Because he writes so well and because he is an accomplished critical thinker, iconic blogging pioneer Andrew Sullivan’s opinion pieces are always worth reading even when he’s completely wrong. True, bias sometimes makes Andrew stupid, which shows the awesome power of bias because he’s definitely not stupid. Sullivan’s devotion to gayness is one source of emotionalism for him; another is his blind hatred of Donald Trump, which to my eye seems to be of the George Will/Bill Kristol variety: Sullivan thinks Trump is an unmannerly low-life too vulgar for him to agree with. I think Sullivan may be terrified of cognitive dissonance self-destruction if he admits to agreeing with Trump on most substantive issues, which he does.
In his latest substack newsletter, Sullivan spins his topic a bit to avoid alienating his mostly left-leaning readership, calling it “Will Biden And The Dems Finally Get It? Their far-left record has made the far right more electable.” Oh, see? The real problem with the Biden policy fiascos is that they will let the evil far right gain power. Shame on you, Andrew. Have the guts and integrity to be clear about what you are really saying…which is this:
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.”
IIPTDXTTNMIAFB are the Ethics Alarms initials for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.” The phenomenon has been a theme of the Biden Presidency Ethics Train Wreck so far: The Washington Post isn’t keeping an archive of Biden’s lies like they did for President Trump (and most of what they archived weren’t lies anyway), and Biden has arguably engaged in far more substantive and deliberate untruths in less than two years than Trump did in four. It was a recent Biden lie of breathtaking audacity that reminded me to write about this issue: over the weekend just passed, Biden told an interviewer regarding his student loan debt bailout: “It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two.”
No, this was an Executive Order. It wasn’t a bill, it wasn’t voted on by Congress, and it didn’t “pass”—that’s exactly why it is unconstitutional. The scary possibility is that Biden actually thinks it did pass, but I refuse to accept “He’s senile, and doesn’t know what the hell is going on” as a defense for such blatant falsehoods.
Prof. Turley, who is becoming increasingly outraged at the Democratic Party’s disregard and disrespect for the Constitution, blasted away at Biden’s deliberate defiance of the law of the land in a recent post. Noting that Biden falsely (or ignorantly) boasted that the courts “are on his side” regarding the illegal EO despite the fact that the initial law suits blocking it were rejected on procedural and not substantive legal grounds (amazingly, Biden went to law school), Turley fumed…
Well, I don’t know. Quite a few Cabinet members have been convicted of crimes in office, and the Biden Cabinet has other bad apples, notably Attorney General Merrick Garland. Still, it’s hard to imagine any federal department head more incompetent or guilty of dereliction of duty than Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Or more of a weasel. To be fair, he is the first Cuban-born Homeland Security Secretary, which makes him “historic” and yet another diversity feather in the current Democratic regime’s cap. And after all, that’s what’s really important, right?
I wish I were kidding.
Mayorkas, you no doubt recall, says that our Southern border is “secure,” apparently using the archaic definition of “secure” that meant “as porous as cheesecloth” in Chaucerian English. He also attempted to install an Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board, until even the Democratic Party’s captive news media objected, which always signals that the Left’s totalitarian aspirations are getting ahead of themselves. But he really secured his place in the U.S. Cabinet Members Chamber of Horrors, it has now been revealed, by deliberately condemning border agents of whipping illegal immigrants along the Texas-Mexico border when he knew the allegations were false.
Weeell, that wasn’t exactly true, was it? As the Marshall Project analysis explains, while the act may have symbolic force in prompting some states to extend clemency to pot violators, and while at the federal level there aboutt 6,500 people with prior marijuana possession convictions on their records may benefit from the pardon by restoring civic rights like voting, or serving on juries, but only if the marijuana charge was the only felony on their record.
In short, the grand gesture, a sop to the Democratic Party’s drug-loving base, was pure deceit, misleading the public to believe it was something it was not to a ridiculous degree. The way the mainstream media played it, the President was letting harmless, non-violent offenders out of prison and addressing “over-incarceration.” In realty, the “mass pardon” released nobody. Continue reading →
The pardon is irresponsible, cynical and unethical. It is also transparent: like the college loan forgiveness stunt (which is unconstitutional and a good bet to be knocked down), this is another sop to the Democratic base showing that Biden is keeping his promises made on the 2020 campaign trail. If it does serious damage to the Rule of Law, society, cultural ethics and developing young brains, hey, it’s worth it. Maybe getting more pot-heads to vote will keep the Democrats in power.
The pardon certainly doesn’t reflect any deeply-held convictions by the President, who doesn’t have such convictions. (This is a man who, please note, says he is a devout Roman Catholic who believes that the unborn are human lives from conception, but who champions abortion.) Biden opposed pot legalization until he became the Democratic nominee for president in 2020. Integrity? What’s integrity?
The pardon is guaranteed to lead to an increase in crime. The people with federal convictions for marijuana possession who Biden pardoned broke the law because they felt like it. They don’t respect the law, and Biden’s move endorses that disrespect. Such law-breakers will break other laws, and probably have.
President Biden looked in the audience on Wednesday for Representative Jackie Walorski, Republican of Indiana, during a White House conference on ending hunger, apparently forgetting that Ms. Walorski had died last month.
“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” Mr. Biden said as he thanked lawmakers who had sponsored legislation on the hunger issue. The president appeared to be confused at her absence and said something under his breath about whether she had planned to be at the event.
In fact, Ms. Walorski was killed on Aug. 3 in a car accident in her district, along with two of her congressional aides, when a vehicle she was in collided head-on with another. The driver of the oncoming car was also killed.
Mr. Biden did not correct himself during the remarks, but the incident quickly went viral on Twitter and other social media platforms, with some people seizing on the moment as evidence that Mr. Biden, who is 79, lacks the mental capacity to be president.
