Dr. Now in TLC’s “My 600-Pound Life” is confronted with morbidly obese patients. The show reveals the gross flaws of human nature when people are advised to stop destroying themselves in gluttony. They lie, cheat – sneak pizza into their hospital room – and wallow in atrocious self-pity. Well, the first two of those behaviors were on full display last night before a joint session of Congress by President Biden, with the addition of demagoguery and an LSD-inspired disconnect from reality. To be sure, Biden isn’t the doctor; he’s the troubled patient.
And this on the heels of President Trump’s previous 4-year litany of “best ever”. He exaggerated. Biden out-and-out mangled the truth, probably intentionally lied, and presented all the integrity of a used car salesman. He out-Trumped Trump, and every other politician since Tammany Hall.
Let’s face it, last night’s spiel was a “Welcome America to Your New Soviet Future”. Where to start? Start where he started. He shamelessly claimed credit for the good news on the virus. The guy’s been above room temperature while in office for only 100 days, and he struts around taking credit for other people’s accomplishments. The vaccine came out of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed; the distribution and jabs began under the orange man; and the decline in the death rate began before a pandemic-mutilated election put Biden in the oval office. Of course, the contributions of the man from Mira Lago were erased from history. Welcome to Biden’s Bizzarro world.
Biden’s unwitting comic routine continued under the ages-old political tactic of distorting a crisis to stampede the public into the Leviathan. We should have known that we’re in trouble when “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” came off his lips. Funny thing that “worst economic crisis”: it was an overt government act to euthanize society in response to the virus. More accurately, it was a government-induced coma, and one that blue state governors want to extend beyond the horizon. Let’s get this straight: they engineer a deadening of life; work to continue the suffocation; and then exploit these outcomes to bring the Soviet’s Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) to America. The hutzpah is off the charts.
Speaking of Gosplan, Biden’s 26-minute prattle was Soviet central planning galore. He plans to flood the country with tidal waves of fiat, paper money – 4 trillions of it on top of his already-passed 2 trillion – for Democratic Party constituencies and hangers-on. He wants to buy off blue-collars with coerced unionization for everybody as he works to destroy their jobs in order to pander to Environmentalism’s zealots among aloof, semi-literate white-collars and uber-wealthy. Oh, he says, not to worry. The working stiffs will be drafted as laboring foot soldiers in the Great Leader’s greenie transformation of all of life, which is reminiscent of Stalin’s Industrialization campaign of the 1930’s, a scheme that had the unhappy consequences of massive official maldistribution of resources and stunning brutality: 10 million starvation deaths in the Ukraine (the Holodomor), ill-suited and untrained peasants herded into factories and new cities, and the production of a lot of crap. Wild imaginations of the powerful can kill you and your livelihoods.
The suicide pill of a $15 minimum wage was childishly asserted. Who’ll be forced to take it? The pill will be swallowed by the hundreds of thousands who’ll lose their jobs as employers shed folks who can’t produce $15 worth of product. It’ll be a boon to automation . . . as if we need any more reasons to hand over wads of cash to techie lefties.
Be warned, the rest of this account depicts Biden’s and the entire Dem firmament’s rampant abuse of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Playing loose with the language is a hallmark of the blinkered ambitious. It was on full display last night. Take the word “infrastructure”. If you thought that it meant roads, bridges, water projects, the grid, oh how you misjudged the creative duplicity of ambitious people with too much power. “Infrastructure” means The Squad-economy. Say goodbye to your fuel-efficient sedan; say hello to a $50,000 electric cart, made affordable by making somebody else share the cost without their consent. Say goodbye to affordable and consistently available energy; say hello to blackouts, vast stretches of the landscape blanketed in solar panel plantations and artificial forests of huge steel-towered propellers, and utility bills that’ll force you into a hippie lifestyle. Greenie energy isn’t cheap energy, never has been.
“Clean energy” is another one of those abortions to clear thinking. Cut the crap; it’s code for the destruction of reliable energy – “managed decline” (?) – and its replacement with the kind that’ll be foisted on us after upending our entire way of life at humongous cost to us. See, our politicians only produce words, words that satisfy their unhinged imaginations but make a mockery of good sense.
Here’s more words. All this talk about the “21st century economy” isn’t the “economy of the future”. It’s the economy of the whimsical imaginations of people who are divorced from the mundane task of making and selling stuff in the real world, of people who live a Beltway existence, have the lifetime sinecure of a safe district, and a steady six-figure paycheck. Their whimsies become our nightmares.
Biden was not finished making a shambles of the Oxford Dictionary. He introduced “The American Families Plan” which has little to do with families, and more to do with padding the bank account of the NEA. The centerpiece turns “free” K-12 into “free” pre-K-to-senior thesis. 13 years at taxpayer expense quickly became 17, as if the “21st century economy” requires more sociology and grievance/identity majors. Once they get done with your child’s schooling, your kid will be ready for a job behind a Starbucks counter and primed to head to Portland in a black hood, ready for the ongoing fight against “white privilege”.
