June 6, 2022 at 11:33 a.m.
It is hard to conceive of a president making so many blunders, but we have been alive to give witness to them: the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe, the debacle ongoing at the open southern border, historic inflation, the shutdown of domestic energy production, his appeasement of the Iranian regime, well, we could keep going, but we don't have enough space.
Then there are the gaffes. The latest last week was his insistence that one of the most popular handguns in the United States, the 9 mm, is a high-caliber weapon that should be banned. Doing so would ban about half, if not more, of all the handguns in America. He also said people couldn't buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. Both of his statements are patently false, and the White House walked the whole handgun commentary back.
He called Vladimir Putin a war criminal and said he could not remain in power, retracting that in an op-ed later obviously written by whoever is the real president. Some days ago he said the U.S. would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan - a departure from long-standing U.S. foreign policy and, once again, the White House walked it back.
We could keep going here, too, but there is no need: The American people have noticed. Indeed, as research from the analytical group 538 shows, Joe Biden is the least popular president in U.S. history at this point in his term, with his approval rating even lower than Jimmy Carter's. One could argue the point, we suppose - he's in a neck-and-neck race with Gerald Ford for dead last.
Part of the reason for the unpopularity is the incompetence, and part of it is due to the obvious cognitive decline. But a major reason Americans don't like Biden is because we know all too well that the economic pain the administration is inflicting on us is by design. It is the policy agenda fashioned by the far-left.
Americans know this, and they reject it.
Take gas prices, to cite just one policy area. Gas prices this past holiday weekend were the highest ever recorded - using AAA data, the national average price for a gallon of regular gas popped to $4.62 - and many industry analysts now fear that the average price could soar past $5 by Independence Day.
In addition to the economic toll, what's sad about this fuel inflation is that it's by design, as columnist Marc Thiessen pointed out in a Washington Post column this week. The Biden administration wants high gas prices to force Americans away from fossil fuels and to electric vehicles, and it wants it not gradually but immediately.
Speaking in Tokyo on May 23, Biden appeared to make another of his trademark gaffes when he embraced exorbitant fuel prices: "And when it comes to the gas prices, we're going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over."
Only this time it was no gaffe but an actual policy statement, Thiessen pointed out in his column. No doubt the administration didn't want him to say it out loud, but it was no gaffe, which Thiessen demonstrated by pointing to congressional testimony on May 19 by Interior secretary Deb Haaland, who refused to say that gas prices were too high, despite repeated and direct questioning from Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming).
So Biden's gaffes are a big problem, but when the gaffes turn out not to be gaffes at all, they are also a big problem.
And they are a disaster for average Americans. As Thiessen also pointed out, the administration may be trying to force Americans to buy more expensive electric cars, just as taxes on tobacco compelled Americans to quit smoking, but most Americans can't afford the vehicles and, even if they could, there's no infrastructure for them - there are fewer than 46,000 EV public charging sites when a million would be needed, and there's long-range funding for only about half of that capacity.
What Thiessen didn't mention is the large-scale and environmentally dangerous mining that it takes to produce electric vehicles. There is a cut-throat race to mine the nickel needed in lithium vehicle batteries. In the Philippines, to cite just one example, a giant nickel mine is plowing right into an ancient rainforest, having won a rezone to expand its footprint from four square miles to 14 in the delicate ecosystem.
Open-pit and sulfide mining is pushing into sensitive areas around the developing world, driven by the demands of climate change activists, and it is accelerating - the demand for nickel is expected to mushroom by a factor of 10 in the next eight years alone.
All of which is why Joe Biden is the worst president ever, so far. He is the only president to have fully embraced a far-left agenda of this magnitude. He single-handedly has shut down domestic oil production - in his presidency we have gone from being a net energy exporter to begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil - impaling middle America on the sword of inflation, many now unable to cope, all without any plan for replacement infrastructure, without any care for the world's environment, and without any compassion for average Americans.
It's an "incredible transition," after all. Americans should be happy to pay the price.
All of this parrots the globalists who hailed the original "incredible transition" in trade began under Bill Clinton, a transition that resulted in transnational corporations shuttering U.S. factories, killing jobs, and decimating the U.S heartland so they could move to the developing world, where they could maximize profits without worrying about labor laws or even mediocre wages or environmental regulations.
Biden's agenda might called the Incredible Transition 2.0.
Only this transition - not limited to energy policy - is even worse because it is wrapped in the worldview of a woke elite that increasingly desires unprecedented power. The original Incredible Transition was acutely about economics; Biden's Incredible Transition is about economic and absolute political power, about the destruction of national sovereignty itself. The medical tyranny of the pandemic was just the beginning; Biden's back-room deals to hand over American sovereignty to the World Health Organization, as we detail in this edition, is part of that ongoing effort, as is Justin Trudeau's attempt to ban all handguns in Canada.
The suppression of liberty across the western world is full-blown, as elites in every country boast that it is time to violate basic rights so they can "protect us."
As all elite totalitarian ideologies are, Biden's agenda is baked in hypocrisy. We are supposed to forego our gas-fueled cars and reduce our standard of living by downsizing our carbon footprints, while elite climate-change activists fly around the world in their private jets, which by themselves annually produce more carbon than the entire nation of Denmark.
We are supposed to give up our guns while the elite parade around with fleets of armed guards. We are supposed to give up the 9 mm guns we keep to keep our families safe, but the Secret Service, which uses the 9mm to protect the president, would be able to keep theirs. The servants who wait on the elites at their extravagant galas must wear masks, but the elites are free to show their beautiful faces.
Today's globalist elite is all about rules for thee but not for me. It is decadent and rotten morally, and that is what is worst about Joe Biden's presidency. The Biden agenda is not just re-gutting the American heartland economically, it is imprisoning us in a moral fabric woven by the wealthy woke for the wealthy woke and that must be worn as a yoke by the rest of us. It seeks the outright transfer of political power.
That Biden's administration has succumbed to this political cancer, far more so than any other president, makes him the worst president ever, at least so far.
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