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2021-09-20 Home Front: Politix
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Another Failed Presidency at Hand
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Bret Stephens
[ENGLISH.AAWSAT] A civilization "is born stoic and dies epicurean," wrote historian Will Durant about the Babylonians. Our civilization was born optimistic and enlightened, at least by the standards of the day. Now it feels as if it’s fading into paranoid senility.
 Joe The Big Guy Biden
...46th president of the U.S., who gives the term geriatric a bad name. He blames Afghans for losing Afghanistan....
Continued from Page 6
was supposed to be the man of the hour: a calming presence exuding decency, moderation and trust. As a candidate, he sold himself as a transitional president, a fatherly figure in the mold of George H.W. Bush who would restore dignity and prudence to the Oval Office after the mendacity and chaos that came before. It’s why I voted for him, as did so many others who once tipped red.
Instead, Biden has become the emblem of the hour: headstrong but shaky, ambitious but inept. He seems to be the last person in America to realize that, whatever the theoretical merits of the decision to withdraw our remaining troops from Afghanistan, the military and intelligence assumptions on which it was built were deeply flawed, the manner in which it was executed was a national humiliation and a moral betrayal, and the timing was catastrophic. We find ourselves commemorating the first great hard boy victory over America, in 2001, right after delivering the second great hard boy victory over America, in 2021. The 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center — water cascading into one void, and then trickling, out of sight, into another — has never felt more fitting.
Now Biden proposes to follow this up with his $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill, which The Times’s Jonathan Weisman describes as "the most significant expansion of the nation’s safety net since the war on poverty in the 1960s."
When Lyndon Johnson launched his war on poverty, its associated legislation — from food stamps to Medicare — passed with bipartisan majorities in a lopsidedly Democratic Congress. Biden has similar ambitions without the same political means. This is not going to turn out well.
Last week, Joe Manchin
...Dem senator-for-life from West Virginia. Manchin is one of the approximately one Dem senators who exhibits more integrity than Jello, often even representing his constituents...
, Democrat from West Virginia, published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in which he said, "I, for one, won’t support a $3.5 trillion bill, or anywhere near that level of additional spending, without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs."
Is the White House paying any more attention to Manchin’s message than it did to classified intelligence briefs over the summer warning of the prospect of a swift Taliban
...the Pashtun equivalent of men...
victory?
Maybe Biden supposes that the legislation, if passed, will prove increasingly popular over time, like Obamacare
...aka the Affordable Care Act, an ineptly designed and worse executed piece of legislation designed to bring 17 percent of the U.S. economy under the direct control of the government. The previous iteration, known as Hillarycare, was laughed out of Washington. This stinker was passed on a party-line vote without being read...
. That’s the optimistic scenario. Alternatively, he could suffer a legislative calamity like Crooked Hillary Clinton
...former first lady, former secretary of state, former presidential candidate, Conqueror of Benghazi, Heroine of Tuzla, formerly described by her supporters as the smartest woman in the world, usually described by the rest of us as The Thing That Wouldn't Go Away. Politix is not one of her talents, but it's something she keeps trying to do...
’s health care reform in 1994, which would have ended Bill Clinton
...former Democratic president of the U.S. Bill was the second U.S. president to be impeached, the first to deny that oral sex was sex, the first to have difficulty with the definition of the word is ...
’s presidency save for his sharp swing to the center, including ending "welfare as we know it" two years later.
Even the optimistic precedent was followed by a Democratic rout in 2010, when the party lost 63 House seats. If history repeats itself at the 2022 midterms, I doubt that even Joe Biden’s closest aides think he has the stamina to fight his way back in 2024. Has Kámala Harris
 Former Oakland mayor Willie Brown's former mistress, then a senatrix from California, and then a former 2020 Dem presidential hopeful. She dropped out because she was polling in negative numbers because of racism or misogyny or something like that. Her father is a Marxist professor emeritus at Stanford and her mother is an Indian of the Hindoo tribe. She is reputedly the proud descendant of a long line of women. Joe Biden picked her for her skin tone, feeling she could also bring in the Native American, women's, and bimbo votes. She's an outstanding exemplar of the Peter Principle, proudly displaying her level of competence in her handling of the Biden Border Surge
shown the political talent to pick up the pieces?
Perhaps what will save the Democrats is that Biden’s weakness will tempt Donald Trump
...Oh, noze! Not him!...
to seek (and almost certainly gain) the Republican nomination. But then there’s the chance he’d win the election.
There’s a way back from this cliff’s edge. It begins with Biden finding a way to acknowledge publicly the gravity of his administration’s blunders. The most shameful aspect of the Afghanistan withdrawal was the incompetence of the State Department when it came to expediting visas for thousands of people eligible to come to the United States. Accountability could start with Antony Blinken’s resignation.
The president might also seize the "strategic pause" Manchin has proposed and push House Democrats to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill without holding it hostage to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Infrastructure is far more popular with middle-of-the-road voters than the Great Society reprise that was never supposed to be a part of the Biden brand.
My sense is that Biden will do neither. The last few months have told us something worrying about this president: He’s proud, inflexible, and thinks he’s much smarter than he really is. That’s bad news for the administration. It’s worse news for a country that desperately needs to avoid another failed presidency.
The New York Times
... which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
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Posted by Fred 2021-09-20 00:00||
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