By CHRISTOHER MANION
Five years ago this week, Vice-President Joe Biden could have made a graceful exit from public life as the Obama-Biden administration drifted quietly into history.
He didn’t, and today, one year into his presidency, his increasingly ungraceful performance bears all the marks of a bitter failure.
This has caused a historic drop in Biden’s polls, prompting many Republicans to indulge in prognostications that are typical of even-numbered years in the U.S. election cycle.
They cheer as over two dozen Democrat members of the House of Representatives announced their retirements, with more coming every week. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy talks about what he’ll do as Speaker a year from now — whom he will appoint to chair key committees, what rogue Republicans he will remove. On a gambling site based in Las Vegas, the odds favor Republican victories in the House and the Senate in November.
So all we have to do is wait out the storm, and fix everything in 2023?
Two considerations come to mind.
First, between now and November, the Left has a wide range of options that they can use to prevent Republican victories next fall. And second, whoever wins, the unelected Left — and their number is legion — holds most of the high cards with regard to exacerbating the suffering that is now being experienced by the majority of Americans.
Joe Biden isn’t helping. Last week in Atlanta, he branded Americans who oppose his federal takeover of state and local elections as “racists.” This past Tuesday, he doubled down: His opposition is “Jim Crow 2.0, [which] is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s about making it harder to vote, who gets to count the vote, and whether your vote counts at all.”
To overcome this “insidious” effort, Biden needs the Senate to change the rules and terminate the tradition of “extended debate” known as the “filibuster,” a practice which began two centuries ago (and which Joe Biden often defended in his days as a senator).
When the Senate voted on Wednesday night not to discard to practice, Joe the “uniter” became a divider: Those senators supporting the filibuster were all, well, “Jim Crows.”
Biden’s calumny that half of the country is racist goes far beyond the realm of semantics. Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, has declared that the greatest terrorist threat facing America is “white supremacy.” He has enlisted the FBI to pursue those white “terrorists,” and Biden has just told Garland who they are:
They’re a couple of hundred million American citizens.
After all, if you oppose Joe’s takeover, you oppose “democracy,” and you’re a “racist” to boot. That makes tens of millions of Americans potential terrorists whose activism can easily be designated as “sedition” deserving of a federal criminal investigation.
A Crass Invitation To Chaos
“The best defense is a good offense, “said Knute Rockne. And Biden’s disasters are so indefensible that he refuses to discuss them. This week he held only his second solo press conference, a historic low. His performance was incoherent, embarrassing, and dismaying to Americans who are watching helplessly as Russia menaces the Ukraine, Communist China targets Taiwan, two million illegals cross the border with thousands more on their way . . . the list is endless: soaring inflation, weakened supply chains, the pandemic, school unions, shuttered classrooms. . . .
Without a defense, Joe Biden’s spiteful offensive opens the door to a vicious national mood fed by divisive epithets. His political goal is simple: Derail the GOP juggernaut that is on track to win both houses of Congress in November. The cultural consequences, however, are dire and long-lasting.
We recall how then-Bishop Wilton Gregory celebrated the 2008 victory of Obama and Biden as “a sign that in the United States the problem of racial discrimination has been overcome.” Unfortunately, that’s not what Obama had in mind. He intended to divide the country even more.
Any honest notion that Joe Biden campaigned as a “uniter” two years ago would have required that he renounce the reverse-racism stoked by Obama. But no dice.
Why not? We recall again the wisdom of Knute Rockne: “You don’t spit on a man’s head if you’re standing on his shoulders.” Joe is standing on Obama’s shoulders (and his administration features numerous key Obamanites).
Without Obama, Joe would be relaxing in his Delaware basement. So he goes back to the sewer.
The result is unlovely. Once upon a time, if you criticized a minority, you might be called a “racist.” A flagrant falsehood, but instead of rectifying the lie, Joe Biden perpetuates and intensifies it.
Today, if you oppose Biden’s election takeover, you’re a racist white terrorist extremist supremacist, and Merrick Garland’s message is clear: If you don’t behave, his Gestapo network is now established nationwide to “keep you safe.”
So much for civil discourse in the public square. Whether it’s accidental or intended, the result is the same. Intelligent conversation goes underground. Intimidation rules.
Death By A Thousand ’Crats
The Deep State has thousands of bureaus, offices, regulators, and lawyers who enforce literally millions of rules. While Joe Biden makes up new ones — his edicts on vaccinations alone have ravaged entire sectors of the economy — there are plenty of old ones that the bureaucracy can wield against “opponents of democracy.”
Obama’s HHS Mandate caused countless individuals and organizations to spend hundreds of millions defending their religious freedom in court — money they could otherwise have dedicated to good works (or, ahem….to opposing Obama).
Obama’s Department of Justice refused to prosecute IRS regulator Lois Lerner for malfeasance when she deliberately and illegally stalled over a hundred conservative organizations from operating until after Obama’s 2012 victory. Instead, Justice investigators cleared her and praised her as a “hero.”
Lerner was allowed to retire with full benefits. When over a hundred organizations sued, they won: After dragging its feet for years, the IRS was ordered in Federal Court to pay them $3.5 million for Lerner’s criminal malfeasance.
Of course, that $3.5 million was paid by the taxpayer, not Lerner.
A reminder: Jesus and Socrates both warned us: Perfect justice comes, but only in the next life.
The Culture Can
Cancel You Too
Mid-level bureaucrats can easily wield the “death of a thousand cuts” that are usually almost imperceptible. But that power is not reserved solely for government officials. A college professor can give a conservative student taking a class in her major a demeaning grade that guarantees she will not get into a top-flight law school.
Even tenured professors, who historically have been as impossible to fire as federal government workers, find themselves ostracized or worse for espousing the simplest of truths.
That sad reality has prompted a pioneering number of senior professors, fed up with the “ThoughtCrime” atmosphere in today’s academe, to leave their tenured positions and found the promising new “University of Austin” in the heart of the liberal capital of Texas.
But not all professors and students can enjoy such independence. For several years in the early 2000s, I volunteered to record the presentations given by various academics at an annual meeting of sane, which is to say, “conservative,” academics. The topics ranged across the fields of primarily liberal arts and cultural subject fields.
I was startled, a couple of years ago, to receive a frantic message from one of the participants at a college that many readers would recognize as a prominent liberal arts institution. He reminded me of his presentation given some years before. “Please,” he wrote, “do not distribute or share my remarks. I’m a candidate for tenure here, and in this atmosphere that presentation would be used to turn me down for sure.”
The Left will never quit. Not in November, not in 2024, never. The City of Man is ruled by Satan.
Plan accordingly.
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