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"It has to get worse before it can get better." As much as it pains us to see the destruction wreaked all across the fruited plain by the incompetence and malevolence of the Biden maladministration, there's another old adage that comes into play: "You get the government you deserve." Our current far-left regime holds office because Americans allow them to; this will only cease when Americans decide not to allow it anymore.
To that end, it's helpful for the hurt to come as fast and hard as possible, and in the most blatant ways imaginable so that not even the tech lords can hide the obvious. We've had some bad weeks before in America, to say the least - but your humble correspondent can't think of one in which so many different, apparently unrelated, but politically devastating events took place.
From the beginning of the 2020 election campaign, the Democrats have trumpeted what came to be called as the "Green New Deal" - a rainbows-and-unicorns fantasy world where high-speed trains magically run down every street Polar-Express-style, powered by invisible windmills and solar panels that don't kill vast numbers of birds nor require environmentally-destructive slave labor. To push this utopian dream forward, all the Democrat candidates promised to kneecap fossil fuels in every way possible, even lying and contradicting themselves as needed to push the chosen narrative.
Once in office, unlike most Republicans, they started fulfilling their most extreme promises, even to the extent of bankrupting blue states that gather major petrodollars from fossil fulels extracted from federal lands. It's simple logic: in order to not burn fossil fuels and Save the Planet, it is absolutely necessary to... not burn fossil fuels, or as the lefty slogan goes, "Keep it in the ground!"
Thus, it was nothing less than a godsend when the Russian criminal gang Darkside hacked the software of Colonial Pipeline, which supplies half the fuel of the entire East Coast, shutting down the flow just as summer driving season began. This single act did more to "Keep it in the ground!" even than Mr. Biden's regulations, since without a functioning pipeline, there's no way to get the oil out of the ground, there being no other place to put it.
Instead of celebrating, though, the Biden administration took a torch to their most beloved regulations, suspending rules limiting how long tanker-truck drivers can work, waiving laws forcing domestic shipping to be performed by unionized American sailors, and even allowing environmentally-unfriendly gasoline mixes to be used. Isn't that supposed to be Republican policy?
No doubt the fact that near 90% of DC gas stations had no gas to sell affected these decisions, but this is precisely the outcome that Democrats want, as they've publicly stated many times. The humanitarians at Darkside simply gave Americans a timely taste of the objective of Mr. Biden's goals, to back up his many statements and written policies leading in this direction.
What - you don't like the result? Then perhaps it's appropriate to consider voting for someone other than a Democrat. We can tell woke suburban women this until we're as blue in the face as they are in the voting booth, but when they can't fuel their Suburbans to drive to the next global-warming protest, perhaps their two brain cells can put two and two together to reach four, as racist as that that concept might be.
We mourned in 2008 that so many Americans seem to have abandoned the former custom of "doing my duty to God and my country." As individuals gave up doing their duty, it's no surprise that the government as a whole would abandon the most fundamental duties that go back to the very origin of government - protection of citizens from enemies, both domestic and foreign.
Our government used to understand this. The wooden warship U.S.S Constitution, a.k.a. Old Ironsides, was build specifically to protect American sailors from Muslim powers based in North Africa which had made a habit of enslaving any Americans they could catch on the high seas. The "persuaded" the Muslim powers to knock it off, giving rise to the "shores of Tripoli" part of our Marine Hymn.
The Carter administration, in contrast, did nothing when Iranians stormed our Embassy in Tehran, a clear act of war.
During a series of "mostly peaceful" riots last year, billions of dollars worth of property damage was done while cops stood down and let rioters riot. The police officers we've talked to about it were indignant - "Our friends in Seattle know how to stop this, they could shut it down right away but the politicians won't let them!"
Many blue state governments deliberately abandoned their duty to protect citizens against domestic enemies.
What about foreign enemies? When it became clear that the Colonial Pipeline had been shut down by a buch of hackers from outside America, the Biden administration had little to say. Microsoft News tells us:
Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber & Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger said it's a "private sector decision" to determine if the company should pay the ransom.
At least one former official is aware of the problem, but what does the Biden administration plan to do?
"Ransomware crews have been operating out of Russia for years, with great effect on our schools, on our state and local government agencies, on our health care facilities," he [Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security] said. "They have effectively the tacit approval of the Russian government, and it has to end." [emphasis added]
Asking duckduckgo.com to search for "infrastructure cyber attacks" gives many articles about successful penetrations of the computer systems which run water plants, electric grids, and other important utilities. As a practical matter, our government has shown itself to be impotent at protecting our businesses and even government data from foreign attackers - what good will another Executive Order do other than add more paperwork?
Yet more murderous rampages in the Middle East has always been the ultimate example of something that is not news, because it's been going on since time immemorial with no sign of ever stopping. Even supremely self-confident President Donald Trump doubted his ability to bring peace there.
