"This was not a State of the Union address, it was a fascistic campaign rally."
By
Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
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.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading.
