You knew it was going to happen. It was always a matter not of if but when. And sure enough, energized by big media gushing over his wrathful State of the Union address, Joe Biden is taking it to the limit on Donald Trump. Employing the only argument he has left - other than defending the right to terminate the unborn up to the point of birth - the president has upped the ante on the left’s single-minded obsession with January 6, releasing a scurrilous ad with flashing images of Trump adjacent to those of white-hooded marchers from the Ku Klux Klan.
Where to begin? For starters, this re-opens the discussion about the long ties between the Republican Party and that vile racist organization. Oh, wait - it was actually the Democratic Party of yore who invited and embraced the rise of the KKK - symbolized by a screening in the White House of the infamous racist film Birth of a Nation by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, himself an open racist. But undergirded by a media entirely incurious about any history that might cast doubt on the moral superiority of the left, Biden can release this ad with impunity, hoping against hope that the only desperate argument he has left in his quiver is the one voters will swallow.
At the same time, to say the left has beaten the dead horse of January 6 might rate as the understatement of the year. If the Trump-as-dictator narrative were a cat with nine lives, all nine would have been expended by now. Everybody in the United States of America has had over three years to process and form their own view of J6. To lead with that argument is a clear demonstration that Biden is flat-out desperate - and actually hurting his own cause by admitting he has nothing else to offer.
He has tried and failed to gaslight the American people by saying their growing financial woes are an illusion; that “Bidenomics” is a godsend; that the open border is actually closed; that migrants are not really overrunning one city after another; and that crime is under control despite the reality of one hollowed-out city after another. Hell, the National Guard has now been dispatched to the New York City Subway system.
Biden and the Low Bar
It is borderline laughable to believe that one angry, adrenaline-induced rant shouted from the rooftops will suddenly change the well-formed minds of Americans. The voters have made crystal clear in overwhelming numbers their belief that Joe Biden is hardly up to the job. The reaction of relief and giddiness on the left about the SOTU - after setting the bar low enough that any outcome other than a physical collapse would be deemed wildly successful - belies the reality that lies below, that few beyond the Biden family believe he can continue to handle the most powerful leadership position in the nation, if not the world. Those who continue to argue that he is up to the job are evidently just lifelong Democrats or Never-Trumpers who, in the actual words of more than one leftist, would vote for a dead Biden over a live Trump.
Donald Trump (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
If, as appears likely, the anti-Trump argument alone proves insufficient, Biden will be forced to rely on a legal system so exploited by the left that it has spawned a brand-new word: lawfare, i.e. replacing voters with prosecutors and judges - a genuine replacement theory. It makes one nostalgic for the good old days when elections used to be decided at the ballot box. But now, the people can no longer be trusted to make an acceptable decision, so we must deny them the right to make it - just as we must deny parental rights accepted since about, say, the time of Adam and Eve on issues from abortion to transgenderism. In fact, the only cultural issue where the left believes in choice - as opposed to making everything else either mandatory or forbidden - is the right to end the life of a child before it even begins, most often for convenience, i.e. the sustenance of a “lifestyle,” devoid of any responsibility for the fact they were impregnated in the first place - as if it was a divine curse.
It is getting tiring to make arguments that, a mere decade ago even in the midst of the Obama era, would have been so obvious and self-evident that it would be a waste of space to even fantasize about them. But now, there are self-described progressives who actually believe - or say they do - that pre-pubescent children should be free to change genders on demand, that men can give birth, or that defunding police will restore justice, among other arguments that should rightly be laughed off the stage but have entered the mainstream of political discussion.
Biden’s Fatal Error
As the declared winner of a tightly-contested presidential election, Biden has abandoned any commitment to the unity he so bragged about in his 2020 campaign and inaugural address. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say he has pulled a political bait-and-switch, governing as if he had been handed a mandate to scandalize and bury the America First movement and transform the country into a socialist paradise. He stood by as his increasingly radical party attempted to expand the Supreme Court to assure a progressive majority, turn left-wing territories into states, and ram through federal laws that would cement the pandemic-era voting laws designed specifically to benefit Democrats.
In the end, Biden and his fellow travelers have made a fatal miscalculation. They reacted as if the right-wing extremism they perceive in Trump must be met not with moderating, center-left solutions, but with far more radical left-wing extremism. And now it is too little, too late to try and convince the electorate that Biden and company have changed their ways - on illegal immigration, crime, defunding the police, and all the other issues where Biden is well underwater - just in time for the election. The voters are not that stupid. On top of Biden’s palpable weakness and broad public disapproval, the flawed strategy of going hard left has the party gasping for air as it approaches the reckoning of November 5.
As Donald Trump continues his march to reclaim the White House, he could learn from a critical observation by Richard Nixon. The 37th president was nothing if not a crafty politician who himself pulled off perhaps the greatest political comeback of all time, rising from the ashes of “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” to the presidency years later. And he once intoned a view that has mostly held up over time: when there is a movement that is anti-anybody, the one they’re organizing against will win. Donald Trump certainly hopes that time-tested axiom holds true once more against an opponent with nothing more to offer an exhausted citizenry than the vision of a fantastical hellscape replete with white-hooded thugs certain to be unleashed if his evil opponent is allowed to return to the Oval Office.
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