By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Joe Biden claims that gasoline producers are illegally colluding to rip off Americans, that there is “mounting
evidence of anti-consumer behavior by oil-and-gas companies.”
There isn’t any such evidence, of course. That doesn’t
matter. As an oil executive once told me in a different context: “We’re an oil
company. You can say anything you want about us.”
That’s true.
More to the point, Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump.
If you go back through the news clippings of the Trump
years, you’ll find about 453,681 examples of sentences such as “President Trump
today asserted without evidence,” or “Trump claims, contrary to the evidence,”
that sort of thing. Some of these were tendentious, but often they were true.
“Donald Trump claimed without evidence” is almost a redundancy. Trump didn’t
care about evidence even on those rare occasions when the evidence was on his
side.
Biden, who resembles Trump much more closely than
partisans on either side are ready to admit, is big on making assertions that
are contrary to the evidence, too, e.g., his longstanding false claim that his
wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver. Biden peddles outrageous lies
for political purposes and has for the whole of his very long career. Remember
his claim that Mitt Romney intended to put African Americans “back in chains”?
That’s typical Joe Biden poison.
The man doesn’t give a fig for the facts of the case.
Energy prices, along with many other prices, are under
upward pressure because of economic factors that are reasonably well
understood. There is no evidence of the collusion that Biden blames for it, but
you won’t see that fact mentioned much outside of the pages of the Wall
Street Journal or this magazine. No evidence is necessary when
denouncing an oil company.
The media double-standard is an old and tiresome
complaint from conservatives, but that doesn’t mean conservatives are wrong
about it. This has serious consequences: NPR publishes breathless accounts of
“exploding bullets” that don’t quite exactly actually exist and
nobody bats an eye, but if your right-wing uncle on Facebook hits “like” on a
tasteless attack on Hunter Biden, it’s a disinformation campaign that means the
end of democracy as we know it.
Still, there is more in play here than media bias.
President Biden has launched a federal investigation into
oil and gas companies on grounds that are entirely pretextual — and, even as
dumb as he is, the president must know that the investigation is completely
unwarranted. Put another way: The president is using federal law-enforcement
powers to harass innocent Americans, threatening them with litigation or
criminal charges in order to deflect attention from the part his own policies
have played in exacerbating inflation and other unwelcome economic
developments.
That is an abuse of power, and a naked one. In a sane
world, that’s precisely the sort of thing you’d impeach a
president over. If misusing federal police powers with malice aforethought in
the pursuit of political gain isn’t a presidential misdemeanor, then there are
no presidential misdemeanors, and everything is permitted.
Of course, conservatives who spent years defending
Trump’s lies and distortions as political necessities and excusing every abuse
of power on the same grounds — “He
fights!” — are poorly positioned to complain about Biden. Those
so-called conservatives (in truth they are anything but conservative) who have
contempt for the rule of law, institutions, and procedure — who believe, like
Sohrab Ahmari, that right-wing politics should be an exercise in “enmity” in
which rightists work toward “discrediting their opponents and weakening or
destroying their institutions” at whatever price — can hardly complain about a
politically motivated investigation or two. The doctor can hardly protest his
own prescription.
At this point, the usual cliché-addled nincompoops will
weigh in with the usual denunciations of the Marquess of Queensbury. But what
we end up with in such a fight is not the bruising victory of conservative
governance but instead an ever-escalating arms race of petty corruption, a
political and moral race to the bottom in which there is no prize for getting
there first. Banana-republic stuff such as Biden’s phony gasoline-price
investigation ends up being not just a common mode of politics but the only mode
of politics.
Unfortunately, the lesson too many on the right seem to
have learned from left-wing demagogues is that Republicans should be more like
their rivals; the Democrats, being impervious to education and example, seem to
have taken approximately the same lesson from the Trump years. And so they will
countenance Biden’s abuses — this one and others — as a matter of political
necessity.
As usual, we have failed to understand that virtue in
public affairs isn’t some airy-fairy consideration for the afterlife and the
history books — it is an eminently practical concern, because it is impossible
to maintain a free society without it.
No comments:
Post a Comment