Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: When the Democratic Party cleared its primary field to all but anoint Joe Biden as its presidential nominee in 2020, it was supposedly to offer up a moderate candidate who would not scare the bejesus out of the American people like most of the rest of the candidates calling for all manner of left-wing policies. But now, even the nakedly pro-Biden media are acknowledging that President Biden has moved the goalposts from where they were set by candidate Biden. Witness this brief but significant analysis from Jonathan Karl of ABC News.
Jonathan Karl: Joe Biden offered himself as a candidate of unity and moderation, somebody who would work with Republicans, even suggesting he’d be a transitional president.
Joe Biden (from campaign speech): Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.
Karl: Nearly three months in, President Biden has blazed a different path, aiming to be a transformational president, acting to erase his predecessor’s legacy and using his narrow Democratic majority to ram through the biggest expansion of government since LBJ.
Tim: Bait and switch, you might say. It’s an old political trick. Run as a moderate, then, when you seize the reins of power, govern as a liberal. But what Biden is serving up, at the behest of whatever powers on the left are engineering his presidency, goes well beyond mere liberalism. This president’s mass discarding of Trump’s border policies is creating a crisis of growing magnitude. Also, Biden can claim to have erased the legacy of his reviled predecessor. But while the media have been all but shut out from covering what’s going on at the border, members of Congress like Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) cannot be silenced.
Jim Jordan: The press wasn’t allowed in, even when [Homeland Security] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas went down this past week. So Joe Biden won’t go down, the president won’t go to the border. The vice president won’t go to the border. The press aren’t allowed in. And the reason that they’re, the press, aren’t allowed in is because they don’t want the American people to know what’s going on.
One pod that we looked at, there were supposed to be 33 kids in this area, there were 527. That’s what the conditions are like. And the other thing, and I think this is key, if the press were allowed in, the border patrol agents would tell them exactly what they told us. Namely, that the reason for this is because of the policy that Joe Biden has now adopted, which is we’re not going to keep people in Mexico, the policy that President Trump had. We’re not going to keep people in Mexico while we evaluate to see if they can actually come into this country. That single policy is what’s driving this huge volume.
Tim: And if you want to hear a horror story of how this border crisis intersects with the ongoing pandemic, listen to a senator who visited the border, John Barrasso (R-WY), describing one particular holding cell.
John Barrasso: I watched them be tested for coronavirus. They had them in a courtyard, all of these young people. This is after they have been there. They’re only allowed to be there for three days by law. You wouldn’t want your own kids to be there for three minutes. Many are staying there for up to ten days. They’re being tested the day that they leave. They put them all in the courtyard. They do the instant test. And then those that have been tested positive are just moved to one side of the courtyard, and those negative to the other of this courtyard. But I will tell you, they’ve all been exposed. And then they’re sent all across the country.
Tim: All for the sake of Biden being able to say, he’s not going to continue anything started by Donald Trump. But he’s starting to pay a steep political price for what he’s refusing to do, and not just among Republicans, says Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R).
Greg Abbott: This is a bipartisan response to the Biden administration because you have Democrat members of the United States Congress, you have Democrat members of the state legislature, as well as Democrat local officials who are pushing back against the Biden administration as much as conservatives in the state of Texas.
What the president could do is to immediately put back in place the Remain in Mexico protocols that were established in the prior administration. He could continue to build the wall along the border in South Texas. He could send a stronger message that these people should not be coming here.
Remember this, one of the reasons why there are so many people coming here, every single one of the Democratic candidates said, if they are elected, they will have open borders and they will be giving things for free to anybody coming across the border.
Tim: And as predictably as the sun rising in the east, Biden says of the wall, both literally and figuratively, “Stop building it and they will come,” and come they have.
Meanwhile, there is one issue of actual bipartisan interest these days, infrastructure, rebuilding roads and bridges across the country. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says it’s beyond time to pass the massive multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure package now being debated on Capitol Hill.
Pete Buttigieg: Look, the American Society of Civil Engineers rates our infrastructure. We’ve been getting a lot of Cs and Ds. But you don’t need an engineering report to know that driving on American roads, they’re not the way they should be, that our bridges need work. We’ve got thousands upon thousands that are in poor condition or even structurally deficient. If you go to U.S. airports and you compare them to airports in other countries, other developed countries, you know that the U.S. is not at a high standard.
We don’t have a lot of work to do to persuade the American people that U.S. infrastructure needs major improvement. The American people already know it. And that’s one of the reasons why there is such extraordinary Republican and Independent and Democratic support for this package among the American people.
Tim: But when Buttigieg tried to make incredibly bold claims about the jobs this massive infrastructure bill would create, he was called on the carpet and embarrassed by Fox News — whoops.
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Pete Buttigieg (from previous video): The American Jobs Plan is about a generational investment. It’s going to create 19 million jobs.
Chris Wallace: But it turns out the study you’re citing from, Moody’s Analytics, says, “The economy will add 16.3 million jobs without the infrastructure bill and 2.7 million more with it.” So it doesn’t, as you said last Sunday, create 19 million jobs.
Buttigieg: Well, you’re right. I should have been more precise. The 19 million jobs that’ll be created are more than the jobs that’ll be created if we don’t do the plan.
Wallace: Two million more — not 19 million.
Buttigieg: Yeah, exactly. It’ll create 2.7 million more jobs than if we don’t do it.
Tim: That is classic political doublespeak — right out of the textbook.
Finally, if you started going back to the movie theater these days, you might have noticed that what we’re being offered by Hollywood is hardly uplifting. And the upcoming Academy Awards, the Oscars set for Sunday [April 25], are living proof, as noted by the no-holds-barred comedian and social commentator Bill Maher.
Bill Maher: The Oscars need to change their name to the Debbies, as in Debbie Downer, because judging by this year’s Best Picture nominees, you couldn’t have a worse time at the movies if there was an active shooter in the theater.
In Judas and the Black Messiah, the FBI kills the leader of the Black Panthers. And in The Trial of the Chicago 7, the FBI kills the leader of the Black Panthers again. Sound of Metal is about a musician going deaf. The Father is about an octogenarian descending into dementia. And Minari is the story of dirt-poor Korean immigrants in Arkansas who put all their food in a barn, but then grandma has a stroke and burns it down. Now, enjoy the show.
Tim: Yep, just the kind of messages a nation riven by pandemic wants to hear. Hooray for Hollywood.
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