by Conrad Black
The guessing game of how long the levitation of the Biden presidency can be taken seriously seems to be entering a new phase. The deluge of illegal entries into the United States at the southern border is now running at a rate of closer to 3 million than 2 million a year, and yet we still see and hear the bobbling talking head of the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assuring us, “The southern border is closed.”
The media has provided almost no coverage of this calamitous invasion. A recent Trafalgar poll found that 56 percent of Americans don’t think Joe Biden is “fully executing the duties of his office,” yet the docile White House press corps continues to ask him about his ice cream and other such probing questions of national interest. Apart from a rising stock market and a quieter atmosphere, the record of the new administration is one of almost complete failure.
The oceanic influx of unskilled labor at the southern border cannot fail to aggravate unemployment and depress the incomes for the vulnerable sectors of what, under President Trump, was a fully employed workforce. The administration has reduced domestic oil production and squandered the country’s status as an energy self-sufficient state. These are all familiar issues to those who follow public affairs, but the 95 percent Democratic-supporting media preserve the cocoon of a fairyland Biden presidency, whose bumbling chief flatters himself with comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
This regime has embraced the most hair-raising, unproven, terroristic versions of the climate change issue, and it’s only answer to surging increases in violent crime is the tired Democratic mantra about gun control. The firearms don’t discharge themselves and are now mainly used for self-defense and deterrence. It is legally and politically impossible to reduce significantly the immense number of firearms in the country and the sophistry about what constitutes an “assault weapon” will not achieve anything. Attempts to reduce the supply of ammunition will just increase the supply of illegally manufactured or imported ammunition.
If strict gun controls that already exist were properly enforced in the most crime-ridden areas of the country, the effect would be benign. But there is no sign that the Democratic administrations in the crime-swarmed cities have the will to undertake such a controversial act in the “defund-the-police” era, or that Washington will encourage such measures.
Only an unrepresentative method of calculating the rate of inflation keeps it beneath the level of eight to nine percent, which is an accurate rate for most members of the public affected by the cost of gasoline, home fuel, and building materials.
The great Democratic effort to seize permanent control of elections by dispensing with any voter-verification system, replace references to the courts with a partisan election commission, and encourage ballot-harvesting (in addition to admitting masses of illegals and directing their votes) is not going to be adopted. The Democrats suddenly have discovered that voter identification is not a bad idea after all, but the media will not be holding their feet to the fire because until last week voter ID was “Jim Crow 2.0.”
The media still locks arms to deny that there is any taint or question about the 2020 presidential election. The Wall Street Journal’s John Bussey gave their civilized anti-Trump conservative line on Fox News on Sunday: the variants will bring back COVID (meaning the Fauci Terror will reign again) and that will be “a headwind” for Trump, whose argument against the integrity of 2020 election was “unfounded.” Bussey uttered this with catechetical conviction, but of course, it is not unfounded and concern about it is ineradicable.
Only the continuing momentum of Trump-hate still prevents the media from reporting seriously about this ramshackle regime led by someone who can scarcely utter an English sentence and a vice president who responds to all questions with a stream of monosyllables followed by gales of demented laughter.
Comedian Jon Stewart has gently and humorously pointed out that the coronavirus probably did escape from the Wuhan Virological Institute in China; Bill Maher has warned his leftist comrades of the dangers of “progressophobia.” America’s anti-Trump sweetheart, Peggy Noonan, advised her readers in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that the Left has gone too far. Having written that less than a year after the Democrats’ BLM ally incinerated much of urban America in “peaceful demonstrations,” buyers’ remorse cannot be too far off. Noonan was one of the huge wave of people who placed their dislike of Trump above the aggregation of almost every serious policy issue.
The issue isn’t really that the Left has only now gone too far — they were even more sociopathically extreme in the five months preceding the election, and promised to “burn down this system” if they didn’t get everything they wanted at once (according to New York BLM co-founder Hawk Newsome).
The Democrats promised open borders, massive spending, and were neutral about police funding with a lot of fatuous bunk about sending out psychologists and social workers on 911 calls. Biden was clear about returning to the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization, and the Iran nuclear deal. It isn’t that the Left is overplaying its hand; it is that the snobbery of the American minority triumphed over rational analysis of public policy options.
A very questionable result emerged. The judiciary abdicated from the supreme responsibility of assuring an honest election of the country’s highest office-holders, and the entire media establishment tried to stamp out the dirty public secret that the vote was tampered with in quantities adequate to flip the result in several of the six swing states where miraculous complexities arose, including lop-sided vote-drops in Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous dropboxes at 4 a.m. and other efforts to “fortify” the result.
As the otherwise sane enablers and cheerleaders for the victory of this hollow administration blinkingly begin to see the result of their work, the default fantasyland of Trumpism without Trump arises. But it does not exist, never did, and is unlikely to come to life now.
Trump did not give a particularly good address to CPAC in Dallas on Sunday: there was too much blustering and vague accusations, even for him. But he again made the points that the election was probably stolen and the Biden Administration is a disaster mitigated only by the quieter political atmosphere that has naturally resulted from replacing a deafening human tornado with a waxworks dummy.
Trump predicted a total failure in Afghanistan, and blasted the military for extravagance. He showed considerable forbearance in not focusing on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley. Milley’s performance in denouncing the president’s walk to St. John’s Church across from the White House, which rioters had tried to burn down, in a gesture of the administration’s refusal to tolerate mob rule, was a disgrace. There is a rising sentiment in the country that for all the indulgence they have received, the Pentagon has failed to protect America’s Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and principal bases against hypersonic Chinese and Russian missiles, and there is increased skepticism that they did the best possible in the 20 years they were in Afghanistan.
Everything appears to be topsy-turvy: the chairman of the joint chiefs and the chairman of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, made almost identical statements about critical race theory. The Democrats now claim the Republicans are the ones who wished to defund the police, and now they suddenly have discovered the virtue of voter identification, which, up until yesterday, they had been shrieking from the roof-tops was tantamount to the restoration of slavery. Apparently, it’s not Jim Crow after all.
The media are so absurdly partisan they will try to allow the Democrats a free pass across the barricades on those issues. But the accumulating disasters for the Biden Administration will not be entirely absorbed by the (agonizingly slow) return to work of Americans after COVID and the miracle of the Warp Speed vaccine development, (for which Trump must receive no credit). The media can’t cover for this “Gong Show” administration indefinitely, but I must admit they have lasted longer than I expected, given their invertebrate response to almost everything else.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
