Joseph Robinette Biden began his final State of the Union address by invoking FDR. But while Biden has nearly as much trouble getting around as FDR, he didn’t lead a nation out of a depression, but into one, and he didn’t win a war, he did however lose several.
Including a personal war with his diction and his teleprompter at the State of the Union.
Biden’s addresses have gotten longer as he has had less to say. Last year’s State of the Union was the 8th longest on record and this year’s clocks in behind Obama’s 2010 rant. The only reason it wasn’t even longer is that Biden rushed to get through it, mumbling and slurring words, rattling off threats and insults at a speed that made them all but impossible to understand.
Usually presidents use the podium to make promises and take credit for past accomplishments, but there’s not much of that here and so Biden began his speech name-dropping presidents who people liked better than him (a long list) and threatening and berating Republicans.
A few breaths after implicitly comparing himself to FDR during WWII, Biden then compared himself to Lincoln during the Civil War (“not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today”) and then President Reagan before launching an attack on President Trump.
The State of the Union isn’t a place to attack opposing candidates. Bush didn’t take potshots at Kerry in his State of the Union speech and even Obama didn’t mention Romney in his.
And yet Biden attacked Trump a few minutes into his. And then did it again. And again.
But this was not a State of the Union address, it was a fascistic campaign rally of the kind that he had been giving for years, most disturbingly while flanked by Marines at Independence Hall before the 2022 midterms, declaring war on Trump, Republicans and all political opponents.
After accusing Republicans of being in thrall to Russia and then of being “insurrectionists”, he falsely claimed that they were preventing women from getting IVF procedures. (In reality, no one’s IVF procedures were threatened and Alabama rushed through a bill protecting IVF in record time .) That was then followed by attacking Republicans over abortion.
None of this material belongs in a State of the Union address which is not a campaign rally, but a presidential review of the year, and calls for bipartisan cooperation on national priorities. No president has ever delivered a deranged partisan hatefest of a speech like this at the SOTU.
Not even Obama ever went that far. Not even Obama violated the State of the Union’s norms.
Biden’s State of the Union rant would have been more ominous if it also hadn’t been pathetic. The speechwriters reached (as they always do at these events) for the grandiose, but came off as bellicose, and in Biden’s mouth, even the bellicose became the quavering rattlings of an angry old man who had spent too much time reading Stephen Ambrose and listening to NPR.
Much of Biden’s address had to be reconstructed from the transcript because it was indecipherable. His hands and lips shaking, Biden spoke of strength, but showed only weakness, invoked historical figures only to show how unworthy he was of them.
The threats and attacks on Republicans gave way to absurd boasts. And while presidents always claim credit for more than they accomplished, Biden’s could only occasion eye rolling.
Biden claimed that “our economy is the envy of the world”, that inflation “is the lowest in the world”, that there is “historic job growth”, and that unemployment is “at 50-year lows”.
Why didn’t Biden begin by bragging about these incredible accomplishments? Why bury them toward the middle of his speech? Because not only are they lies, but no one believes them.
Since no one believes them, Biden moved on to promising free stuff. A cap on prescription drug costs, more tax credits for mortgages, universal pre-k, and student loan payoffs. With a $34 trillion national debt, there’s no money for any of that or for any of his other promises. We’re on the way to $1 trillion in interest payments a year thanks to his previous spending sprees.
Desperate for material, Biden warned senior citizens that “Republicans will cut Social Security and give more tax cuts to the wealthy” and promised to pass a bill legislating how many chips there should be in a bag of chips.
All that a bag of chips indeed.
In between attacking Republicans, Biden also attacked Israel for not caring enough about ‘Palestinians’ and promised to lead an “emergency mission” to bail out Gaza. He demanded that Congress take away our guns to “beat the NRA” and promised transgenders, “I have your back”. None of this was aimed at Americans, it was pure red meat aimed at his own base.
What should have been his DNC acceptance speech, somehow became his SOTU address.
Biden violated the most elementary State of the Union decorum. He gave a speech that he should not have been allowed to deliver. And that should have been shut down during. Presidents deliver these addresses as guests of Congress. As a guest, Biden insulted his hosts, soiled the drapes and tried to wrap his partisan hatefest in name dropping and the flag.
At the conclusion, Biden laid out a clash “for the soul of our nation” between “those who want to pull America back to the past” (conservatives) “and those who want to move America into the future” (leftists) while unintentionally giving everyone a taste of what that future looks like.
The future looks like a senile president arriving at a State of the Union to launch vitriolic attacks on the opposition, wrecking political norms, implying that a new civil war is at hand, threatening the Supreme Court and defining all opposition as a dangerous form of treason.
Americans have seen the future and polls show they don’t like it very much.
After over an hour of non-stop attacks on his political opponents while depicting them as enemies of the state, Biden unconvincingly claimed that he wants to “be a president for all Americans”. Like a small number of men in this nation’s history, he had his chance.
Biden wanted to be FDR, instead he’s doomed to be the worst possible combination of LBJ, Obama and Jimmy Carter, with all of their bad points and none of their good ones, a political hack who bungled everything and accomplished nothing, hated by everyone, loved by no one, and incapable of even convincingly lying about his accomplishments or delivering a speech.
His legacy concludes with a series of unhinged meanspirited rants in which he demands absolute power to save the country from the threat of political dissent. Americans would be scared if they could understand what he was saying. It’s best for everyone that they didn’t.
{Reposted from FrontPageMag}
