[Read the Introduction here]

I really don’t feel like going through this; it’s reminds me of that old gross-out camp song about “great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat” and “concentrated chicken feet.” It degrades the office. It degrades everyone who listened to it. It degrades me to have to describe it.

Over at PJ Media, Ed Morrisey had an equivalent reaction, calling it “the worst case of valedictory projection ever” and writing in part,

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … just gave George Soros a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president who … cajoled and pressured tech billionaires to comply with his attempts to censor speech and suppress dissent through his State Department’s Global Engagement Center. 

Beware the oligarchy, warned the president whose party gets massively funded through Arabella, a network of leftist billionaires using dark money to fund candidates and activist campaigns. 

But this offal from the Oval Ofiice demands a thorough fisking, much as I’d rather pound nails into my scrotum, so here we go. (The gift-linked Times transcript is here.)

I’ll skip past all of the boilerpoint blather as Biden tried to crow about a meh Hamas-Israel deal that at least returns some live American hostages although everyone knows that the only reason Hamas agreed to anything is because incoming POTUS Donald Trump promised “Hell” if there wasn’t an agreement before his Inauguration Day. The cease fire and exchange kicks in on the last day of Biden’s Administration. What a coinkydink! But I expected no grace or admission of futility from Biden.

My first hairball was coughed up when Biden’s programmers started mentioning the Statue of Liberty, and went on about it for two paragraphs. He’s doing this to try to excuse and rationalize his open borders policies that added millions of illegal immigrants, many of them criminals, to our cities. (At least he didn’t quote the irrelevant poem like so many illegal immigration activists.) The first paragraph reminded me of “Ghostbusters II”: “Like America, the Statue of Liberty is not standing still. Her foot literally steps forward atop a broken chain of human bondage. She’s on the march. And she literally moves.” The second paragraph throws the kitchen sink at MAGA critics: “A nation of pioneers and explorers, of dreamers and doers, of ancestors native to this land, of ancestors who came by force. A nation of immigrants who came to build a better life”: more thinly-veiled defense for illegals, because they cane to “build a better life,” with a dig at those evil white Europeans “who came by force.” (Bad writing there; they didn’t come here by force. Never mind, Joe is in no shape to quibble.)

My next near stroke was caused by this:

“Whether we show the courage to stand up to the abuse of power, or we yield to it. After 50 years at the center of all of this, I know that believing in the idea of America means respecting the institutions that govern a free society — the presidency, the Congress, the courts, a free and independent press. Institutions that are rooted — not just reflect the timeless words, but they — they echo the words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Rooted in the timeless words of the Constitution: “We the People.”

No President and his party have trashed these institutions like Biden and the Democrats. That he was a figurehead President for most or all of his term, violating the spirit and intent of the Constitution and the nation’s voters is the most obvious example, but also the undemocratic installment of Kamala Harris as the candidate after the first Presidential debate, the attacks on the Supreme Court, and the breach of past House protocol and rules to run a partisan investigation of the January 6 riots manipulated to be an ongoing attack on the one opponent Democrats feared. Meanwhile, that free press was anything but independent, being almost fully complicit in hiding from Americans that fact that their President was demented and individuals unknown were making policies that affected their lives.

Shortly thereafter, we get this one-two punch in the gut: “In the past four years, our democracy has held strong”—OOF! Unelected leadership and an individual running for President with no democratic support at all!—“And every day, I’ve kept my commitment to be president for all Americans, through one of the toughest periods in our nation’s history.” All Americans! As Biden oversaw systematic discrimination against white men, and speeches like…

…that one, in which he called most of the Americans who voted against him later “fascists.”

Next Joe’s ventriloquists really got rolling:

“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”

Biden and the Democrats have courted and benefited from the majority of these “ultrawealthy people” as well as the soulless corporations, about whom liberal scholar John Kenneth Galbreath warned us in “The New Industrial State.” Now that these same feckless people and companies are shifting with the prevailing winds as they feel them, they are…

It’s so transparent. The corporate giants, controlled by “ultrawealthy people,” have been largely responsible for spreading The Great Stupid, bombarding the public with propaganda and workplace policies that sucked up to Black Lives Matter, that racist, Marxist scam, supporting Wuhan virus hysteria and fake health care mandates, and mouthing climate change pseudo-science because they calculated that this would make them seem sensitive and trustworthy. Morrissey writes,

Other than Musk, we saw Biden leveraging these “robber barons” to silence dissent and debate. Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pinchai cooperated with the Biden regime to suppress any message that didn’t meet the standards of the Biden administration on a wide variety of subjects, but especially about COVID-19, its origins, and the US role in its development. Biden turned the GEC — which had previously been an outward-facing counterpropaganda unit of little note — into a domestic Speech Police, and he did so with the help of his “oligarch” buddies. Only when Musk bought Twitter and exposed these operations did the White House’s censorship efforts begin to fail…

Bingo. More “Joe”:

“ Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.“

Joe Biden, whose administration was run via invisible puppet strings by powerful influencers unknown, with an entire administration staffed for four years by apparatchiks who were never fired no matter how inept they proved themselves to be, who was ousted by a cabal of millionaires like the Obamas and Nancy Pelosi, and whose party leadersship is creeping with ancient power-brokers in their eighties (like him) in an uncanny imitation of the Soviet Union’s leadership before it collapsed, had the nerve to make that claim. This takes astounding gall.

