Chris Hedges | American Republic IS DEAD
Under Mayorkas, deaths due to drug overdoses topped 100,000 for the first time ever, the vast majority from fentanyl, imported from China and Mexico across our southern border.”
If Biden lifts Trump-era curbs on migrants entering the U.S., the number of illegals coming in will jump to 5 million or more per year.
“By the end of Joe Biden’s first term,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, “nearly 20% of all Americans will be here illegally.” Mayorkas’ excuse for lying is that he works 18 hours a day. “When Republicans take back control of the House this fall,” Liz Peek suggests, “they should impeach Mayorkas and let him catch up on his beauty sleep.”
Biden's Deathly Presidency
For four years under President Trump, America enjoyed peace, security, and unparalleled prosperity. Trump's presidency was a historic era of good times in which we began to regain faith in the American Dream. Now we have the nightmare, and the death and destruction that go with it.
Yes, the Trump Era was prosperous, with historically low unemployment rates, low inflation, energy independence, and rising wages. But aside from that, the most important thing about Trump's presidency was the fact that Americans were secure, as they had not been under Obama and certainly are not under Biden. Under Trump, America was in so many senses vibrant and "alive" with pride in our country and hope for its future.
Now we have regular mass shootings in which citizens disarmed by the State have no way to defend themselves. Overseas, we have a war in Ukraine, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and Iran developing nuclear weapons with the encouragement of the Biden administration. The common thread is death and the fear that goes with it. And this does not even include Biden's aggressive defense of abortion on demand.
Under President Trump, I lived without fear. I knew that Trump supported my right to defend my home and that he supported the police who defended me as well. Just having the president and his administration on my side made me breathe easier. America was moving in the right direction, as was confirmed by every opinion poll during Trump's time in office before COVID was unleashed.
Long-term death rates are more a matter of demographics than policy, and they have been rising ever since Obama took office in 2008. But murder rates, deaths in war and civil unrest, drug overdose deaths, and accidental deaths are attributable to policy, and they have been rising under Biden, even during his short time in office. Under Biden, the U.S. murder rate, which had been declining under President Trump, is the highest in 25 years. According to former N.Y. police commissioner Howard Safir, the spike in violence is partly attributable to lack of support for police and soft-on-crime prosecutors. And it is Biden, with his anti-police rhetoric and refusal to prosecute (as in the case of those picketing Justice Kavanaugh's home), who is responsible for this climate of anarchy.
Now I plan my trips carefully, avoid eye contact with strangers, and carry only a driver's license and credit card. I drive inconspicuously as well, given the explosion of road rage incidents.
The most galling thing is that Biden never says a word about the victims of crime unless he can twist the incident into an anti-gun lecture, and he takes no action to protect anyone, especially law-abiding citizens in middle-class neighborhoods like my own. In this and so many other ways, he seems on the side of those who wish to destroy us. It's no accident that murder rates are spiraling at home and war is breaking out overseas. Both are a response to Biden's weakness, and death is the consequence.
I fear there will be more death ahead. I expect an invasion in Taiwan, Moldova, or Finland, and new outbreaks of violence in the Middle East involving either Iran or its surrogates. The incomprehensible Iran deal, which Biden is pushing, would "make Biden 'the biggest funder of terrorism in the world,'" according to Rep. Jim Banks. "Terrorism" is not just a derogatory word; it is the act of murdering innocent human beings, including women and children. Hasn't that fact entered into Biden's Iran deal calculations?
Biden's weakness has emboldened our enemies, and their actions pose a threat to our security. This is the way major wars begin. They can be prevented only by the projection of force of the kind we saw under President Trump, and Biden projects about as much force as a lady's fan. His weakness will get us into another war, and our young men and women will die in that war. There is death hanging over us, and Biden seems oblivious, fumbling with his note cards to find some kind of answer.
There is a new national mood in America unlike anything I've seen since the 1960s: a sense of foreboding and caution based on the very real threat of violence and collapse. There are more threats to our country, including the wealth destruction of inflation, to which Biden simply rolls his eyes, chuckles, and whispers some idiotic riposte. There are more criminal gangs, and Biden just welcomes more in. There is more road rage, more random shooting, more felons out on no bond/low bond. And there is a callous and brutal disregard for the lives of the unborn.
In response to the mounting violence, Biden seems remote, fuddling with his microphone like a man slipping into dementia, and those around him seem inept, if not callous, including his new press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who is said to have "frequently stumbled" during her first weeks. A president who is weak and advisers who are incompetent and anti-American to boot — that is a recipe for disaster, and disaster will end, as it always does, in poverty, destruction, and death.
