The mainstream news media and progressive gaslighting aficionados were shocked–-shocked!—when habitually left-biased and incompetent NBC talking head Chuck Todd went on Democratic propaganda organ MSNBC and revealed that the most recent NBC poll showed public trust and regard for President Biden and Democrats plummeting like Icarus.
What was shocking wasn’t that Biden was polling horribly, but that he was polling so horribly that MSNBC would report it. Not only are polls unrelaible at best, they are manipulated to confuse and mislead the public by left-biased media contractors (only the Fox News polling is showing Terry McAuliffe trailing Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, for example, which he is, and badly). Moreover, the news media routinely buries or misrepresents polls that carry bad portents for Democrats.
The poll found that 42% of U.S. adults surveyed approved of Biden’s job performance and 54% disapproved, despite a 49%-48% split as recently as August. The survey was conducted jointly by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies.
Observations:
1. The real shocker is not that 42% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s performance, but that it is that much. How is that possible? I know that some studies indicate that 40% of the American public can’t read adequately, and about half have an IQ in double digits, but what in the world could 42% approve of? They like inflation? They like mobs of Wuhan-carrying illegals storming the border? They are glad all those Americans are trapped in Afghanistan? They enjoy hearing a President babble incoherently? They think it’s great that the Biden selection to keep our transportation running and our supply chain functioning took two months off during a crisis? They view rising murder rates as a boon? What? What is it that they approve of?
2. Oh, I know. (I just like running that clip…)They approve of the fact that he’s a Democrat, and that he’s not Donald Trump, and if the country falls apart in chunks, it doesn’t matter to them. They are incompetent citizens, and the bane of democracy. I know. It still amazes me.
3. This isn’t all Biden’s fault, or even mostly his fault. Yes, he accepted a job of great importance and responsibility that he is completely incapable of doing adequately, and that’s unethical, except that Joe has always been in that twilight fog of the Dunning-Kruger effect: he was too dim to know how dim he was even before dementia started creeping up on him.This is when responsible family members are supposed to gently explain, “Joe, we have to take your license to drive away, you can’t speak in public any more, and we’re hiring a Visiting Angel.”
Joe, however, has no responsible family members. Dr. Jill, like many First Ladies before her, is blinded by her own ambition. Hunter Biden lives off of influence peddling: he wouldn’t care if dad was locked in a terrarium, as long as he had a title that made Hunter a desirable conduit.
4. The Democratic Party is the real ethics villain here. I mistakenly wrote that they couldn’t win an election on hate, but they did. What I should have written was that winning an election on hate isn’t winning, and in the end, it will be a disaster. With everything coming down around their ears, Democrats are still trying to justify being in power on hate: here in Virginia, McAuliffe’s ads would make a vistior from Mars think Donald Trump was his opponent. They knew Biden wasn’t qualified to be President. He had made that clear a decade ago. Now, he was an even less qualified candidate. His brain cells were dropping like flies. In the wake of a supposed epiphany on sexual harassment, he was addicted to groping any women within reach, and did it in front of photographers. It was obvious that Barack Obama had contempt for him. Biden was rambling and incoherent in debates; he looked (and looks) spent. They nominated him anyway. They risked the nation’s welfare because they thought an declining incompetent was their best shot at exploiting their base’s drooling hatred of Donald Trump. They even magnified their cynicism by saddling Joe with a useless, giggling, Vice-President chosen because of her skin shade and reproductive organs.
5. The news media did its utmost to shield Biden from public awareness of reality, of course. I’m getting as sick of writing about our unethical media as you must be of reading about it.
6. In the end, though, it was the irresponsible public that elected Biden. It was an incompetent, irresponsible abdication of civic duty, and this is true even without considering the fact that his party has exhibited all the signs of a dangerous cult that is hostile to the idea of America and to individual rights.
As a consequence, the public deserves everything that happens to it and to the nation it has proven unworthy of—even though what happens to them happens to me. Maybe Americans can learn from the disasters to come, and be lucky enough to get a second chance. The U.S. has always been lucky before. Eventually, however, good luck isn’t enough.
Ethics Alarms 
The media actually held him accountable for Afghanistan, and his poll numbers went down. If the media did its job for other areas of the administration, his approval rating may fall even lower than Trump’s. I am really starting to think that Biden may resign instead of running for a second term. His health isn’t going to get better in the next three years.
“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America” is a remark attributed to Bismark.
And he was never more perceptive than when he made that observation.
Oh? He was never more perceptive, was he? What about his 1888 observation that “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”?
Oh, I think lots of people predicted THAT, just not people with as much of an audience as Otto.
No, very few people indeed predicted that – in 1888. Bismark was being very perceptive indeed, to manage that as early as that. The rebuttal stands.
Special thanks to Other Bill for flagging a bunch of typos. This was one of those posts that I tried to get up while being constantly called away from my desk on various emergencies and errands.Not an excuse at all—just an explanation.
Figured as much. A man in a hurry.
Most of what you said can’t be excelled. I’d like to add that a persistent problem at the root of a lot of these other problems is that the American public has a tendency to oppose things and run away from things without thinking much about what it is advocating for or running toward. I think sometimes we LIKE being in the minority because it means you can just complain, bitch, and pen scathing editorials without having to really do anything or stand for anything. Indeed, fisherman-turned-religious-scholar and Senate Chaplain Rev. Peter Marshall famously said that, “unless we stand for something we shall fall for anything.” This last election the American public was so busy running that it never thought about where it would get to. It was running from COVID. It was running from supposedly rampant racism. It was running from a manufactured boogeyman in the form of Trump as constructed by the media. There was a hope that if we ran fast enough and far enough we would distance these problems and reach somewhere where everything would be back to a placid normality. It was full on “make it stop!” mentality. Meanwhile, Biden was able to drop out of sight, and the rest is history.
