I’m not even sure the partisan campaign speech President Joe Biden delivered last night from Union Station [text here] in Washington, DC even rises to the level of grasping at straws. It was certainly desperate and pathetic in its desperation and hypocrisy: Ethics Alarms has been predicting that as the reality of public lashback against the spectacularly failed Democratic Party rule since 2020 (and in many places, before) became undeniable, the lies, tantrums and other excesses of those accountable would escalate. I’m sure even worse is on the horizon, but the most charitable thing one could say about Biden’s speech last night is that it wasn’t a terrible as his earlier one calling Republicans fascists. Nonetheless, in my preliminary research, no President has ever given two such divisive and intellectually indefensible speeches in their entire time in office, and Joe Biden gave them within 60 days of each other.
The speech comes as the various polls are finally showing what anyone paying attention knew was the case long before: Democrats are losing support even from their base, and face an epic shellacking. The slashing conservative blogger Ace of Spades, I think, has this scam figured out. He writes that the polling organizations, most of them allied with with progressive universities and biased news organizations, deliberately slanted their polling groups towards Democrats in order to please their clients. (Another analyst adds that such fake news gives Democrats sufficient hope to peddle in fundraising appeals, knowing well that the real numbers would be far more discouraging.) Now, however, because their future credibility depends on not looking like idiots when the votes are tallied, the pollsters are finally playing it straight.
Still, even as all around Biden are losing their heads and blaming it on him, I cannot fathom the epic gall required for this President of all Presidents to base a last ditch appeal for his party on the argument that “we the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic where reality is accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred.”
Which party is he arguing for? Biden’s speech began, disgracefully enough, with the Paul Pelosi attack, despite the reality that his attacker was an illegal alien, clinically insane, and without apparent alliance to either party. The facts of the attack are still unclear and not exactly coherent, and the security footage of the break-in have yet to be released. A speech about the importance of reality was begun by spinning an event about which the reality has not been determined, while alleging a causal relationship with GOP rhetoric that has not been, and probably can’t be, established.
You know. Reality.
But the speech was even more absurd than that. Biden himself has been at war with reality all along, and may be losing whatever tenuous grip he had on it completely. In recent weeks Biden has called Kamala Harris a “great president,” claimed that his student loan giveaway was a law passed by Congress when it was his own executive order, said that his son Beau was killed in Iraq, and claimed that he attended a Historic Black College, Delaware State. He continues to employ a Secretary of Homeland Security who says that the southern border is secure; he claims that the surge in gas prices that began with his specious climate-control measures is really the result of oil company “gouging;” he claimed that he has lowered gas prices from “five dollars” when he took office; his administration claims that the economy is in great shape despite devastating inflation. His party hacks and the mainstream media are arguing that Republican attacks on the crime rate are based in “racism.”
Here’s a recent example of accepting reality: yesterday the White House tweeted that Social Security checks would be larger because of Biden’s efforts. When it was pointed out in multiple sources that this was a lie, and that the cost-of-living increase had nothing to do with Biden, the tweet was taken down. This President, this Administration is ethically estoppel from accusing anyone of “denying reality.” But Biden’s entire speech was an exercise in gall, and a gamble that the American public is naive, gullible, and as dumb as a box of whoopie cushions. He actually accused Republicans of spreading “lies told for power and profit. Lies of conspiracy and malice, lies repeated over and over to generate a cycle of anger, hate, vitriol and even violence,” as if power and profit isn’t and hasn’t been a primary motivation of both parties, and for as long as anyone can remember, and as if, as I’ve already noted, his party has been hyperactive in the lying category.
In fact, the choice of the theme for Biden’s speech was deliberately dishonest and a diversion from reality. This election isn’t about “protecting democracy.” It’s about all the real issues Biden didn’t mention at all, the ones that are going to lose the election for Democrats—inflation, energy, illegal immigration, crime, the totalitarian behavior of his administration, not Trump’s, attempted government censorship, the illegal student loan giveaway, the promotion of racial division and inappropriate sexual content in the schools.
Even the theme as stated was dishonest and hypocritical, as many have pointed out. Democrats questioned the results of elections vigorously in 2000, 2004 and 2016, the latter after Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton piously lectured candidate Trump about how accepting adverse results in the interest of the nation was mandatory—because they were sure Hillary would win. When she lost, Democrats backed an effort to have the Electoral College voters flip the results, and spent the next four years trying to eject a President they regarded as illegitimate by any means necessary.
Biden, Democrats, and much of the media, are now arguing that allowing any party but a single one—theirs— to hold power in the United States is a threat to democracy. Only one ideology is acceptable; only one result can be tolerated; only one point of view is “safe.” You can call that self-contradictory claim audacious, you can call it ominous, you can call it cynical and insulting. In the end, however, it is a test of just how susceptible Americans are to totalitarian methods…or, more simply, just how unworthy of a republic Americans have become.
Ethics Alarms 
Biden, his advisors and the Democratic Party are the real threats to democracy, as is amply demonstrated above. And I don’t believe Biden comes up with these ideas on his own: he doesn’t have the brain matter left to invent them; really, he can’ read a teleprompter accurately.