There are bullies in the world who watched as Biden stumbled out of Afghanistan, and bullies don't have much respect for doddering fools who just want to survive a four-year term and leave a mess for someone else to clean up.
As a citizen, it is difficult to watch my country besieged by violence. Biden's presidency has been deadly in every respect: turning off economic growth and imposing environmental restrictions, proposing inflation-adjusted cuts in national defense while paying off student loans, and putting citizens at risk with his anti-police rhetoric.
There is little chance of a second Biden term, but just another two and a half years is painful to imagine. How many thousands will lose their lives because of one incompetent and wrong-headed leader? How far will America go into danger and destruction? And how much more difficult will it be for our next president, Trump or a Trump lookalike, to repair the damage and Make America Safe Again?
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Biden goes into cloud cuckoo land on inflation
Joe Biden is either stupid, or thinks you're stupid.
Because how else does anyone explain a speech like this, to the supposed working stiffs of the AFL-CIO Tuesday?
Biden, visibly angry: "I don't want to hear anymore of these lies about reckless spending. We're changing people's lives!" pic.twitter.com/0I3OgmIJGD
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 14, 2022
No more lies about reckless spending? Here's the whole thing:
WATCH LIVE: President Joe Biden speaks at AFL-CIO convention https://t.co/NGF1mEBc8K
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) June 14, 2022
There's plenty to dislike about this, from the 1940s proletarian vernacular to the heaping helping of old hokey Irish Catholic gesturing, as if the abortion president were actually Catholic and not a guy who plays one on T.V. for political benefit.
The worst thing about it though was his incessant mockery of his runaway federal spending, which is the root of the current inflation. He wants more of it. More spending, more inflation, it doesn't get more obvious than that.
The appropriate response was here:
It’s truly shocking that the President of the United States of America doesn’t know what causes inflation.
— Shawn (@sps59t) June 15, 2022
Because at a time of an 8.6% inflation rate not seen since Jimmy Carter put on a sweater, it's pretty obvious Joe Biden doesn't know what causes inflation. Or he does, but he doesn't want you to know. He's mocking the hard reality, effectively admitted by Democrat economists such as Larry Summers, that inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," which was what Milton Friedman posited without compromise.
Biden has spent up a storm already through his largely unnecessary $1.9 trillion pandemic aid package in early 2021, doling out stimulus checks and paying people not to work, forcing the Federal Reserve to print money to pay for it. The Wall Street Journal called it "a tidal wave of federal stimulus."
Once printed, that money stays in circulation and prices across the board rise to absorb the excess cash. That's the verdict of the Federal Reserve itself, which ran a study on the matter and found just that.
A new analysis from the San Francisco Fed finds that U.S. core inflation is higher than other nations – and attributes a part of it to President Biden’s decision to continue unemployment bonuses and government stimulus after the pandemic receded.
Democrat economists who care about their reputations certainly have said so -- here's one:
Jason Furman, a Democrat who was chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, said the latest effort tackled the wrong crisis. “We fought the last war,” he said.
Here's another:
As you may know, early last year Summers sounded the alarm about President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it was the 'least responsible' economic policy in 40 years and that it could engender significant and persistent inflation. Turns out Summers, a self-described progressive, was right.
...who's now pointing out:
"The Fed's idea used to be that it removed the punchbowl before the party got good," [former Democrat Treasury Secretary Larry] Summer[s] said. "Now, the Fed's doctrine is that it will only remove the punchbowl after it sees some people staggering around drunk."
Grosser still, Biden envisions himself as another LBJ, famous for his 'war on poverty' and Vietnam war spending:
Mr. Biden likened his ambitions to those of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society during the 1960s. “This is the first time we’ve been able to, since the Johnson administration and maybe even before that, to begin to change the paradigm,” he said after signing the stimulus into law in March.
He apparently didn't get the memo about what followed from that LBJ spendathon -- a ruined presidency for Johnson, which scuppered his bid for a second term, and more to the point, after a small GOP interval characterized by government expansion, the Carter years, with stagflation galore, and broken only by Fed action from tight-money Fed chief Paul Volcker and the entry of the great Ronald Reagan, both of whom reversed the terrible trend.
Not so Old Joe, whose economic brain shut off right about when he was elected senator in 1973.
