A reader-friend of mine from the deep South who is an authentic intellectual and has earned his income as a doctor of research in physics with eminent employers including the Pentagon and high academia, and relates culturally to the popular contemporary South, and is without discernible ethnic or regional prejudices, recently wrote me the following fulmination: “The NY DC Press has got together via electronic communication, and is now executing a blame-Trump, praise-Biden strategy. What this actually demonstrates is that Red China could attack Taiwan, kill everyone, loot and occupy it, and Biden’s press kook would give a press conference on masks for kindergartners.
“Biden started his alleged statements to the press by rambling about socialist legislation, then imitating Detective Columbo by saying ‘Oh, just one more thing. I’m abandoning the hostages next Tuesday,’ demonstrating the gang rape of Lady Truth by the Democratic collective. It’s as though Afghanistan was a drought in California, or a brush fire outside of San Diego.
“We cannot coexist with the New York and California worldview. Infanticide, kinky/really kinky sex, deindustrialization, anti-white racism, brownouts, uncontrolled fires, crumbling infrastructure, junkies on every street corner, shoplifting normalized, public health tyranny, and world record physical/moral/political cowardice cannot be imposed on the non psychotic, non diabolical, parts of the country. It will not be tolerated.
“The Republicans have nothing to do with it. The Democrats can nurse off the Chamber of Commerce, military industrial complex, Chinese subornation, but their sick, greed-obsessed narcissism is wearing thin in the hinterlands. If more Americans are killed via Biden’s negligent homicide, a good third of the population is never going to forget it.
A Coalition Rules
This screed has the distinct air of a “cri de Coeur” and can be slightly diluted in its fervor to allow for the heat of the moment of utterance. But it is a cogent and understandable outburst from a highly intelligent, experienced' patriotic, and observant man.The United States is now in the position, unprecedented in its history, of being led by a coalition of socialists, of evocators and spokespeople for a corrosive national guilt and shame over the original sin of slavery, and of fierce and unscrupulous partisans trying to alter the nature of federal elections and presidential election vote-counting.
Such vote rigging, coupled to simply opening the southern borders to whomever wishes to enter the United States and permitting them to vote by virtue of residency rather than citizenship, will, this coalition hopes, prevent the horrible aberration of a return to the White House of Donald Trump or anyone remotely like him (or any Republican for a long time).
None of these three distinct but somewhat overlapping groups, nor all of them together, remotely represent a majority of Americans. Yet each of the three groups is determined to take advantage of the fleeting moment when the Democrats’ control, albeit narrowly, of both houses of the Congress, and the White House, albeit with a rather inattentive president. The result is that the United States is careening towards the legislation of measures that the country disapproves and which will prove, if adopted, severely baneful to the national interest.
The Sanders-Ocasio Cortez left of the Democrats will never have an opportunity like this again to jam through high taxes, big spending, a full anti-capitalist agenda with a mighty turn to supposedly egalitarian financial redistribution.
The militant African-Americans and the significant but chronically minority number of conscientious white Americans who believe that their country has been inadequately punished and humiliated for the wickedness of the institution of slavery, its implicit preservation in the Constitution, and the terrible war provoked and conducted by the minority of Americans who approved of slaveholding. (Mr. Lincoln judged the Civil War a chastisement of the Almighty that was “true and righteous altogether.”)
Biden’s Restraint Needed
Even with these three groups standing on each other’s shoulders and barely squeaking through the House of Representatives and the Senate, nothing like as radical a program would require consideration were it not for the fact that the president, Joe Biden, with all goodwill, seems not entirely to grasp the radical significance of what is afoot.To the extent that he does, he appears to be well satisfied to exceed those Democratic presidents he most admired, FDR, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and those whom he may slightly have resented while admiring them also: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; to surpass them all in moving the country toward the “progressive” left. That he soldiered nearly 40 years in Washington without feeling that he was being treated seriously by the Clintons or Obama’s furnishes a motive that any fair-minded person can respect.
But a president who addresses a press conference on the urgent subject of Hurricane Ida and on receiving a perfectly temperate and reasonable question about the contemporary crisis in Afghanistan, responds by saying that he doesn’t take questions on Afghanistan and stumps out of the room, is not really on top of his job.
It is difficult for any outsider to know exactly how well focused this president is on the heavy responsibilities of his office. I do not doubt his objectively good and patriotic intentions, and I wish anyone grappling with the ravages of age a prolonged success. There is no shortage of goodwill in the country or much of the world, for this president, but he is not going to be able to somnambulate through another 3 1/2 years.
The press has no constitutional right to interrogate the president but it has been customary starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. Some presidents haven’t been particularly good at it; Ronald Reagan was an outstandingly successful president who was not fast on his feet with the media. Media impertinences were the principal reason that press encounters with Presidents Nixon and Trump sometimes became excessively disputatious. But President Biden is going to have to do better than simply refusing to answer questions about great national emergencies.
And if he is going to be more than a footnote to presidential history, he will have to impose some restraint on the three principal groups now driving the Democratic agenda in the Congress. Otherwise, his party will implode and his presidency will be the unmitigated shambles that it is already starting to resemble.