The beginning of this year the media was all caught up in how great the incoming administration was going to be. They were publishing huge pictures of Kamala Harris dwarfing portraits of the other vice-presidents in the style of the Virginia Slims “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads. They were devoting column inches to an “inDOGuration” for the Biden family canines, when they paid nowhere near that level of attention to any other presidential pet. They were saying that the inauguration was like Biden putting his arms around the nation when it needed it. The fact is that no one except the Democratic Party faithful (and not all of them) believed in or wanted any of that crap – they wanted the pandemic to end, they wanted the economy to reopen, and they wanted normalcy to return. So far, the pandemic is still going on, the economy is growing at an anemic rate, and we’re nowhere near normal, in fact the administration is telling us to “lower our expectations.” We wanted things to wrap up in Afghanistan, but not at the expense of twenty years’ work going down the drain almost overnight and hundreds of lives. We certainly didn’t want all this spending of money we don’t have, nor a huge expansion of governmental intrusion into every freaking aspect of our lives. Is it any wonder a lot of us, especially the independents, are now asking, like Steve McQueen’s Jake Holman at the end of “The Sand Pebbles,” “what the hell happened?”
I especially like your point about people who stand against things but never for anything. It is indeed quite difficult to identify a concept that one will stand for in the face of all else. To fix this issue, I’m working on a project that makes it much easier for people to identify constructive values and concrete ways to apply them. That will make me the greatest abstract thief of all time: I shall take away humanity’s excuses.
I think I mentioned the e-mail list I was accidentally included in. It was from a group of Democrats who were exhorting the group to get out and spread the word. They basically said the MAGA crowd was intent on stopping the great progress that was happening in the country right now and we all need to do our part to make sure the progress continues to the final goal. Now, this list was intended for a group of middle-aged, highly educated Democratic professionals. That is their viewpoint. That is your group that supports Biden’s job performance and is actually quite giddy about it. This group includes leaders in the fields of law, education, and law enforcement. There really are a lot of Democrats that are in favor of everything that is happening. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean they don’t.
True. And a really good way to look at the 42 percent approval demographic.
We got out of Afghanistan. Who cares if it was a goat rodeo. More people are coming from Central America to live on the dole and vote Democratic. The government is printing money to salve every possible wound. They’re shutting down domestic oil production to reduce deadly greenhouse gas emissions. The crime rate is up because the evil, over-reaching police are finally being defanged and put in their place by social workers. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. The supply chain is bottled up, but what the heck is a supply chain and Pete Butegige is a gay guy and a Commie and he’s wonderful and showing all those straight guys how to behave. What’s inflation? Who cares if gas is expensive, I bike or take the subway. You’re damned right I want my student loans cancelled. They’re a pain in the ass. Damn right tax everyone who makes more than I do and give it to me. The Iranians are finally being treated nicely again and the Jews in Israel are getting the back of our hand again. Good. The Chinese are rattling sabers in Asia. Good for them. We shouldn’t be sticking our noses in their affairs. We’re chauvinists. And a managed economy is what we should have over here any way. Just ask Thomas Friedman.
It really is good sometimes to put on the other guy’s glasses and see how things look to them.
I bet the only thing the 42 percent disapprove of is the Biden administration hasn’t been more successful at what it’s been trying to do. They’ve been too deferential and conservative. I mean, come on, what would Rachel Maddow say? “We’ve got the White House and Congress!* Let’s go for it!”
________
*Uh, not really Rachel, but, whatever you say.
Jack wrote:
The real shocker is not that 42% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s performance, but that it is that much. How is that possible?
That’s a great question. The only thing I can figure is a high percentage of people just don’t care and responded in the affirmative because of a general desire to support the leader of the country. That impulse isn’t quite dead.
The Democratic Party is the real ethics villain here. I mistakenly wrote that they couldn’t win an election on hate, but they did.
You can be forgiven for that. Selling hate, particularly on social media where it’s banned for one side and promoted for the other is really, really easy. Appeals to emotion, generally, are very effective, and our low-information electorate makes it even easier. We apparently can’t be bothered with arguments we haven’t been exposed to or that might conflict with our current beliefs.
In the end, though, it was the irresponsible public that elected Biden.
Exactly. We’re getting what we asked for, good and hard.
On 2, I think you’re underestimating people’s confirmation biases: They voted for him. If they admit he’s a failure, they admit they were wrong, and that’s hard. It’s also not new, usually when politicians poll numbs drop like that, it isn’t the function of a doddering do-nothing administration, it’s because the politician fucked up so publicly and plainly that it breaks through that bias.
In the case of Joe Biden… I think that his moment was Afghanistan, not just the painful withdrawal, not just the images of the people falling off the planes, not those awful news conferences, I think the moment that Joe Biden gave his voters the bias-breaking clarity they needed was after the 13 soldiers died, and Joe Biden trotted out Beau. “I’ve felt loss too” is a very different message when discussing topics as different as a fatal car accident and a botched military call. This came on the heels of him checking his watch incessantly at the dignified transfer… He highlighted his absolute lack of empathy, and for someone who ran almost entirely on his folksy charm and common sense, taking the mask off and showing the sociopath underneath is terminal. Now… Now we’re at a race to see how low the limbo pole goes before 2024.
This is a fair estimate for his personal culpability in the collapse of the polls. But I think there’s also a combined frustration at all things “Left” and the fall out of the “Left’s” actions, and by being the Left’s primary public face, he gets the blame.