Biden's proposing more spending, more subsidies -- for prescription drugs, day care, student loan forgiveness, and a host of other idiocies, plus tax hikes for business (to keep their hiring down).
Biden is still blaming oil companies for the ongoing inflation, as if oil companies themselves were not subject to the higher transport, production, labor, and materials costs of taking oil out of the ground, vowing to punish them with "emergency powers" if they don't pump more oil to increase supply. He's begging the Saudis to produce more oil, despite an amazing array of oil resources available in this country, production of which he has largely shut down, as well as the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada. He's also reportedly releasing another round of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve, as if the first huge release had had any effect. It didn't. He's blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin. He's blaming the global economy. He's blaming Republicans for not approving his latest spendathons.
What he's not doing is addressing inflation itself and runaway federal spending that created it. It's as if he doesn't know, or thinks you don't know.
Because the flip side of what Biden is claiming is that he cut the deficit, which right there holds the premise that runaway spending is inflationary.
The hell he has. He's kept the deficit higher than it would have been as pandemic programs from the goverment have expired. He's also increased the national debt.
Here's lefty FactCheck:
In recent speeches, President Joe Biden has been misleadingly taking credit for cutting federal deficits by historic amounts, though most of the reduction in deficits is the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending. Deficits fell between fiscal year 2020 and 2021 far less than initially projected after Biden added to them with more emergency pandemic and infrastructure spending.
And the deficits under Biden and beyond are projected to remain historically high compared with pre-pandemic levels.
In recent remarks, Biden took credit for cutting the deficit by $350 billion in FY 2021 and claimed his proposed budget for FY 2022 will cut the deficit by $1.3 trillion this year.
The whole thing reeks of a president being out of touch on basic economics, and worse still, unable to do anything but make things worse.
Worse yet, does not have any solutions for it, and therefore things are not going to get better.
And speaking of out of touch, here's an ironic aside, observed by my old colleague Sean Higgins from my Investor's Business Daily days:
Pretty sure that Joe Biden must be the first U.S. president ever to vow at the AFL-CIO's convention that he's going to build grain silos in the Ukraine. #AFLCIOConv
— Sean Geary Higgins (@SeanGHiggins) June 14, 2022
It's about par for this sorry presidency. This clown needs an intervention.
Image: Screen shot from Townhall video, via Twitter
Team of Fools: Biden’s Cabinet Picks Prove He is Unfit to Lead
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote an acclaimed book called Team of Rivals in which she described Abraham Lincoln’s recruitment of the ablest men of the time for his cabinet.
We are witness to the exact opposite. Joe Biden seems intent on assembling a team of the least able. I’m calling it Team of Fools.
I have written extensively about Biden’s shortcomings. Nothing exceeds his capacity for choosing the wrong people. It would be difficult to zero in on Biden’s worst choice, but his Homeland Security Secretary would be a good candidate.
Alejandro Mayorkas has me somewhat confused. I can’t tell if he is a consummate liar or just plain delusional. Mayorkas claimed that his message to migrants heading to the U.S. is: “Do not come.” Then he declared that, “Our border is not open.” He also asserted his department has “a handle” on migration. “We’re not letting people loose,” he said. More blatant lies never have been uttered.
In direct contradiction to his statements and his sworn duty to uphold the law, Mayorkas deliberately has allowed more than a million to cross our southern border illegally.
“The vast majority of those people are single adults—not families fleeing poverty,” said Liz Peek on Fox News, “and the total includes 40 men on the terror watch list.
Under Mayorkas, deaths due to drug overdoses topped 100,000 for the first time ever, the vast majority from fentanyl, imported from China and Mexico across our southern border.”
If Biden lifts Trump-era curbs on migrants entering the U.S., the number of illegals coming in will jump to 5 million or more per year.
“By the end of Joe Biden’s first term,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, “nearly 20% of all Americans will be here illegally.” Mayorkas’ excuse for lying is that he works 18 hours a day. “When Republicans take back control of the House this fall,” Liz Peek suggests, “they should impeach Mayorkas and let him catch up on his beauty sleep.”
Not to be outdone, we have Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellin.
Listen to the congressional hearings—Yellin sounds like a homeless person. Since Biden took over, the price of gasoline and other key commodities have doubled. “Not only did Janet Yellen fail to see any of this coming,” said Tucker Carlson, “Yellen more than any single person in America caused it in the first place. If you’re mad about the current state of the economy, Janet Yellin is the first person you should blame.”
