In his wonderful recent history, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, author Fintan O’Toole recounts what one Irish writer said about a politician: “His hypocrisy was mesmerizing, exquisite, magisterial.”
That’s a good description of President Joe Biden. On almost every issue, the president has been a bloviator and a hypocrite. Biden opens up the southern border, then blames Republicans for illegal immigration. He warns of totalitarianism while trying to toss his opponent in jail. He renounced racism yet has bought into every racist “diversity” scam of the last two decades. He was once pro-life and tough on crime; now he’s an abortion extremist who grins while our cities burn.
Biden’s blarney is going to be on full display on St. Patrick’s Day. The president has always made a big deal out of his Irish roots, despite the fact that his ancestors on his father’s side were British and even owned slaves.
As an Irish American, I wish Biden would stop embarrassing my community. Because the Irish Americans who birthed me and raised me and surrounded me for most of my life all have one thing in common: what Ernest Hemingway called “a built-in, shock-proof crap detector.” Yes, we Irish love our exaggerated stories. We love our Guinness and our “craic,” the Celtic euphemism for a good time with friends. Yes, the Catholic church has held a huge amount of power over us for centuries.
But beneath it all we have crap detectors.
The Catholic church has its flaws, but it defended us against the British. It taught us about human reason, a well-formed conscience, and the natural law. The natural law is the moral code that is written on the human heart.
My entire life, Irish people have loudly insisted I face reality. That reality includes a few key facts: men can’t become women, illegal immigrants are, well, illegal, and high taxes kill initiative.
It’s no wonder that an Irishman, Edmund Burke, is known as the father of modern conservatism.
It’s also why a recent referendum in Ireland that would have changed the definition of family and “update” the constitutional defense of women to include “gender identity” was defeated by massive margins. “The people do not trust the Government, and even the main Opposition parties seem to be detached from the people and aren’t listening to them,” one politician said.
And consider that the most vocal celebrity opposing COVID lockdowns was Irish singer Van Morrison. “Remember, those who are shutting down our economy haven’t missed a paycheck since lockdown began,” he tweeted. “We are not in this together.”
Van the Man has a working crap detector — just like the Irish people who influenced me. I once told my mother, whose parents had come to Boston from County Mayo, that a doctor said I have ADHD. “You don’t have ADHD,” she said.“You have L-A-Z-Y.”
Biden’s crap detector was broken by naked political ambition many years ago. But his near-dormant Celtic common sense peaked out briefly during the State of the Union speech. The president admitted that nursing student Laken Riley had been murdered by an “illegal.” Biden then quickly apologized — to the alleged killer for calling him illegal. Shameful.
A good historical example of Biden’s duplicity is how he has contradicted himself on natural law. In 1987, during the Senate hearings for Judge Robert Bork, then-Sen. Biden heard that Bork had expressed doubts about natural law theory. Biden hit Bork with this: “As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not derived from any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator and they represent the essence of human dignity.”
Exactly right. Yet four years later, Biden faced Judge Clarence Thomas, who was accused of taking natural law seriously. Hadley Arkes, a conservative scholar criticized by Biden at the hearing, marveled at Biden’s hypocrisy. “In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Biden warned that if we had judges again who took natural law seriously, we would have a throwback to those reactionary judges who resisted the New Deal in the 1930s, with its regulation of business. We would go back, he said, to the kinds of teachings offered by this Professor Arkes in this preposterous book, First Things.”
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Arkes noted that Biden said he would not impose, through the laws, the “personal” “beliefs” he had learned through Catholicism. Arkes pointed out that “the Church, on abortion, has never appealed to ‘beliefs.’ The teaching has drawn on the facts of embryology, woven with principled reasoning.”
Such reasoning is beyond corrupt, old Biden. He long ago may have had a crap detector. Now he’s America’s biggest crap supplier.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
