National Review Online
Thursday, April 29, 2021
President Biden’s address to Congress connected only
intermittently with reality.
On his telling, every good thing that has happened in
America since he took office — from vaccination to job creation — is a tribute
to his wisdom, rather than a continuation of a trajectory set beforehand. All
presidents say such stuff, and they all get away with it, although Senator Tim
Scott made a valiant attempt to correct the record. Worse was the dishonesty of
Biden’s sales pitch for his policies.
He insinuated that the ten-year ban on assault weapons
had reduced the murder rate in the U.S. — something neither
careful studies nor a casual look at the trends supports. He pretended that
the Trump administration had ended successful efforts to control migration
across our southern border, a brazen inversion of the truth. He claimed that
the country supports federal legislation that would, among other things, ban
states from verifying voters are who they say they are. Poll after poll says
otherwise. He promised that Medicare could save hundreds of billions of dollars
by cracking down on drugmakers. Not according to the Congressional Budget Office, it can’t.
Biden conjured a world in which there was no danger from
unprecedented deficit spending, no possible adverse consequences from raising
taxes on corporations and rich people, no spike in violent crime that needs
attending, and no foreign threats that demand of us more than platitudes about
leadership.
Even as he proposed one of the most radically Left policy
agendas in American history, he continued to feign an eagerness to work with
Republicans.
The press, which has invested absurd importance in every
president’s first 100 days, is hardly bothering to conceal its excitement at
the low-fifties approval rating Biden has at this marker. It is simultaneously
hyping his left-wing legislative agenda. Those same polls show, however, that a
plurality of Americans disapproves of how he is handling taxes and spending —
and that his numbers on guns and on border security are abysmal. The
implication is that a COVID recovery he has done little to cause is buoying
him, while his agenda threatens to pull him down. Biden is providing Republicans
plenty of material to work with, and nothing to intimidate them.
No comments:
Post a Comment