We are in the fourth day of Joe Biden’s ex-presidency, and the motorcade taking him back to his mansion in Delaware shrinks in our rearview mirrors. It can’t disappear quickly enough.
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi has written perhaps the definitive article on Biden’s presidential performance, and I lack talent and insight to write anything better. As Biden shuffles off into the sunset, we should not only remember his performance as he allegedly served as president, but we also should remember (or at least not forget) those that were part of the Big Lie—a collaborative effort of the White House, Democrats in Congress, and, of course, the legacy media.
If there is a word to describe the Biden presidency, it is “incoherent.” Much incoherence came from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but it was more than just an elderly president mumbling and stumbling over words and a sandbag at the Air Force Academy, and tripping over steps leading to Air Force One. There was also extraordinarily bad policy at home and abroad, all the while the White House and the legacy media were insisting that we shouldn’t believe our lying eyes.
(When Gerald Ford was president, the media highlighted his every stumble in order to fit the narrative that Ford was a clumsy oaf. However, when Biden tripped—on many occasions—the media insisted it didn’t happen or made excuses.)
Before stepping into the Memory Lane from Hell, we revisit Biden’s 2024 “State of the Union” speech, which was incoherent enough, but the reaction to it from Congressional Democrats and the legacy media was such that one only can conclude they were in on the con. The video linked here very much speaks for itself. The only shocking thing about it is that no one was shocked.
One cannot watch his SOTU speech and think Biden competent, but there they were—politicians and alleged journalists joining together to repeat the talking points (“fiery,” “fire in the belly,” “on fire”) that seemed to be on every establishment news talk show after Biden stopped mumbling and shuffled off the podium. What followed the speech on the news shows was reminiscent of the news spoofs that used to be standard on “Saturday Night Live,” but these folks were trying to convince us that we didn’t see what we saw.
Build Back What?
During his basement campaign in 2020, Biden ran on the slogan, “Build Back Better,” with its accompanying legislation being the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act, which committed the federal government to more than $4 trillion of new spending. This legislation was the classic example of looking for the opposite result of what was in the legislation’s title. As Connor O’Keeffe wrote on this page:
By flooding the economy with so much new cash, the government was able to hide most of the destruction wrought by the lockdowns. And, because of the Fed’s low rates and heavy-handed interventions, the inescapable economic pain was delayed and exacerbated. But as the Biden administration and Federal Reserve learned in 2022, it couldn’t be delayed forever.
Inflation ravaged the American public. But it was only one part of the economic pain the federal government’s economic interventions have locked in. The artificially-low interest rates led businesses to start unsustainable lines of production that make a recession — or market correction — unavoidable.
He added:
In addition to the government’s Covid spending and monetary policy, the Biden Administration’s many interventions in the energy sector, automotive industry, and healthcare field — among others — have reallocated resources into the production of goods and services that consumers don’t actually want. That locks in even more economic pain.
This administration did nothing good on the economic front. and instead tried to emulate the progressive government of California, which is busy burning down that state while trying to regulate the energy companies out of business. Ironically, the energy industry did well during the Biden years, not because of favorable financial and regulatory policies from Biden, but because of factors beyond the administration’s control.
Yet, Biden also made his views clear with policies ranging from outright threats against oil companies to restricting firms from drilling for new oil and natural gas. The signals were clear: the energy companies needed to stop developing new capital in production of gas and oil because we plan to make that capital worthless in the future.
Despite the trillions of tax dollars the Biden administration tried to direct into new production of electricity, along with a new infrastructure in which electricity replaces fuels for transportation and home and business heating, reality tells a different story from Biden’s happy talk. Writes Jonathan Lesser:
One well-publicized infrastructure failure is public EV charging stations along U.S. highways, for which the Inflation Reduction Act allocated $7.5 billion. That federal largesse has resulted in just eight charging stations being built since the IRA was signed almost two years ago.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has claimed the U.S. will need 500,000 such stations by 2030. To build the remaining 499,992 stations, we will need to build almost 90,000 of them annually — that’s almost 250 daily or more than 10 per hour — for the next five-and-a-half years.
Perhaps sensing the absurdity of this pace of construction, Buttigieg claimed that most people will charge their EVs at home. Maybe, but numerous states, including California and New York, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, have decreed that all heavy trucks, which transport the bulk of our products, including the food we eat, must go electric, too. Thus, under the envisioned EV future, a lack of public charging stations will not be a mere inconvenience for holiday travelers. Indeed, it could be a matter of life and death.
Lesser goes on to explain that implementing the Biden plan would require hundreds of thousands of miles of new cables, new cable towers, and other reconfigurations of the nation’s electric grids. At the present time, only about 500 miles of new lines have been built.
In other words, Biden’s plans were dangerous absurdities, absurd in their sheer dishonesty, and dangerous because people’s survival depends upon the present transportation and fuel set-ups, which Biden tried to destroy. Thus, he created the worst of both worlds. He tried to hamstring the current transportation and electrical power infrastructures while trying to force people to use what is nonexistent.
Build Back Better was little more than central planning coming from his administration’s version of Gosplan, with results to match the “achievements” of economic planning in the former Soviet Union. Though the administration was quick to tout its so-called successes, “Bidenomics” dug our economic hole deeper with massive deficit spending, money printing, and price inflation.
Biden’s Assault on Free Speech and Civil Liberties
When Biden took office, he faced the second year of the covid virus, and he responded by being heavy-handed. Writes Robby Soave:
While health officials had initially suggested that the vaccines would prevent infection—a claim also repeated by Biden himself—it turned out that they offered limited protection in this regard. More Americans died of COVID-19 during Biden’s first year in office than Trump’s last.
How did Biden respond to these problems? By doubling down on the most intrusive and least justified pandemic prevention policies: mandates and lockdowns. These policies proved incredibly ineffective at stopping COVID-19.
Biden’s Center for Disease Control followed his lead and enabled widespread school closings, along implementing mask mandates and vaccine requirements for workers. Thousands of employees lost their jobs when they refused to receive covid vaccines, with Biden and others vilifying them.
As president, Biden had no problem attacking large swaths of the population for their political views, his most infamous moment being the September 2022 speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. With a lighted backdrop bathed in red and two US Marines standing guard, Biden delivered an attack on Donald Trump and his supporters, calling them a “threat to democracy” and worse. Law Professor Jonathan Turley described the speech as “divisive and inflammatory,” and pointed out that by using Marines as props in a political speech, Biden “violated long-standing rules for shielding the services from such political events.”
Biden also pressured social media companies either to outright lie or remove material from user posts that didn’t square with the administration. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen describes how the Biden White House used bullying and threats against free speech and anything that the Democrats didn’t like:
Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”
These words speak for themselves. While Biden lapsed in and out of coherence, his White House stayed focused on expanding its own domain through threats, bullying, and by what Andreessen calls “the exercise of raw power.” If they thought people were in the way, then they had to be destroyed.
Conclusion
John Fea, a socialist history professor at Messiah University in Pennsylvania, claimed that Biden in his Philadelphia speech was just trying to “protect democracy” from the likes of Trump and his followers:
Joe Biden is a gift to the American republic at such a time as this. He refuses to let democracy die on his watch. (emphasis mine)
A man as destructive as Biden, however, was no gift. “Grift” is more appropriate, and we can be thankful that his term is over.
