What a Difference a Year Makes

What a difference a year makes!

Matt Taibbi takes the full measure of Joe Biden’s first year and he demonstrates the higher truth, once enunciated by Barack Obama: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

So, now that we have discovered that Biden can stand on his feet for two whole hours-- why was that something that needed to be demonstrated?-- and mumble semi-incoherent platitudes, we join Taibbi on Substack and go back in time:

How great was life for Joe Biden a year ago? MSNBC’s John Heilemann compared him to Lincoln; PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor said the return of the Democrats “felt like we are being rescued from the craziness and now here are the superheroes to come and save us all”; Rachel Maddow went through “half a box of Kleenex” in joy; even Chris Wallace on Fox said Biden’s half-coherent inauguration speech was “the best inaugural address I ever heard,” JFK’s iconic “Ask Not” included.

But, now, alas, the nation and the world have pulled back the curtain and they don't like what they are seeing:

Biden looks bad. During the campaign, when he was challenging strangers to pushup contests and doing sternum-pokes in crowds while nervous aides bit their lips, you could make the argument he was merely in steep mental decline, which was okay. Against Trump the standard of “technically alive” worked for a lot of voters. Biden now looks like a man deep into the peeing-on-houseplants stage, and every appearance is an adventure.

In fairness, Taibbi does grant Biden some successes, even though, in the case of Afghanistan, the success is mitigated by the crushing sense that the pullout, aka, the surrender, was conducted by a band of incompetent buffoons-- that is, by Biden and his diverse, woke team:

Biden did his job and got elected, and to be charitable, he hasn’t been a total disaster. He managed to pull out of Afghanistan — at least a decade late, but still. 

And yet, as the leader of the Democratic Party, Biden has done more damage to his party than anyone could have imagined:

On the other hand, building a party whose electoral strategy relies on minority votes while being totally cut off from the working class where a lot of those voters live has put the party in a suicide pattern. The younger Biden was a feisty, unscrupulous hawk who affected to be a champion of the little guy while selling them out to the credit industry. 

Fair enough. But look what Joe has become?

The current version is an enfeebled old man who’s let every half-cocked pseudo-intellectual in Washington occupy his White House, their dumbass fixations achieving what was previously thought to be impossible, driving loyal minority voters in droves into the arms of Donald Trump (instantly rendering them “bad followers,” of course).

The Democratic Party is teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. Biden has alienated some of its main constituents. The odor of failure surrounds everything he does, and no one likes to be associated with incompetence.

Democrats are now in their second straight year of losing significant ground with all minority groups. There are major defections among Asian and Hispanic voters, and even Trump’s six-point gain among black men last year is beginning to look like a thing (Biden’s approval rating with black voters has dropped from 78% to 57%). It’s so bad Tucker Carlson looked at threat to die of amusement this week, cackling that Biden’s base had been whittled to two constituencies: “Anxious upper-income women with multiple college degrees and barren personal lives, and members of the national news media,” with the media already starting to run for the exits. Another Carlson segment gleefully noting that NPR’s audience was now whiter than Fox’s despite years of “Your Bookshelf May Be Part of the Problem” and “The Stories Marginalized Writers Tell When They Don't Center Trauma”-type features cut closer to home. NPR despite its impressive commitment to self-flagellation as core editorial policy has become a machine for repelling working-class and nonwhite audiences, in much the same way Biden Democrats are starting to drive away the party’s most faithful supporters.

Biden is losing minority voters. He has lost working class voters. His woke agenda, the sense that he is a puppet whose strings are being pulled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has alienated suburban mothers, women who have finally awakened to the damage that the teachers’ unions are doing to their children. And let’s not forget the appalling failure of Kamala Harris to stem the tide of illegal immigrants or the spike in crime in big blue cities. And of course, the endless harping on vaccine and mask mandates, at a time when countries around the world are abandoning them, is not improving Democratic voter sentiment.

By now, Taibbi explains, Democrats are the party of the philosopher kings, a jaunty group of pseudo-intellectual bureaucrats who know better than the rest of us and who want to impose their will on all of us. 

The simple fact that a large number of Democratic voters want to intern and imprison anyone who is not vaccinated shows you that American fascism now has a Democratic face:

 Democrats under Biden have become the party of the nomenklatura. Their base is the slice of hyper-educated, jargon-spouting bureaucrats whose ranks are growing thanks to their skill at siphoning resources to themselves before they have a chance to reach a wider base of regular people:

Government spending, expanded government means more power to bureaucrats. The country, Taibbi continues, hates them:

These new commissars are the most hated people in the country, and they’re the Democrats’ main constituency. Even species of viper and corporate parasite is swimming in riches now, from tax-evading private equity titans to the oil & gas CEOs who are right now gouging everyone, to old pals in the banking sector (Goldman’s just-announced special 1% bonus celebrating last year’s record $27 billion profit was a nice touch), all thriving but lionized so long as they mask appropriately and genuflect to “norms.” Meanwhile, the party increasingly demonizes every species of complaining underclass person as a right-wing enemy, even the minorities.

And then there is Biden’s appalling failure with the pandemic. Yesterday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man whose electoral fortunes have been in steep decline, but who is not a demented fool, removed all vaccine and mask mandates. He told his nation to go back to work.

As Johnson was doing this, Biden was insisting that everyone keep wearing a mask-- even though there is now no evidence that said masks do anyone any good.

So, Biden rode into office by claiming that he could get the pandemic under control. And  yet, having at his disposal multiple vaccines, he has been doing worse than Trump:

Of course, the issue that has cost Biden the most is the pandemic. The best word for his Covid policy is weird. As a candidate, he blasted Trump for the “lie” that “every American who wanted a test could get one,” then for no clear reason waited a year to start shipping free tests to people. There were similar delays with releasing 400 million N95 masks from federal stockpiles, despite the administration’s ostentatious messaging about mask use (even wearing them alone or outside in all-vax groups). To be fair, Biden has to be as confused as the rest of us as to what is supposed to be correct policy.

As for the government agents who are supposed to be in charge, their messaging, as the quaint phrase says, is incoherent and unintelligible:

When his CDC reduced its isolation recommendation from 10 days to 5, health experts and comics alike shrieked with outrage (one tweeter compared the idea to re-opening Jurassic Park). When his education secretary said “The goal is to keep our children in school,” MSNBC responded with an editorial calling the sentiment… you guessed it… “eugenics.”

Now that the world entire, see our post from Monday, has discovered that shutting down schools at the direction of the teachers’ unions has been an unmitigated catastrophe, Biden had the gall yesterday to claim that schools everywhere are open. The truth remains, bad policy has damaged a generation of American children, especially minority children:

Biden is too old to deal with these lunatics and too out of touch to see, for instance, the politics of school closures as they might look to people who can’t afford nannies or private schools. Surrounded by panic addicts, he hasn’t been able to articulate a Covid plan that doesn’t come off as cultish class shaming. The main problem, though, is his own infirmity has added to the impression that America’s Covid-19 policy is a Nosferatu ghost ship floating to nowhere, which heightens everyone’s fear level.

A large percentage of Americans gives Biden an F for his performance in office. Now that midterm exams are months away, the chances of his turning things around are nil.