Two more years. Only hope is Republican control of both houses, which would estop him to a certain degree, and an active legal community able to challenge his illegal Executive Orders. So all to keep him as impotent as possible.
For those that haven’t seen it yet, here is a link to the entire speech.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?524007-1/president-biden-warns-democracy-ballot-midterm-elections
I had a link to the text—I guess I should flag it better….
Jack,
Your link goes to a CNN article about the speech not the actual text.
I chose to link to the CSPAN video.
Arrgh! Wrong CNN article! How the hell did THAT happen? The right link is up now.
The last two years have been a replay of what happened when Obama came into office. The Dems veered off into health care reform as if they had a mandate. Health care reform was hardly an issue raised during the campaign but a lodestar for the far-left wing of the Democrats party. The shoved Obamacare through and that was essentially the end of the Obama administration. Same thing in 2020. The now completely far-left Democrat party thought they had a mandate to do everything AOC and her Justice Democrat puppet masters want done. I hope they will get their heads handed to them, but the real problem is, it won’t matter. They’ll be back in two years as vicious as ever. These are revolutionaries and they are playing the long game. They push as hard as they can all the time and ignore, and even accept as inevitable, the setbacks they endure. And they’re winning.
Other Bill wrote, “The last two years have been a replay of what happened when Obama came into office. The Dems veered off into health care reform as if they had a mandate. Health care reform was hardly an issue raised during the campaign but a lodestar for the far-left wing of the Democrats party. The shoved Obamacare through and that was essentially the end of the Obama administration.”
Obamacare was passed in March of 2010 and Obama was reelected in 2012, how can you justifiably say that passing Obamacare was the end of the Obama administration when it’s factually not so?
Other Bill wrote, “The now completely far-left Democrat party thought they had a mandate to do everything AOC and her Justice Democrat puppet masters want done. I hope they will get their heads handed to them, but the real problem is, it won’t matter. They’ll be back in two years as vicious as ever. These are revolutionaries and they are playing the long game. They push as hard as they can all the time and ignore, and even accept as inevitable, the setbacks they endure. And they’re winning.”
I think you’re completely right that they’re playing and winning the long game, at least so far, that game is heading directly towards totalitarianism.
Steve, I think OB was alluding to the fact that Obama ran on his pushing through health care in 2012 but he did very little else after Obamacare. Some of that was due to losing control of the House.
Thanks, Chris. Obamacare came out of the blue and was pushed through on a strict party line vote. “You’ll have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” After that, Obama accomplished absolutely nothing. He mailed it in for the balance of his two terms. The nation did not heal, and the oceans did not recede or any of the other happy jazz he emoted about. He was a disaster. The economy limped along for the entire time. “You didn’t build that.” My point is simply as did Obama, or more likely his handlers, Ron Klain et al. have completely overreached. Flat learning curve, except they’re revolutionaries so they’re simply on the march. Two steps forward, a step back. They are relentless.
Obama was also conscious, able to fog a mirror, and string a sentence together. We might not like the the agenda of the Democrat party, but they have a platform, they win elections every now and again, and that gives them *some* level of mandate to attempt to enact their platform. If the electorate disagrees with them, or they fall through, that’s what elections are for. The differences between Obama and Biden are that Obama “Yes We Can” campaigned on most of the policies he enacted, Biden campaigned as a centrist bridge builder and governed as a divisive progressive. The contexts in no way resembled the packaging, unless you focus solely on how Biden looks half dead at any given moment.
The midterms are going to be a bloodbath. I said two years ago that this election map was going to be hard for Democrats just because of what was up and where, but I couldn’t in my wildest dreams envision this.
And they will learn nothing. Biden won’t retreat to the center, he’ll start trying to pen-phone his way around and get himself impeached.
Other than “hope and change,” I don’t remember anything Obama campaigned for. I’d forgotten about “Yes we can.” David Axelrod ran a brilliant campaign that basically turned Obama into a blank canvas upon which the voters could project whatever they thought he was or what he would do. It was kind of a Rohrschach test. Soaring rhetoric and … nothing. He presided over the most tepid recover in history and couldn’t get anything through congress, and hardly even tried.
But yes, he did get re-elected to a second term. If that ranks as an accomplishment, he has that feather in his cap. A good campaigner, yes.
I remember that he campaigned on closing Guantanamo Bay. I remember it because that was a time that the Deep State thwarted a left-wing agenda, and it was therefore socially acceptable to notice its existence.
There’s another factor at play in political polling that is often overlooked. Most of the polls are paid for by media companies. Media companies that want to sell advertising space to political candidates. This is one reason why the polls always tighten up as the election nears. You can’t squeeze any more money out of a campaign if the polls show them down by ten points. But if the polls suddenly show surging, previously unseen support, you can sell more ads to both campaigns. A demoralized candidate stops spending. One with some false hope will empty his coffers in the final week, and his opponent will spend to counter that…
Political spending is an enormous biennial windfall for these companies, and they’ve figured out how to maximally extract revenue from that source.
