President Biden said yesterday, as he boasted about a misleading jobs report, “The American people are smart as hell and know what their interests are. I think they know they’re better off financially than they were before. It’s a fact.”
It’s not a fact. There were a number of counter factual assertions there. First, the American people are NOT “smart as hell” or they would not have elected a dementia victim who was never too sharp to begin with as President of the United States, Second, Biden and his party routinely act as if the public does not know “what their interests are,” presuming that Big Brother knows best. Moreover, even the substantially dim-witted members of the pubic are smart enough to know they are not “better off financially than they were before,” before meaning, as it should, before the pandemic and the progressive-led lockdown created an artificial crater which any administration would be able to crawl out of and show a relative improvement. The only question is whether Joe Biden believes that “Bidenomics” is working.
I’m pretty smart myself, as Wilfred Brimley says in “Absence of Malice,” and I know my family and business are far worse off than “before,” even if you don’t count inflation and the fact that Biden’s exploded national debt creates a fiscal sword of Damocles over everyone’s head. The huge increase in mortgage rates have ruined any chances of our getting the home equity loan we desperately need, and our credit is in the toilet after we nearly lost our home.
Oddly, those smart American people, presumably even the dolts who voted for Biden, tend to agree with me. All polls have reported this year that the percentage of Americans who feel they are worse off is about three times larger than those who think they are better off. Biden, in the same speech, claimed that this is because the news media is misleading them—-since we all know the mainstream news media is hyper-critical of Democrats and is trying to get Trump elected.
Look: double gaslighting by Biden!
Or maybe we all are really going crazy…
Added: Victor Hanson Davis just released an essay about the “Its isn’t what it is” addiction of the Biden regime, mentioning the open Southern border, the crime waves in the “defund the police” cities, even the Jamaal Bowman scandal. This part is relevant here:
One common denominator that explains why previously successful societies implode is their descent into fantasies. A collective denial prevents even discussion of existential threats and their solutions….
[President Biden] now praises this three-year effort to borrow $6-7 trillion, and spike interest rates threefold to 7% on home mortgages — even as prices on essentials like food and fuel have spiked 25-30% since he entered office. The more that Biden brags about what he did to the economy, the more people poll — over 60% — dissatisfaction with his alternate reality of “Bidenomics”…
Despite our epidemic of fantasy, there remains reality.
And we will soon rediscover it all too soon.
Bingo.
Ethics Alarms 
Bingo, and here’s the thing. If you go back and look at the last war in Iraq, even as their military was disintegrating, Baghdad Bob was broadcasting that the Iraqi military was successfully repelling the allies. For the longest time the Soviets kept saying they had the upper hand in the Cold War, even after Reagan had put them in an impossible position. We all know how badly things went with the Tet offensive, to the point where Walter Cronkite said on the air “what the hell’s going on? I thought we were winning the war.” It’s also documented fact that almost right up to the end both Germany and Japan were telling their own people they were winning the war.
That goes especially for Japan, who, realistically, couldn’t hope to win after Coral Sea and Midway wiped out most of the super-elite pilots they had relied on. They never told their own people about that, and they never told their own people about Philippine Sea or Leyte Gulf, nor that they were losing merchant shipping faster than it could be built. No government that’s fighting a losing fight wants to admit that it is losing, because then the people’s confidence in it will tank and either they will get voted out (if free) or deposed (if not). They keep on lying, propagandizing, delaying, and hoping they can hold onto power. In Biden’s case, all they need to do is hold on long enough to skate through next year’s election.
Some of the things Biden is saying now are things he has to say. Of course he’s going to say the American people are smart as whips, he can’t say they are gullible idiots who are content to have the wool pulled over their eyes. He has to say they know they’re better off than they were before because if he says otherwise he’s basically Herbert Hoover saying “prosperity is just around the corner,” and we all know how that worked out. He has to say things are going great, because if he acknowledges that they are not, people are going to start wondering just what the hell he is still doing in office.
The fact is that Biden, if he, or whoever is calling the shots, plays his cards right, doesn’t have to turn the economy around to get another four years, and he doesn’t need to become competent. He has several very powerful cards to play that have nothing to do with either of those things. First, there is hatred, certainly hatred of Trump, but also hatred of conservatives generally. He has a built-in reserve of voters who hate Trump viscerally more than they concern themselves with anything else, and another reserve of voters who hate anything with an R next to it and will not consider it. If he can get this base really frothing with hate and motivated, he’s got at least the appearance of a movement behind him. Second, there is abortion. The numbers with young or single women, when it comes to abortion, are off the charts, because they really don’t care about anything more than 1. the perception of being 100% in charge of their own lives, which starts with the decision to kill a gestating child in the womb, and 2. the license to carry on like a cheap Port Elizabeth whore when the fleet is in without consequences. Third, there is fake virtue. There is a huge reserve of voters who will do whatever they have to do to prove that they are all-in with the latest fashionable values of the left, including everything on that yard sign that our host justifiably mocks. And if it means the US gets flooded with people who have not been vetted, aren’t particularly interested in being productive, and in a lot of cases can’t even speak English, or crime goes through the roof, or ruinous lockdown policies get continued much longer than they need to, well, that’s just fine by them. Fourth, there is the “pro-wrestling” mentality of partisanship in the US now, in which not only will people vote by letter, but they will defend outrageous behavior by their own party while relentlessly attacking the other side no matter whether they succeed or fail.
Hell of a platform playing to people’s unreasoning hatred, desire to have unlimited sex, and wish to feel smug and righteous, but unfortunately, it worked in 2020, and it looks like it may work going forward. Negative campaigning used to be the thing because it made the numbers move faster, but now it’s reached the point where attacks, insults, and fearmongering are the only things that work. No one wants to hear even the basics, never mind the details, about sound financial policy or a strong defense or law enforcement initiatives that work. It’s easier to spew hate and slogans, trash something, and go home feeling righteous. However, if you rely on that, don’t say I’m a jerk if when you’re hungry I tell you a la Carlo Collodi to eat two fine slices of your righteousness, and much good may it do you, don’t say I’m a bad person when you can’t get anywhere and I tell you to fill up your gas tank with your virtue and may it take you far, don’t tell me I’m somehow being unfair when your pockets are empty and I tell you to draw against your hatred, and be well, and don’t tell me I’m horrible when you can’t feed your child and I say maybe you should have aborted her.
I choose “outright lying.” It’s what the Biden regime (why didn’t I think of that term to describe the cabal of assholes currently running the country) does. They lie, like a rug.
Along this vein – it should be noted, perennial-fool-elevated-to-unheard-of-heights Paul Krugman, posted an inflation graph, proving to all the stupid rubes out there that the inflation rate was lowering.
I’m not going to get into the debacle where the Left tried to redefine the discussion to be about the lowering *rate* of inflation increase…like use stupid rubes weren’t going to notice what that meant.
But Krugman posted a graph showing inflation being lower than it has been. (Still very elevated mind you). WIN FOR BIDENOMICS!
Except, as his own graph admitted, it didn’t include stats for:
1) Energy costs
2) Housing
3) Food
Why not throw in love and affirmation also, so we can round out all of the essential needs for mere human survival.
Which by the way, inflation in those areas still put the heights of Mount McKinley to shame.