But in what had to be a shock to everyone observing - it surely was to us - he actually made great progress in that happy direction - both formally, as he managed to get more Muslim countries to sign peace treaties with Israel than any president before him, and informally, as Hamas and their Iranian backers decided to lay low rather than abruptly be sent to meet Shaitan. Indeed, far from the apocalypse predicted from recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, promised but then welched by presidents for decades, he seemed to create the closest thing to peace that Israel's ever known.
Yes, well, it didn't even take three months of Mr. Biden fecklessness to bring that to a shattering end, as Hamas terrorists and Israel are now in what amounts to full-blown war. Arab mobs in Israel proper are burning down synagogues and Hamas missiles are incinerating city buses and schoolchildren alike.
In response, Israel is decapitating Hamas leadership and destroying Hamas headquarters in Gaza, a building that just happen to also house offices for AP and other news organizations which are equally opposed to Israel though less murderously so. The media bleats about this appalling attack on themselves, but that begs the question - if they don't even notice that they're sharing an office building with the terrorists whose side their "reporting" always takes, what good are they as journalists anyway?
It seems that Israel is determined to finally finish the job of cleaning out terrorists once and for all: Prime Minister Netanyahu said, "Whatever we don't do now, we will have to do in six months or a year." For its part, Hamas has been burning through years of stockpiled missiles - though at least they can easily afford more, thanks to Mr. Biden's restoring of millions of dollars of "humanitarian" funding previously embargoed by Mr. Trump.
Joe Biden's response? Well, as CNN's headline archly put it, "Battle between Israel and Hamas is an unwelcome surprise for Biden."
That would make Sleepy Joe literally the first human being in his entire long liftetime to be, that's right, surprised by violence in the Middle East! It's no joke, though - the Biden response, or rather lack thereof, shows that CNN was correct. Mr. Biden really didn't expect this fight - he'd gotten so used to Mr. Trump's peace effect he forgot how much effort went into it, and how unusual it is in contrast to the whole remainder of his own political career.
It's not really the job of the President of the United States to bring about peace in the Middle East, though it's a nice kudo if you can. But, just as with the gas crisis, Hamas missiles simply reveal the clear and public consequences of Democrat policy goals: full half of Democrats support the evil murderous terrorists, even while a majority of Jewish-Americans vote and donate to the selfsame party half of whom sides with the folks murdering their cousins.
This seems like it shouldn't be able to go on forever, yet it's been the case for decades. This week's events seem to be even more bloodily blatant than ever before; is it possible that, finally, Democrats voters and donors who don't believe in supporting terrorism will start to question their premises and wonder if, just possibly, Democrats might actually be the baddies?
So, Joe Biden isn't paying attention to what's going down in the Middle East - is he, perhaps, focusing on the American economy?
Apparently not, because when the quarterly job statistics were released this week, they were shocking to everyone - to business leaders, journalists, and, yes, the Biden administration. As the Marin Independent Journal reports:
Most experts agreed that after a yearlong pandemic, tens of millions of layoffs and widespread disease and death, a likely second straight month of nearly 1 million added jobs would send a clear signal: The economy was bounding back toward full health after a devastating recession.
Instead, the report was a clunker. To nearly everyone's surprise, employers added a comparatively paltry 266,000 jobs, down drastically from a gain of 770,000 in March, which itself was revised down from an initially much higher figure of 916,000.
One unfortunate newsreader was so unprepared that they did a double-take live on the air, thinking they must have misread the number as it came into their live feed. As ridiculous as this sounds, it's not entirely unreasonable - this was indeed the largest miss in history, or put another way, the biggest disconnect between "expert expectations" and actual reality we've ever seen even when compared to the many covid misstatements. And no, it wasn't caused by Easter being in March, as White House economic adviser Cecilia Rouse explained - Easter was in fact in April.
Today, there is more evidence our economy is moving in the right direction. But it's clear we have a long way to go.
Not too bad for China Joe, actually - he's half right, which is better than average. We do indeed have a long way to do. In no way, however, is this evidence that we are moving in the right direction; it is in fact the exact opposite, in so spectacular and brutal a fashion that even America's gaslight-friendly low-information-voters can't help seeing it.
Having Joe Biden in the Oval Office was never going to be good for the country, but we are starting to see a silver lining from his assumption of power: he's really bad at his job no matter who's standing behind the curtain!
This is a stark but heartening contrast with his old boss, Barack Hussein Obama, who was a terrible President in reality but did a fantastic job of playing a cool, competent, qualified leader on TV. Even with the entire sycophantic media carrying water for him, Joe Biden can barely appear conscious; competent doesn't enter the picture. And we need not even mention the odiously abrasive Kamala Harris.
If, as the saying goes, the history of the Obama administration is repeating itself, it is most definitely coming back as farce. Damaging? Yes. Destructive? Absolutely.
But, thankfully, clarifying, in a way "just telling" never can be. Sometimes you have to show people in order for them to learn. As the old saying goes, "Some people can learn by reading about others' experiences. Some people can learn by talking to other people. And some just gotta pee on the electric fence!"