Outstanding observation Jeff. That’s really connecting the dots. It’s amazing all the airtime being sold to campaigns. They’ve pushed everything but the fast-food guys at dinner time right off the air. Even during baseball broadcasts! We even saw some PA ads and we’re in AZ!
Very astute.
jvb
Unless it’s a swing like 1894, the Democrats will not learn.
Here’s a good one showing how brazen the Democrats’ campaign strategy is: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11383683/Suspect-raided-Katie-Hobbs-headquarters-illegal-Portuguese-migrant-RUN.html
The Democrat running for governor in Arizona blamed her Republican opponent for a break-in at the Dem’s campaign office. Evidently, she wanted to turn it into Watergare Revisited. She alleged the break-in was done by a Republican operative. You know, the Plumbers return. Turns out the burglar is a Portuguese guy who’s over-stayed his student visa and was out on bail for various crimes (including assault on a police officer) when he broke into the campaign office.
So, there you have it. The Democrat is victimized by an illegal alien (The border is secure) out on bail (cash bail is discriminatory) completely in line with Democrat policy, and she immediately says it’s a case of Republican political violence. Does this sort of ubiquitous and juvenile thinking verging on projection even rise to the level of hackery? The Republican candidate called the accusation “Jussie Smollett II.”
Heh! Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, self-parodies themselves like Lefties!
And I also saw Lake addressing this very effectively in a press conference — ‘You have to do better than this, guys”.
Caught a couple snippets where Hobbs was talking to MSNBC and CNN, and they had the nerve to ask her ‘Why didn’t you debate? Not debating didn’t keep your opponent from speaking out, so why not get up on a debate stage and confront her directly?”
The only real answer she had was that the election was only six days away and this was the campaign strategy they had, so this was the campaign strategy they had.
One host also asked her why she didn’t debate in the primary — ‘We were way ahead and won handily so it wasn’t an issue’.
A thinking person, if there are any who still watch MSNBC and CNN, would be all too likely to have a thought occur to them — is she that bad at debates, or is she just that scared of Kari Lake? Either way, why should I vote for you?
===========================
Something else I read recently: We’ve all heard about the Democrats trying to get the most extreme Republican nominated in the primaries, on the theory that it would make it easier for them to win the general election (never mind that they’re supporting the very people they are also telling us are an existential threat to democracy).
Apparently some of them feel this tactic is such a winner for them that they are trying it again in the general election. How you ask? Well, they cut ads for a third party candidate in the hopes that additional support for that candidate will come at the expense of the Republican they’re actually running against.
Talk about a campaign bankrupt of ideas and issues, even bankrupt of negative ads.
What stuff like this does is persuade folks like me, who might otherwise be inclined to carefully examine the individual candidates, realize that my only option is a straight ticket vote. People like this need to be sent packing as soon as possible. The occasional worthy Democrat — well, can we say collateral damage? Or, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas…
“Still, even as all around Biden are losing their heads and blaming it on him…”
It’s irrational to blame Biden for America’s problems. Biden doesn’t grasp the consequences of his actions. Now, the fact that he’s president is itself is a problem with a whole list of people we can blame…
I’m almost finished with an incisive article inspired by the current situation and the insufferable propaganda I keep seeing. It’s called “Democracy Is in Danger, but Not for the Reasons You Think”.
Read “Ron Klain, et al.” whenever you see “Joe Biden.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hillary-clinton-said-voters-don-142135645.html
They really just have no clue, do they? When will this out-of-touch woman go away? Her husband would never be this stupid.
I’m with her in 2024!
Hillary has always been and will always be loathsome. She hates the citizens of this country. She especially hates those who don’t vote for her.
jvb
I think we can say the feeling is mutual with the ones she especially hates.
You know, if you think back two years, right before the 2020 election, lots of folks here were predicting dire things should Biden and the Democrats win.
Well, they did win and some of those dire things have happened, but a lot more have not. Why? Well, primarily because they had such narrow control of the Congress. Think how it might have gone if they had had enough votes to kill the filibuster in the Senate. Can you imagine what kind of inflation we’d be seeing if the Build Back Brandon bill, in all its ignominy, had passed in full? I mean Manchin eventually caved, in exchange for a pot of gold over the rainbow, but he did hold out long enough to derail the bulk of it.
It is sobering to think that Manchin and Sinema — 1% of the total Democrats on Capital Hill — were the main bulwark of democracy. And, much as we deride Romney, Collins, Murkowski — they didn’t join the lunacy either during this Congress.
Was this our Midway, our Gettysburg? A near run thing?
I got a kick out of the updated GIF, or is that a meme? Sorry, I’m tragically unhip. I had to look it up: Origin The idiom ‘grasping at straws’ comes from an old proverb “A drowning man will clutch at straws,” meaning that a drowning man will grab at anything around to try to save himself, even a floating straw.
I guess the man with the dirty hands above is drowning in floating plastic waste in the Pacific?