“A great man giveth not a mean speech; yea, and a mean man giveth not a speech worth hearing.”
One point about Biden’s Wednesday night speech is not debatable: no one could have been disappointed. Biden’s speech was pure Biden: unimaginative, mean, probably plagiarized in parts and designed to sow discord even as he mouthed words about bring Americans together.
In another words, about what you would expect — probably just what you did expect.
He spoke of lifting his “hand off our family Bible” — you know, the one that endorses abortion, which Biden wants to fund in a thousand and one ways. Some Catholic bishops may have been watching: It has now been reported that some of them are considering stopping Biden from receiving communion.
He spoke of “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Not much nuance there, given that the crisis was created entirely by government, which locked down the country, snuffing out economic activity. So: Biden is pro draconian lookdown rules, and then complains about precisely the results of those lookdown rules. Please.
Then he called the Jan. 6 business “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Whether it was an “attack” is debatable — how do you attack a concept? But surely “our democracy” includes the concept of law and order — and certainly the summer’s Black Lives Matter riots were magnitudes worse that what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6. More than a dozen people were killed during the summer’s riots, and the property damage is estimated to be more than $1.4 billion. The only killing on Jan. 6 was by a yet-unidentified policeman of an unarmed woman as she was climbing through a window, not exactly a threatening position. Biden was just stoking racial unrest.
Here’s the old plagiarizer at work: “When I was sworn in, less than 1% of seniors were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. One hundred days later, nearly 70% of seniors are fully protected.” What he’s implying is that the previous president (whose name is never to be spoken) did a lousy job of getting people vaccinated. Except that the vaccine was only just coming online when Biden took office; and coming online only because of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Without Trump and without Warp Speed there wouldn’t be a vaccine. How difficult would it have been for Biden to tip his hat to that success story?
Too difficult, apparently.
And on he went, about a nurse who said, “Every shot feels like a dose of hope.” and about a Florida educator who “when she got vaccinated, she sat in her car and cried.”
“But tonight, I can say because of you — the American people — our progress these past one hundred days against one of the worst pandemics in history is one of the greatest logistical achievements our country has ever seen.” But it really wasn’t because of the American people as a whole, but only the drug companies — and the man who drove the Warp Speed effort.
And catch this line: “. . . more new jobs in the first one hundred days than any president on record.” Well, yes: government shuts down the economy, then opens it up and then takes credit for creating the jobs. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
For those who don’t like Biden, it was fun watching him stumble over his campaign slogan. The text read: “We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back better.” What he said was, “We have to do more than just build back better (stumble, stumble), we have to build . . . back . . . better.” No, no: we have to do better than that.
“Throughout our history, public investments and infrastructure have transformed America. The transcontinental railroad and interstate highways united two oceans and brought us into a totally new age of progress.”
Biden has forgotten — if he ever knew — the Crédit Mobilier scandal.
In the late 1800s, the federal government gave huge federal subsidies to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads which created the chance for corruption and which resulted in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, the first two transcontinental railroads, received federal subsidies of land and cash. Later, the Northern Pacific Railroad was given federal subsidies of land. But the Great Northern Railroad, under James J. Hill, received no federal subsidies, and it was so successful that it was the only transcontinental not to lose money during the Panic of 1893. Both the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Railroads went broke during the 1890s. They were early Solyndras — the Silicon Valley solar power company to which the Obama-Biden administration gave a half a billion dollars, which then promptly collapsed.
Then: “The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. And, it recognizes something I’ve always said: ‘Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country.’”
Could we have a citation to where you’ve said it before, please? The middle class undoubtedly did its part building this country, but where’d the money come from? Wall Street? Oops.
And the idea of pumping more money into woke educational establishments borders on dementia. We know, and have for years, that most people learn almost nothing in college. Promising more funds for education is just a bribe to people too stupid to realize they’ll be wasting precious years of their lives warehousing themselves off the grid.
And then this not-so-veiled attack on the 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump: “And, we won’t ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined [would those be the same agencies that determined that Trump was a Russian stooge?] — the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism,” a sentence followed immediately by, “And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation.” You just can’t make this stuff up.
There’s a lot of ruin in a country. And a lot of it was on display in the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday night.
Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.