As for “free”, nothing is “free”. We all know that, or do we? Don’t expect four more years in an ideological hothouse to enlighten the kids. “Free” is another one of those words to go through the etymological shredder.
The word “free” is frequently attached to “investment” in the steel trap of Biden’s mind. “Investment” is a nicer word for “spending”. Mind you, he’s not talking about “investment” to defend us and our way of life with a 350-ship navy. He’s talking about pumping money into more social programs. “Investment” actually means an expense in the reasonable hope of a profit. What is the reasonable result from many of the earlier “investment” boondoggles? Remember FDR’s New Deal that turned a market correction into a decade-long castration of national wealth and personal fortunes? Remember urban renewal? Remember AFDC? Remember public housing, Section 8? Remember the additional trillions pumped into public education over the past three decades with embarrassing results? Yes, remember Head Start? It’s proof that entrenched lefties still try to put lipstick on that pig. If you want a glimpse into Biden’s future for us, look at California.
He’s not done with saddling us and future generations with more debt. He plans to lard up the bill with more “free” (meaning somebody else pays) stuff: day care, family leave, etc. The only ray of light is the child tax credit which gives working families a voucher, in essence, to escape his Education Department’s and DOJ Civil Rights commissars. It might be worth Biden’s gift for parents to have the option of getting their kids out of Biden’s public schools, the ones that are riddled with the mayhem of “restorative justice” discipline, school boards under the thumb of the teacher unions and the mentally bankrupt Schools of Education, and the racist indoctrination of critical race theory and other mind-numbing ideologies. How long will it be before Biden discovers that he unleashed a form of choice that he hates: school choice? Parents, take the checks before the teachers’ unions wake up and put the kibosh to it.
The flood gates for more government are further thrown open when the word “right” is promiscuously tossed around as Biden did by attaching it to healthcare. If something is declared a “right”, then it must be guaranteed, guaranteed equally to all. The 13th Amendment prohibits enslaving providers to give it up, but no such protection applies to the taxpayer. A “right” in this context means that taxpayers, now and in the future, must pony up.
Just think about it: how can a product or service, scarce by definition, be guaranteed to everyone in the amount that they demand? Scarcity means a limit to the number of doctors and nurses, medical facilities, money for same, equipment and supplies, and the rest of the supply chain inputs. To pretend it to be a “right” – and that’s all it is, a pretension – is to eventually reach the reality of resources being sucked away from the other necessary components of life. You’ve got healthcare, but the cost of housing, food, and heating goes through the roof. In the end, your healthcare will be limited by quality and some form of rationing. That’s the real world, but it’s not where we find the minds of the donkey party and our president at the dais last night.
How will the giver-in-chief pay for these additional trillions and trillions? “Pay” goes into the same meat grinder of meaning with the rest of the relevant vocabulary. It’s a flight of fancy away from the real capital flight. You see, if he succeeds in raising your employer’s taxes, he or she adjusts. Some flee the jaws of Biden’s IRS, and they take a few jobs with them, maybe yours. In the end, a hike in taxes always disappoints. The money coming in doesn’t match the lofty expectations, but the spending certainly continues as before. As for those that head for the tax haven of Ireland, Lizzy Warren (D., Mass.) wants to man the exit points with agents to corral the flight to freedom. Sounds like East German guards at the Berlin Wall.
It’s interesting to note that Biden’s threshold for tax hikes is $400,000. 400,000 bucks encompasses a well-paid techie lefty and places the bar high enough to protect another valuable constituency: dues-paying members of the teachers’ unions, an essential constituency if you running for office with a “D” after your name. Comfortable suburban white-collars can’t be irritated with tax increases at a time when the Dems need their support to replace other lost constituencies. No need in angering a demographic that you rely upon to continue the revolution down the road.
Biden then gets to another one of those tactless monikers: “fair share”. He throws it out there as if he said something profound. He didn’t; he demagogued it. He should know, as does Pelosi’s CBO, the top 20% pay 69% of all federal taxes. What’s “fair share”? A 100%? This is pure malicious demagoguery. It’s either a lie or Biden is absolutely clueless. You choose.
The speech then mashed together two huge self-negations: his fascination for the rigid ideology of climate change and his promise to protect America’s national interests. Tell me, how does that work? He acts to run down the country with massive regulations, taxes, and life-degrading mandates as he promises to put China in a box. The Paris accord, which he demands that we re-enter, exempts China and India from most of its most deleterious edicts while they fully fall on the U.S. It’s a plan to chop off one of the U.S.’s legs in the race with Red China. Strangulation of the domestic economy makes mute the promise to make Red China play fair. Biden is doing to us what the Red Chinese would do if they could.
Is Biden an unwitting Manchurian candidate?
The whole speech was a combination of how-to-be-Argentina and government-by-leftist-junta. Calm, soothing tones are meaningless if you’re rampaging the train of the country off the rails. “Sleepless in Seattle” became “Shameless in DC” last night.
RogerG
