Joe biden

President Biden told Americans to expect an era of unity and normality after four years of disruption. What they got was a chief executive unable to cope with the overlapping crises of the coronavirus pandemic, consumer price inflation, illegal immigration, crime and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet there is one thing that Biden has restored to good working order: the DC gravy train. In Biden’s Washington, well-connected liberal Democrats in the influence industry have no problem enriching themselves. The world is a mess but the Swamp is as fetid as ever. Not long after taking office, Biden issued an executive order restoring and strengthening the government ethics provisions that had been in force under President Obama. He banned gifts from lobbyists.

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 having come and gone, many have turned to reflection. Some meditate on the solidarity and sense of national purpose that act of terror engendered; others view it as a dramatic opening to our miserable 21st century. What comes to my mind are the images of our hasty retreat from Afghanistan over the last month. As is often the case, my best thinking has already been articulated by the late Charles Krauthammer. In the introduction of his best-selling collection of essays Things That Matter, Krauthammer explains his evolution from psychiatrist to public intellectual.

Joe Biden is telling the unvaccinated that the time for waiting is over. In his signature ‘get-off-my-lawn!’ old-man yelling voice, the exhausted 78-year-old Commander-in-Chief dutifully tried to read a teleprompter full of COVID-19 talking points on Thursday. In addition to signing an executive order requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated (with the possible exception of 650,000 postal employees who handle those wonderful mail-in ballots), Joe’s six-pronged plan went even further: ‘The Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their work forces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.

Nearly a week after the last American C-17 flew out of Kabul, the Biden administration remains in the middle of a firestorm. Lawmakers are shouting about what they consider a botched withdrawal and evacuation process from Afghanistan. Calls for oversight and accountability on Capitol Hill go beyond President Biden’s traditional opponents. Multiple Senate committees are planning to conduct investigations into why officials weren’t prepared for worst-case scenarios, why the administration believed the Afghan army could hold out longer than it did, and why tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted the US military during the war were unable to be airlifted out of the country.

With the conclusion of the disastrously-executed Afghanistan withdrawal, the attention of Joe Biden and his loyal media apparatchiks has turned to dealing with the ordeal’s political damage. The last few weeks have seen Biden lose significant support, most notably among independent voters, and Republicans are already incorporating the Afghan debacle into their pre-2022 midterm messaging. Biden’s response to all this is to provide more evidence that he – contrary to the claims of many American liberals – is just as willing to dissemble and misrepresent as Trump. But there’s one crucial difference: Biden has Silicon Valley on his side.

President Biden walked to the White House podium on Tuesday and proclaimed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan an ‘extraordinary success’. He relied on the unanimous advice of military leaders and strategic advisers for these wise decisions. If there were any failures, they were due to Donald Trump. Never in history, he said, had there been such a successful airlift. Of the Americans who wanted to leave, we got out an amazing 90 percent. Surely that’s a success all around, despite the collapse of the Afghan army, which nobody expected. Of course, as a far-sighted leader, Biden said he had ordered plans for that, too.