Biden's administration was circling the drain when, suddenly, like a drowning man thrown a life buoy, Biden got to play the heroic commander-in-chief trying to save the world from Russian aggression.  As always, though, Biden came across as more stupid than statesmanlike.  Along with insisting that he could pinpoint Russian aggression to the minute (no, he couldn't), Biden frightened Ukraine and the members of NATO with his hawkishness.  He then sent the moronic Kamala Harris to make things better at the Ukraine border.  None of this seemed real...and maybe it wasn't.

Sundance, who writes at Conservative Treehouse, questions the weird diplomatic dance we're witnessing.  Two of his posts are worth reading.  Even if you don't agree with his take, they're still thought-provoking.

In the first post, Sundance writes that Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain, was facing a terrible situation: inflation is soaring, energy prices are soaring even more, our southern border is gone, and Biden failed to cure COVID.  His polls are in free fall.  Klain needed misdirection in the form of a Biden success, even if only a fake one, to distract from Biden's endless, and real, failures.  First, say Biden isn't responsible for all the bad things:

Within the book of instructions for the ideological Chicago crew (Alinsky peeps), there are chapters on how to create off-ramps to cloud their agenda. If they need a bigger cloud, they create a bigger crisis. The crisis then becomes the cover, the justification to explain the outcomes of their agenda.

In the latest example, the White House is shifting blame for the collapsing economy, surging oil prices, massive gas price increases and overall U.S. inflation.

The manufactured crisis in Ukraine then takes on a geopolitical angle and a domestic angle.  The prior rate of inflation is now being blamed on Russia-Ukraine.

The media, of course, are helping.  And why shouldn't they?  Cries of "Russia, Russia, Russia" kept them afloat for the four years of Trump's presidency, and it's reasonable to believe that those cries will rally the base once more.

Image: Biden by Andrea Widburg.

Having shifted the blame for everything onto Russia, Biden gets to step into the limelight and make the world wonderful and safe again.  The news Sunday was that France had brokered a meeting between Biden and Putin, at which Biden gets to play the all-powerful peacemaker.  Sundance believes this will be the dénouement to the little play we've been witnessing:

Everything about the Russia invasion of Ukraine has to be increasingly imminent, horrible and loomingly catastrophic for the planet, so that when it doesn't happen the glorious victory for Dear Leader Biden can be proclaimed and amplified from the mountaintops.

Russia has absolutely no plan to invade Ukraine and doesn't even have a role in this theatrical production from the White House.

The way the game is played; and believe me, everything about this is a game; they must take the manufactured crisis to the brink of thermonuclear war, so that Joe Biden can save the world and be seen as this legendary diplomat.

In the annals of U.S. history, there has never been such an important summit.  The nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Ron Klain wants in this mid-term election year, is dependent on magnanimous and strategic Biden overcoming all geopolitical odds to save the world.

This all strikes me as eminently believable.  There is no reason for the U.S. to get its knickers in a twist about what happens "over there."  Obama already paved the way for Putin back in 2014 when he blustered a little bit but then gave the Crimea to Putin.  America has no vested interests in the region.  Moreover, thanks to the USSR having long practiced in Eastern Ukraine the same replacement policy that Biden is visiting on America with his open southern border, large swaths of Ukraine have an entirely Russian allegiance.

Significantly, Biden, for all his bluster, has done nothing to stop Putin.  Both secretary of state Blinken and Kamala Harris twisted themselves into pretzels to avoid acknowledging that the Biden administration's threats of severe sanctions are meaningless because the administration promises to impose them only after what it claims is a certain invasion.  If the invasion is certain, as the administration insists, ex post facto sanctions won't stop it.

Additionally, Biden has already given the go-ahead to Putin to have a pipeline to Europe while blocking an Israeli one that would have given Europe an energy alternative.  (The Israeli pipeline would also have forced both Europe and the Muslim nations to make peace with, or at least stop attacking, a major energy supplier.)

Maybe there'll be a war; maybe there won't.  But the one thing we can be sure of is that everything we're seeing now is theater meant to distract us from Biden's failures and to provide Biden with an opportunity to appear effective and meaningful.