President Joe Biden brought a wholly undeserved reputation for moderation with him into the White House. Why undeserved? Recall him presiding over the attempted “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas. And it was he who told black voters in 2012 that Republicans — under that vile extremist, Mitt Romney, of all people! — would “put y’all back in chains.”
If you thought our chief executive could not stoop any lower, think again. He’s just
accused
everyone who opposes his desperate bid to twist elections to help Democrats, or refuses to scrap the filibuster, of lining up with George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis.
These gents were all dyed-in-the-wool Democrats and extreme racists. Wallace’s campaign battle cry was “segregation forever!,” Connor attacked peaceful civil rights demonstrators with police dogs and water cannons, and Davis was president of the Confederacy.
Why would Biden hurl such vicious insults? Why would he stain his honor with such crude and contemptibly inappropriate comparisons? One answer is that seeking political advantage by threatening black voters with slave shackles shows he abandoned honor long ago. But setting that aside, what are the advantages, if any, of ratcheting accusations of racism up to 11?
One is that the charge of racism has become the first, last, and apparently only resort of Democrats seeking to stop the accelerating stampede of minority voters into the Republican camp. So, Biden’s shameful speech was another desperate bid to hold his party’s crumbling coalition more or less together for another election cycle.
Another is that although Biden knows his voting bill and demolition of the filibuster are going nowhere, hurling extreme insults at those thwarting his radical agenda might convince his skeptical, militant, left-wing base that at least he tried and is passionately cross about it.
But the bald fact is that Biden and the radicals are in the minority. The country doesn’t like their malignant proposals. Fewer than half of senators back him. The president’s own Democratic colleagues, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, won’t get on board with his constitutional vandalism. He must right now be sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office muttering, “I will have such revenges on you both, that all the world shall — I will do such things — what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the Earth!” All that is left for him is to rage impotently, like King Lear, a “feeble, fond old man” (except that Shakespeare’s monarch was not always so unimpressive).
No wonder, as Daniel Allott writes in his feature in this week’s magazine, “
Biden’s Scranton Problem
,” that Biden’s supporters in his boasted birthplace think he’s too ancient to run again in 2024. Becket Adams exposes how
conniving and hypocritical
news media have puffed up the empty vessel, Stacey Abrams, into a champion of democracy. And in our cover story, “
Teachers Take Children Hostage
,” Max Eden makes a devastating case against the cynical, self-interested educational establishment that treats children as pawns in a political game.
