First thoughts about Biden's address to Congress
Biden spoke for over an hour to roughly 200 masked, vaccinated congresspeople in a mostly empty House chamber. Showing the manic energy of a grasshopper on amphetamines, he did much better than I expected. Barring a few verbal slips, Biden managed to stay on point the whole time. Really, the only problem with the speech was that it was a lie from beginning to end.
The biggest lie was Biden's relentless calls for togetherness. "And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation." "My fellow Americans, we have to come together." "We need to work together to find a consensus." "We came together." "There is nothing — nothing — beyond our capacity — nothing we can't do — if we do it together."
That's a lovely sentiment — and Biden uttered it with a straight face on the same day that his Department of Justice sent the FBI with an open-ended search warrant to conduct a pre-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's lawyer. This is a terrifying descent into practices common in dictatorships:
The next biggest lie was how Biden framed the events of January 6, when a few hundred unarmed people, egged on by leftist provocateurs, pushed their way into Congress, just as leftists have done since George W. Bush became president. They did so not to overturn the government, but to ask for an honest certification vote.
Once the lies stopped, it was clear that only one Trump-supporter died from violence when a still unnamed police officer murdered her in cold blood.
That's not what Biden said. He called January 6 — a protest of the type that leftists routinely make — "the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War." And again, "as we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol — desecrating our democracy — remain vivid in our minds." January 6 is and will remain the Democrats' justification for every crackdown.
Despite a year of Antifa and BLM riots across America — none of which he mentioned — Biden said that "the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism." Maybe that explains why the people who were arrested following January 6 are in solitary confinement four months later without ever being tried. D.C.'s federal prison is the new Gitmo North for terrorists.
Biden congratulated himself for the vaccine, without once mentioning that he had a vaccine in place thanks to Trump's Operation Warp Speed to develop it and organizational abilities to distribute it.
He promised that all his spending can be paid for with taxes on rich people and corporations. But super-rich people and corporations don't pay taxes. The rich people live in Loophole Land, while corporations pass taxes on in the form of lower wages, fewer hires, and higher prices. If that weren't the case, I would love to see Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and other socialist billionaires fund Biden's proposed spending spree.
He implied that last year's economic collapse was Trump's fault, ignoring that Trump had the economy on steroids, benefiting the poorest Americans most. It was the hysteria the Democrats fostered to destroy Trump's presidency that torched the economy. He even had the chutzpah to imply that Trump's policies enriched the 650 billionaires who became super-billionaires because of Democrat lockdowns.
Biden blamed Trump for the chaos on the border, claiming that when he was Veep, he addressed root causes by sending taxpayer money to Latin America, but "the last administration shut it down." It was that, not Biden's open border policy, that created the chaos. Harris, though, will make it all better. (Harris has yet to visit the border.)
So much of what Biden said was stupid. He promised to build 500,000 electric charging stations for Americans driving electric cars. Even with high-speed charging, it takes 40 minutes to "fill the tank" of an electric car. At that rate, 500,000 stations won't be enough — and there's no way any electrical grid can support that demand.
He wants a $15 minimum wage, which every economist agrees will severely reduce jobs.
He wants the Paycheck Fairness Act, which purports to address the canard that women unfairly earn less than men. Women earn less than men because they take lower-paying jobs or flex jobs that allow them to spend more time with their children. Democrats are all about denying biological reality, one aspect of which is the mother-child bond.
He wants to further empower the NIH, the same organization that, under Fauci, sent American money to the lab in Wuhan in which COVID almost certainly originated.
He wants even more money poured into public education, something that may be a tough fight after families across America saw their children's teachers continue to collect paychecks while refusing to teach.
He wants Congress to force employers to provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. The comparison is always to "other developed countries." But other developed countries didn't fund those programs — America did by absorbing their defense costs during the Cold War.
He boasted about lowering prescription drug prices, ignoring that one of his first acts was to raise the insulin prices Trump had reduced.
He said that H.R. 1, which would unconstitutionally remove elections from state control, will make them fairer and lied that Americans support it. There is nothing fair about increasing the opportunity to cheat, something that steals every honest American's vote. Americans overwhelmingly support voter ID, not ending voter ID.
He demanded gun control, making the risible claim that there are magazines that hold 100 bullets that can be fired in a few seconds. We call those machine guns, and they are illegal for civilian use.
It was an hour-long speech, so this only scratches the surface. Suffice it to say that he spoke in terms of unicorns leaving behind him a big mound of unicorn poop.
Image: Biden’s state of the union speech. YouTube screen grab.
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