“Some people”? Not to throttle a theme, but why just “some people”? Isn’t forgetting that someone is dead (when you made a public statement about her death just a month earlier) a classic sign of dementia? And why is this a surprise to anyone who has been paying even a little attention to Biden since before he was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination?
Of course, after that straightforward and factual account, the Times slipped back into familiar “Republicans pounce” territory. “The president’s political opponents have been pushing that attack since he took office.,” the news item says. It’s not an attack! It’s a legitimate concern for any American when it becomes obvious that the leader of the nation is sliding into senility. Again: why aren’t Democrats and the President’s supporters equally alarmed? Integrity? Honesty? Responsibility?
The problem is that this plan depends on the full collaboration of the mainstream media, and cracks are appearing in that previously reliable alliance.
During a Democratic National Committee event, president Biden once again indulged some of his favorite pieces of misinformation (Did you know that Donald Trump lied all the time?). Biden said that gas prices have fallen by “$1.30 a gallon,” with the average now being “less than $2.99” in 41 states and the District of Columbia. He also said that the current unemployment rate of 3.7% is the lowest it has been in over half a century.
CNN, in the midst of a course correction (as in “maybe we should go back to actual journalism a bit”) debunked both statements. “Biden’s claim about average gasoline prices was false, as the White House acknowledged by correcting the official transcript after CNN inquired about the claim on Friday afternoon,” CNN reported. “In fact, zero states have an average price under $2.99 per gallon, figures from GasBuddy and the American Automobile Association show. As the correction notes, Biden got a key digit wrong: 41 states and the District of Columbia have an average price under $3.99, not $2.99….“But the price of gas is one of the most important numbers in politics. Even if the President made an inadvertent error this time, his incorrect remark was televised live on CNN and MSNBC.”
Later, Biden changed his story to say that “a few” states had average gas prices under $3. That was also a lie.
Stop making me defend Scott Pelley!The conservative news media is beating on “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley for what they are calling a “softball” interview, as if every “60 Minutes” interview of a sitting President hasn’t been just as tame, or even tamer. At least Pelley asked Biden about Hunter. The truth is that Americans still prefer to see their Presidents treated with respect and some degree of deference,unless the President is Donald Trump.
It’s funny: the same outlets that are condemning Pelley as a Democratic ally and hack are wondering why Biden’s “handlers” allowed the blithering POTUS to do an interview at all. Of course the conditions demanded for the interview included no follow up questions, and a softball session. And it didn’t matter! Biden’s performance was frightening anyway, andunlike the 2020 interview with Trump, when Leslie Stahl’s clear objective was to attack throughout, the White House couldn’t complain afterwards that the President was sabotaged by a biased journalist. Pelley asked about Joe’s mental fitness, and Biden replied, “Watch me!” And so we did, and have. He continued,
And it ma—, honest to God, that’s all I think. Watch me. If you think I don’t have the energy level or the mental acuity, then — then, you know, that’s one thing. It’s another thing, you just watch and — and, you know, keep my schedule. Do what I’m doing….“I — I think that, you know — I don’t — when I sit down with our NATO allies and keep ’em together, I don’t have ’em saying, ‘Wait a minute, w— how — how old are you? What are you — what say?’ You know, I mean, it’s a matter of, you know, that old expression: The proof of the pudding’s in the eating. I mean, I — I — I respect the fact that people would say, you know, ‘You’re old.’ And — but I think it relates to h— how much energy you have, and whether or not the job you’re doing is one consistent with what any person of any age would be able to do.”
Whether it was Pelley’s intention or not, he ended up doing what ethical journalists are supposed to do: he let the facts speak for themselves.
1. On the topic of social media viewpoint censorship, this:
It takes a lot of chutzpah for YouTube to demonetize a channel because it violates YouTube’s “values” and then sell ads on the same content.
2. Oh please, please let this happen to me! In an open thread at Althouse, a commenter tells this tale,
A friend’s brother lives in Florida. They recently got new neighbors from NY, a husband and wife. A few days after moving in the wife stops over and sits down. She says, “OK, let’s get this out of the way. I am a Democrat and my husband an Independent. What are you?” Non-plussed, he says he is Republican. For the next 15 minutes he was called every expected name- Nazi, racist, etc. IN HIS OWN F-ING HOME!
It’s my contention that the left now knows its flaws are becoming obvious and are overcompensating to hear themselves repeat their failing worldview…
Of all the fumbling, dishonest, weird things President Biden said in his “60 Minutes” interview last night, that statement: “The pandemic is over” was easily the most significant. Because…
As if there wasn’t enough proof already, this was smoking gun evidence that poor Joe doesn’t know what’s going on in his own administration, or, in the alternative, that what his own administration is doing is only marginally within his power.
Programs and policies completely dependent on the existence of the pandemic are not only ongoing, they are being challenged in court.
Biden’s insane college loan forgiveness scheme relies (dubiously) on the existence of the pandemic to avoid being illegal.
Many school systems are still inflicting mask mandates on children.
Professor Turley points out that Biden’s public statement is certain to be used in briefs relating to the many cases challenging emergency powers and policies used by the Administration, like the appeal being considered en banc by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, challenging the moves taken under the Administration’s claimed pandemic authority.
While conservative critics are concentrating on the inconsistency and self-contradiction represented by Biden’s announcement, the Mask Loving Left is furious, because they want the pandemic, along with the fear and submissiveness it engenders, to continue forever. If the pandemic is gone, how will Democratic states justify installing new voting systems where voters just yell out their choices from the windows of their homes and cars, to be recorded by government vote-takers, written down, and deposited in convenient drop-boxes?
