Biden

Monday

Roger Kimball

The great White House replacement

I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long? Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that.

biden

Thursday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

The age of American unexceptionalism

Our administration would have us believe that Joe Biden is the leader of the free world. But he isn’t — and our relative inaction on Ukraine should firmly put to rest the idea of “American exceptionalism.” While Ukrainians were heartened by British prime minister Boris Johnson’s April trip to Kyiv, our commander-in-chief has adopted a different strategy for this active war zone: send in the women. Security concerns are ostensibly to blame for Biden being MIA, but sending in three of the country’s most important ladies — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Kyiv, First Lady Jill Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe — seems an odd way to demonstrate that the administration is worried about security.

unexceptionalism
inflation
Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis and Elizabeth Ames

The moral cost of inflation

Inflation is about far more than rising prices. In this excerpt adapted from Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad — and How to Fix It, the book’s authors explain how the debasement of money ultimately corrupts society. The scenario is fairly standard: central banks devalue money; prices shoot up. Governments look for ways to tamp down inflation by keeping people from spending. They also respond with price controls, capital controls, higher taxes. Governments grow larger and often impose more constraints. People lose their freedom, and worse.

Sunday

William Murchison

How we got to inflation

And just when everything was looking so tidy — the Ukraine war, a new Covid subvariant, mass shootings, a woked-up Disney operation — what should come along to light up our lives but 8.5 percent inflation? And who, I ask you, ought to wonder? Like acid reflux and obstreperous two-year-olds, inflation ranks high among human durable goods: always looming, never gone for long, even when it pulls back, and even then leaving its indelible marks. This, due to another human durable: the determination of governments, autocratic as well as democratic, to mishandle the pretended spreading of economic joy.

bewilderment

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Russia becomes a lost cause

After an embarrassing two-month start to its war in Ukraine marked by pictures of abandoned armored personnel carriers, destroyed tanks and stalled armored columns outside Ukraine’s major cities, the Russian army is re-tooling and re-arming itself for a more manageable fight in the east. I use the word “manageable” not because the battle in the Donbas will be easy for Russian forces, but because the objective of expanding Russian control over the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk is more realistic than overthrowing the Ukrainian government and occupying the entire country. Capturing, let alone holding, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Chernihiv would have entailed a massive number of personnel and a long-term commitment Russia doesn't have the resources to sustain.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin (Getty Images)

Monday

Spectator Editorial

In search of a Biden doctrine

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected,” wrote George Orwell in 1945. The public conversation soon caught up with the lethal realities of the nuclear age. The possibility of annihilation loomed over politics, domestic and foreign, for much of the second half of the twentieth century. Then, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it faded into the background. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, the threat has returned to the fore. The isolated and unpredictable strongman in the Kremlin is not shy when it comes to reminding the world of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

biden

Monday

Teresa Mull

Biden must decide the environment’s price tag

Boris Johnson is considering doing something that should be a duty for every leader. In the wake of sanctions poised to disrupt the 8 percent of domestic oil and 18 percent of diesel the UK imports from Russia, Johnson is reportedly toying with the idea of putting his country first and on the road to self-sufficiency by lifting the UK’s moratorium on fracking. The British government banned hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in 2019. Fracking is a method of extracting oil and natural gas by drilling deep underground and fracturing shale rock with a fluid mixture (99 percent water and sand) that allows fossil fuels to flow out, be captured, processed and used to myriad ends (including gasoline).

Monday

John Fund and Phil Kerpen

Biden spent billions messing up rapid test distribution

What happens when a government thinks it can distribute a consumer product more efficiently than normal retail channels? Boondoggle and failure come to mind. Two months ago, President Biden announced plans to buy 500 million at-home Covid test kits and mail them to anyone who wanted one. The Department of Defense put in orders for $1.275 billion of tests from iHealth, $340 million from Roche and $306 million from Abbott. How many tests those eye-popping figures bought from each company has never been disclosed, but Abbott, the largest test manufacturer, has a reported production capacity of 50 to 70 million tests. It is safe to assume that the quantities involved commanded an enormous portion of total manufacturing capacity.

at-home testing

Sunday

Kapil Komireddi

Can the India-US relationship last?

