition of Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party, according to the people.

The real Joe, as we've come to understand, is vain, prickly, short-tempered, and vindictive. You do not cross Caesar. Even Barack Obama has to be careful about how to bring things up with Joe. Whatever Joe's handlers tell him to do, he resents them, and as I've noted several times, he'll deliberately turn the wrong way when he leaves the stage or deliberately ignore his briefing notes just to show them who's Caesar.

On one hand, we've heard occasional hints of what Obama really thought about Joe as vice president, especially in this pre-2020 election story at Politico:

[M]any senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.

. . . Former FBI Director James Comey recalled in his book that “Obama would have a series of exchanges heading a conversation very clearly and crisply in Direction A. Then, at some point, Biden would jump in with, ‘Can I ask something, Mr. President?’”

Comey continued: “Obama would politely agree, but something in his expression suggested he knew full well that for the next five or 10 minutes we would all be heading in Direction Z. After listening and patiently waiting, President Obama would then bring the conversation back on course.”

And of course, there was Obama's well-known caution, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up.” For anyone to try to keep Joe on the straight and narrow would be a fool's errand, and we've got to give Obama credit for being smart.

But this brings us to a different, but related set of questions: Joe is certainly a puppet, although the brain-dead part is partly an act. But if my hypothesis about Obama is true, and Obama doesn't want to work that hard to puil Joe's strings even if he could, then who in fact is the puppeteer? We can probably go back to Joe as vice president to get some insight.

As vice president, we're beginning to learn, Joe was bought and paid for at retail. A Ukrainian oligarch wants favors, he antes up, and he gets them -- that's the most clear-cut case. As best we can tell, there are also Kazakh, Chinese, Romanian, and whoever else figures in the shadows, and Hunter's unofficial presence on Air Force Two's foreign flights, as well as the e-mail aliases, suggest there were similar deals, all apparently retail, specific favors in specific countries at a specific price.

Nobody was pulling Joe's strings in an overall scheme, as far as I can see. Hunter was executing Joe's plan for Joe's enrichment, as part of which some customers got to pull specific strings for a specific price. But here's another of the related questions: how much did Barack Obama know about this? How much did he tolerate as Joe's tacit price to stay on board as number two?

And here we have a third question, is this still going on? Wayne Allyn Root in the Gateway Pundit piece postulates that someone is pulling Joe's strings, and that someone is pulling them now. He thinks it's Obama. and I disagree. But if it isn't Obama, who is it? This piece at Red State asks the same questions:

I don't think the Obamas are pulling any strings; they seem to be enjoying their relaxed post-presidency years too much, with Barack raking in huge speaking fees in between relaxing at one of their many luxurious homes. Why, with all that, would you want to be bothered with propping up old Joe Biden, especially since there seems to be little love lost between current and former President?

It comes to something like my own conclusions:

Jill Biden is clearly the most likely candidate. Why? The Biden Administration's clear and present ineptitude. "Dr." Biden has never shown any particular competence, even in her supposedly chosen field. That explains volumes about this Dunning-Kruger presidency; the person who is supposed to be in charge doesn't know what's going on, and the person who is actually in charge doesn't know what she's doing.

She's oult for her own aggrandizement; she's certainly not a Soviet plant, nor a Chinese one, although if, as some might suspect, Zelensky has something on Joe, she's going to keep Zelensky happy just to preserve her own perks and lifestyle. But this is strictly a retail operation, there's no grand scheme afoot.