Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
Has America Finally Had It With Joe Biden?
Joe Biden’s personal approval rating is at historic lows; almost all his policies do not poll fifty percent. He is behind Trump in almost all the swing states. And now he lies serially even to sympathetic interviewers. In short, finally Biden has been exposed for what he always was and represented.
Senator and Vice President Joe Biden was always sort of a buffoon. He is by nature a grandstander who handsomely profited from his office while posing as good ole Joe from Scranton.
He is a blowhard meddler, one who proverbially has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades (Robert Gates),” from dissenting on the Bin Laden raid to his trisection of Iraq scheme.
He is a fabulist who believes that the more animated he misleads and slurs (“semi-fascists” “fat”, “lying dog-faced pony soldier”, “chumps”, “dregs of society”, etc), the more likely he is to get away with it. He is a confessed plagiarist. And he has also invented much of his biography, from would be star, college-scholarship athlete and brilliant law student to semi-truck driver and jailed civil rights activist. His uncle, we are instructed, was eaten by cannibals. Joe assures us that he was the first in his family to go to college.
And he is a racist with a repertory of racial taunts and smears unrivaled among modern politicians (“junkie”, “boy”, “you ain’t black”, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”, “put y’all back in chains”, the Corn Pop and golden-leg hairs sagas, the “racial jungle” memes, the strange brag about Delaware as a “slave state” (e.g., "You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state.”), and his encomia for the old Democratic racists of the Senate from former Klansman Robert Byrd (Biden’s self-described “mentor” and “guide”) to segregationist James Eastland (“never called me boy”).
Biden has always had a mean streak that explains why for years he lied about the tragic, fatal auto accident of his first wife and child, using it to libel the truck driver, who was neither drunk nor culpable but smeared publicly for years by Biden as intoxicated and guilty. For years he ignored the pleas of the trucker’s family to please stop libeling an innocent driver.
Biden just told his greatest whopper that inflation was at 9 percent (actually 1.4 percent) when he took office and yet soon spiked to 9 percent due to his reckless deficit spending and money printing spree.
But recently Biden has reached a nadir and even the Left is resigned to him as a mere construct. After bragging after October 7 that his support for Israel was rock-solid he is now cutting off military aid as it attempts finally to end the Hamas murderous threat—a reversion to old Joe Biden who in his long past has previously threatened to cut off Israel while boasting later that anyone who did so was reprehensible. (Leveraging congressional mandated aid for political advantage is precisely the (false) allegation of politicking that the Democrats demagogued to impeach Trump—to the then cheers of Biden himself).
But his sell out of Israel is but a small tessera in his election pandering mosaic. He will again begin drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve to lower gas prices during the campaign. He has badgered Ukraine not to hit Russian oil facilities. He has illegally forgiven billions in student loan aid to regain the elite youth vote. And as the campaign season begins, so too Biden suddenly poses as a border enforcer—after letting in nearly 10-million illegal aliens.
Biden has always put the agendas of his own and his family above the national interest. We witnessed that when he bragged that he fired the Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his son’s Burisma skullduggery. The Biden consortium is corrupt and was enriched with over $25 million through foreign interests’ assurance that Senator and Vice President Joe Biden would deliver on their quid pro quo investments in him.
Any other major politician who habitually invaded the private space of women and preteens to blow on their hair, gobble their necks, squeeze and hug far too long, and be accused of sexual assault would have long since been cancelled by the left.
Add the old disturbing narrative of a naked Vice President Joe Biden exiting his pool in front of female secret service agents, the showering with his pre-teen daughter, the Frank Biden and Hunter naked selfies, and there seems something eerie among the Biden family.
Despite fierce denials, the entire lawfare scheme directed at Trump originated with the White House. Biden was always said to have been exasperated with Merrick Garland for not hastily enough going after Trump.
The misadventurous Georgia prosecutor Nathan Wade met with and was tutored by the White House counsel’s office. One of the top Biden DOJ prosecutors was dispatched to rescue the bungling Alvin Bragg farce.
Jack Smith, appointed by the Biden DOJ to go after Biden’s 2024 presidential rival, timed his indictments to coincide with the campaign season, even as Smith’s office mishandled classified files taken at Mar-a-Lago to bolster its prosecution—and then lied about it.
Hard-won American deterrence was destroyed by the humiliation in Afghanistan and the lies surrounding the disaster, the Chinese balloon flight and the misinformation about it, the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and on the Red Sea, and the accompanying disinformation from the White House.
Such recklessness abroad is the bookend to the home front where massive borrowing, the destruction of the border, crippling inflation, spiraling crime, and the epidemic of “progressive” anti-Semitism on campuses have made American almost unrecognizable.
Again, at the heart of this Biden catastrophe is the Faustian bargain of 2020 when unelectable leftist candidates dropped out in unison to use a fumbling Biden as their more presentable veneer. So he was foisted upon the nation to serve as “moderate” cover to advance a radical, veritable Obama third-term. In that sense, his duties were ceremonial—as the hard-left channeled through him the most radical agenda in U.S. history, and found his debility and dementia advantageous—the country be damned.
If Biden makes it to and through the convention, he and his record remain indefensible. And so expect his campaign largely to be waged through lawfare against Trump, and massive infusions of leftist cash to ensure record mail-in and early voting. In the campaign Biden will become an afterthought, a ghost, vapor, as his party seeks to construct the entire election one of leftwing, blue-city prosecutors, judges, and juries versus serial defendant Trump.
But will Nemesis first catch up to Biden’s long record of hubris and dishonesty?
https://twitter.com/VDHanson/status/1790156802296090684