When asked about inflation, Yellen originally predicted that, “Inflation, if it happens, will be transitory.” Now her excuse is that no one could have anticipated the record inflation that is plaguing Biden’s presidency.
Liz Peek disagrees. Yellen caused rising inflation, says Peek, through reckless monetary policy. “Most economists agree that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan spilled too much money into the recovering economy at the same time that we had goods shortages, sparking rising prices.” Why didn’t Yellen see it coming? And what is her response? “I do expect inflation to remain high,” Yellen says, “although I very much hope it will be coming down now.”
“Is that where we are,” asks Tucker Carlson, “very much hoping? In a functioning country, Janet Yellen would be in a retirement home. How can this person be our Treasury Secretary when we are in deep waters?”
Carlson is not the only one who is angry. “I can’t think of a more inept Treasury Secretary over the past 30 years,” said journalist and media host Charlie Gasparino. “They spent trillions of dollars on nothing and they expected no inflation. It was the textbook recipe for inflation.” Peek’s conclusion: “Yellen turns out to be yet another shill for Democrats’ left-wing policies.”
And now we come to little Pete Buttigieg, our stalwart Secretary of Transportation. His qualification for the job? Buttigieg was mayor of a small town in Indiana. Joe Concha, writing in The Hill, calls this “amateur hour.” We have what Concha refers to as “a massive supply-chain breakdown exploding across the country that will impact every American, particularly the lower and middle classes. Restaurants, stores and small businesses that provide products and services to people will all be negatively affected as the cost to the consumer goes up.”
What did Buttigieg do about it? “He took a months-long parental leave,” said Liz Peek, “after adopting twins with his husband.” Buttigieg attempted to defend his performance by saying, “We’re doing a lot.” He should have stayed out on paternity leave. The country would be better off.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is Biden’s henchman for the administration’s 1984 agenda.
Garland has made it clear that parents protesting the woke indoctrination of their children are domestic terrorists. He has directed the FBI and U.S. attorney offices to crack down on parents by characterizing their protests, which are completely legal, as crimes. "Attorney General Garland is weaponizing the DOJ,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, “by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through intimidation."
Garland has referred to January 6th as an “invasion.” He said it was the most dangerous threat to American democracy ever. According to Steve McCann in American Thinker, Garland identified the protestors as “domestic extremists,” which has become a euphemism for Republicans.
“He wants you to believe and wants history to record,” said Tucker Carlson, “that January 6th was an attempted insurrection by white supremacist revolutionaries bent on taking over this country. Because of January 6th, we must now use law enforcement and military force to arrest, imprison, and otherwise crush anyone who leads opposition to Joe Biden’s government. That’s their position,” said Carlson. “They say it out loud.”
I could stop now, but we have a large cast of contenders for runner-up. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, for example. “Granholm’s credentials for the job appear to be that she has swallowed Biden’s climate agenda hook, line and sinker, and especially his affection for electric vehicles,” says Liz Peek. “It certainly wasn’t her deep understanding of U.S. energy markets. She apparently knows nothing about U.S. oil production or how world energy markets work.” She believes that climate is the nation’s number one challenge. “Granholm’s grandiose green plans were doubtless a hit in the faculty lounge at University of California, Berkeley, where she taught,” said Peek. “That’s where they, and she, belong.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin deserves a nomination for overseeing what Peek calls “one of the most catastrophic military events in our nation’s history—the horrifically mismanaged pull-out from Afghanistan.” Austin’s participation contributed to the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and thousands of Afghans. Billions in war materiel was left behind for the Taliban.
Let’s not forget Biden’s new Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. "If press secretaries reflect an administration,” writes American Thinker's Andrea Widburg, “Biden has just the right person in Jean-Pierre. She's driven by identity politics and otherwise knows nothing." Going forward, we can expect an avalanche of doubletalk and weak apologies for Biden's foul-ups. We can also expect a lot of divisive rhetoric about race, race, and more race.
Last but certainly not least is Biden’s pick for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. In selecting Jackson, race and gender were given precedence over qualifications and competence. Her record of being lenient toward sex offenders, together with her dissimulating answers about “what is a woman” and critical race theory suggest that she does not belong on the high court. Where does she belong? With the rest of Biden’s third-rate choices. She will fit right in.
Ed Brodow is a conservative political commentator and bestselling author of nine books including his latest, America On Its Knees: The Cost of Replacing Trump with Biden. His website is www.edbrodowpolitics.com.
Image: Linnaea Mallette, via Public Domain Pictures (cropped) // CC0 public domain
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