India and the United States have rediscovered each other after the cordial hostility of the Cold War. Those years of isolation have made India’s political and financial elites susceptible to flattery. America’s courtship of India, lubricated by the economics of globalization and the post-9/11 zeal to spread democracy, is now being consummated in the American search for a democratic counterweight to China. But India is a chaotic democracy in a volatile neighborhood. Can it hitch itself to America without forfeiting its autonomy? Foreign strategic experts exhort India, which is non-interventionist to its marrow, to act like a global power.

india

Tuesday

Gilbert T. Sewall

Biden’s food policies have nothing to do with hunger

No one starves in America. The public schools feed poor children breakfast, lunch and occasionally dinner. Church food banks, private charities and municipal programs are everywhere. Eating soundly is not always exciting, crunchy, convenient or microwave-ready, but getting adequate calories is not the nation’s problem. Buying clean, washed lettuce, firm potatoes or a sweet pineapple during a February snowstorm is a small industrial miracle. In 1900 Americans spent about 40 percent of their income on food, and today about 10 percent. The standard claim that 20 million adults live in households that do not get enough to eat rings false. Americans are the people of plenty and commodities surpluses. They have low-cost, safe, tasty food galore.

Monday

Spectator Editorial

The sleepwalkers

It is customary for presidencies to lose vitality and purpose in their last months. It is unprecedented for a presidency to lose its way in its first year, and when it still holds a majority in both houses of Congress. The Biden presidency has donned Jimmy Carter’s cardigan of shame in only nine months. If, that is, it ever was the Biden presidency. It was sold from the get-go as the ‘Biden-Harris presidency’. Double-barreled names are an inveterate mark of snobbery, and in this case the snobbery is that of the higher tokenism. Even the Democrats’ own members didn’t want Harris on the card in 2020. Harris’s symbolic merits as a woman of color seem to have been outweighed by her blatant falsity and opportunism.

biden
liberalism
Daniel McCarthy

Welcome to the age of entropy

Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is contested, as it was during the Cold War. The future could have been capitalist or communist, or perhaps a blend of both systems — ‘convergence’ was a trendy notion for a time — but one way or another the alternatives were clear. After the Cold War, there were no alternatives. Capitalism, democracy and liberalism were here to stay, and soon they would be everywhere else too. All the Islamic world needed if it was to join us at the end of history was a nudge: regime change would speedily bring about social and economic change.

Monday

James Panero

Hunter Biden, artist of modern life

Why do we keep hearing about Hunter Biden? Why is this disgraced political son and aspiring amateur pornographer now making art? Why must we even contemplate his creations? The reason is that much of our culture — at least its sanctioned, outward-facing elements — now operates ‘against nature’. I refer to that 1884 novel by the Symbolist author Joris-Karl Huysmans. À Rebours, known in English as Against Nature, is the book in which French literature dispensed with naturalism and its common-man struggles, and instead gave voice to the rot of the elite. Before we dwell on Biden fils, let us briefly revisit Jean des Esseintes, the main character of Against Nature. He is the withered end of a once noble family.

hunter biden

Friday

Cockburn

What exactly was the plan in Afghanistan?

The collapse of the Afghan army and state was so rapid and so total that, mercifully, talking heads have already moved on from debating whether the country might have been saved from a Taliban takeover. Everyone now agrees that was impossible, and the trillion dollars spent to prevent it was thoroughly wasted. Instead, because pundits and politicians must fight over something, the scrum has been over the frantic manner of America’s withdrawal. Was the Biden administration warned that Afghanistan would collapse in the amount of time typically reserved for a test cricket match? And if so, did it simply ignore those warnings?

taliban kabul

Wednesday

Tim Stanley

Joe Biden and the grand battle of ideas

Well, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so bad now, does he? I don’t say that because Joe Biden has turned out to be as competent or less, but because at his press conference in reaction to the fall of Kabul, he sounded Trumpian. By which I mean, honest. Honest that staying in Afghanistan so long was a mistake, that their government was corrupt, that if its army wasn't prepared to defend itself then we shouldn't do it for them, and that this is what a withdrawal looks like: horribly, brutally honest. The endgame was a disaster because America’s intel was wrong, so the US had less time to get out than it thought, and because Biden lacks the acuity to respond to changing conditions. Biden looks like Brezhnev after heart-attack number seven.

biden