“More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.“

This is quite something coming coming from an administration and a party that has largely decided not to enforce the monopoly laws, allowing Disney, to take one example, to have an octopus hold on the media, entertainment and the culture. As long as these huge and powerful entities like Google and Meta were reliably censoring on behalf of the Good People with the Right Opinions, Biden had no complaints. Now they are, many of them, contributing to the new President’s inauguration committee…like General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics and all the influential and powerful companies of the past did routinely in the past as a non-partisan, patriotic gesture.

“People should be able to make as much as they can, but pay — play by the same rules, pay their fair share in taxes.”

So Joe Biden’s son, who has engaged in who-knows-how many crimes including tax evasion, was pardoned—by the man who said that.

“ So much is at stake. Right now, the existential threat of climate change has never been clearer.”

Or more dubious.

“ Just look across the country, from California to North Carolina.”

But not where I am, because there is more cold and snow than Virginians have seen in decades. There is no evidence that climate change is responsible for the horrific fires in California, but plenty of evidence that mismanaged water policies, foolish forestry practices, incompetent Democratic officials and arsonists have played a part.

“That’s why I signed the most significant climate and clean energy law ever, ever in the history of the world.“

…which had and will have absolutely no ameliorating effect on global temperatures whatsoever.

“And the rest of the world is trying to model it now.’

Except for China and India and the Third World, because they care more about standards of living right now and making money than squishy climate models.

“It’s working, creating jobs and industries of the future. Now we have proven we don’t have to choose between protecting the environment and growing the economy. We’re doing both. But powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.”

If you say so, Joe. Those forces want to stop junk science from crippling industry, energy development and transportation while accomplishing nothing but virtue signaling.

“We must not be bullied into sacrificing the future, the future of our children and our grandchildren.”

Funny, all of the bullying I saw in the last decade has come from Joe’s side of the ideological divide.

“We must keep pushing forward, and push faster. There is no time to waste.”

Fearmongering again, one of the trademarks of the last four years.

“You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

How odd, then, that nobody in Joe’s party raised any of this while cross-examining Pete Hegseth, Trump’s proposed Secretary of Defense!

Six days — six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

And here comes the Left’s pro-censorship pitch!

“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. “

The Federalist knocked that hanging spitball out of the park, thusly:

Got that? It’s not the weaponization of so-called “fact-checkers” to silence speech that’s the problem — it’s allowing Americans to use their First Amendment rights that’s a threat to “democracy.”

But Americans shouldn’t find Biden’s call for increased Big Tech censorship surprising. After all, it was what helped him get elected president in the first place.

After the New York Post dropped its bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story implicating Joe in his family’s foreign business dealings weeks before the 2020 election, social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook went into full-on censorship mode.

On Twitter, users were not permitted to share the story, even via direct message. The platform further “took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” as journalist Matt Taibbi revealed in the “Twitter Files.” Meanwhile, Facebook announced shortly after the story broke that it would be “reducing [the story’s] distribution” pending verification by third-party “fact-checkers.”

It was later revealed that the FBI — which authenticated the laptop in late 2019 — pressured these companies in the months leading up to the 2020 contest to censor posts about its content should they arise before the election. Zuckerberg has since admitted Meta’s decision to censor the Post’s reporting on its platforms was based on the FBI’s actions.

The deliberate attempt to prevent Americans from learning about and sharing information on Biden and his family’s business ventures could have swayed the outcome of the election, as some polling has suggested. That is not at all inconsequential and demonstrates the serious harm censorship can bring upon society.

But as we’ve seen throughout his presidency, neither Biden nor his merry band of Marxists care. Within months of taking office, the administration was busy colluding with these same Big Tech companies to censor and remove posts that disagreed with the government’s unscientific Covid narratives. It didn’t matter whether the post contained accurate information — what mattered was controlling what Americans could say and read at any given time.

When the history books are written, Biden will go down as the most anti-free speech president to have served in the Oval Office. His administration’s obsession with weaponizing any available tool to silence its political opponents and everyday Americans in the name of unfettered power was and is a national disgrace.”

The pro censorship party’s President warns about dangers to democracy because there is not enough censorship, and too much “misinformation” as he lies his head off.

“We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.”

It was the Obama/Biden ticket that ended the Presidential Election Fund by being the first since Watergate to refuse its limits on fundraising. ActBlue faces investigations in Congress and several states over their fundraising activities. George Soros’s billions were used across the country to elect prosecutors who didn’t believe in prosecuting.

“We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress.”

Democratic members of Congress, notably Nancy Pelosi, have been among the most egregious inside traders. “Why didn’t Biden do anything about that over the last four years?” asks Morrissey. Guess, Ed.

“We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit, time and term, for the strongest ethics — and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court.”

I have no idea what this means.

“We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no President, no President is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The President’s power is not limit — it is not absolute. And it shouldn’t be.”

And it isn’t. This is more disinformation aimed at people too lazy, illiterate or uneducated to read the relevant Supreme Court opinion, which Joe’s party made necessary by weaponizing the courts against political adversaries. I bet Joe never read the opinion either.

“And in a democracy, there is another danger — that the concentration of power and wealth. It erodes a sense of unity and common purpose. It causes distrust and division. Participating in our democracy becomes exhausting and even disillusioning, and people don’t feel like they have a fair shot. We have to stay engaged in the process.”

Donald Trump returned to the Presidency despite being savaged by the news media, shot at, and made the target of a politicized legal system, while spending a faction of the money Kamala Harris had to campaign with. The power and wealth was indeed concentrated against him. People made it possible to overcome that. Whatever you think about the results of the 2024 election, it was a demonstration of the resilience of our system, and a triumph of democracy over a totalitarian-embracing party and regime.

The rest of the speech is standard malarkey. I’ve read all of the farewell speeches of our Presidents. To rate this the worst of them is an understatement.