A Full-Court Press for Biden

by Conrad Black

The fallback defense position of the embattled Biden Administration is taking shape. It consists of his die-hard media supporters blaming all problems on former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush and even occasionally Barack Obama. They repeat with tedious persistence the usual bunk about “taking the tough and courageous decision required,” to clean up the mistakes of the past. 

The attempted retreat into this redoubt of evasion and displacement is at the moment covered by Biden’s magical ally, which also came to the assistance of his invisible basement presidential campaign last year: the mysteries of science. 

Hurricane Ida mercifully came to the rescue of the reeling and punch-drunk Biden Administration and pushed Afghanistan into the back sections of newscasts and newspapers as the preposterous deadline for American departure from that doomed country approached. 

At the same time, the alarmists who terrorized the country last year and led the assault on President Trump as a scientific know-nothing contemptuous of COVID fatalities and urging the population to ingest Lysol have been thrown into the fray again over the Delta variant.

The fearsome hurricane struck near New Orleans and enables Biden and his administration to appear compassionate and efficient, assuming that assistance is distributed promptly and widely in the afflicted areas. It need hardly be said that such a violent storm as Ida will bring sorrow to many homes, but no one can blame that on the president and as of Sunday he appeared to be responding swiftly and effectively to the emergency. 

It is little wonder that Biden and his administration embrace the alleged perils of climate change so fervently. It is the ultimate faddish cause, embraced by the entire Left as the most imaginative blunt instrument that they have yet discovered for assaulting capitalism. It incites fear almost as surely as does a pandemic but more distantly, enabling governments to exceed their normal powers. And it is a marvelous distraction at critical times. Last year it justified Biden’s basement campaign, competing with Canadian geese as he tried to fumble through his teleprompter and left the irrationally Trump-hating media to conduct his campaign for him.

The regime’s enthusiasm for climate change and its potential for frightening the nation has served the Biden phenomenon well; but it cannot be relied upon indefinitely. The administration’s allies among professional health administrators and virologists have been seriously discredited by their contradictory statements, reluctance to accept the likely origin of the coronavirus in the Wuhan Virological Institute, and their evident enthusiasm for exercising absurdly excessive authority in the imposition of needless inconvenience and economic hardship on millions of people. The famous anti-COVID masks are now shown to be of questionable utility other than as a placebo to quiet the wearers with the notion of doing their parts in restraining the virus. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has pointed out, it is unseemly for an administration that is allowing scores of thousands of COVID carriers illegally across the southern U.S. border every month and spreading them around the country to claim that a compulsory masking of schoolchildren is a public health necessity. Children rarely have serious symptoms from the coronavirus, are not very effective spreaders of the virus, and there isn’t much evidence that these masks achieve anything medically useful for them, anyway.

The thoroughly fatuous apogee of the administration’s enthusiasm for raising climate change to a level of public terror approaching the imperishable coronavirus was Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s suggestion two months ago that the collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Florida was the result of climate change. Obviously, not a shred of evidence was or could be furnished to promote such a harebrained idea. There was little left but to claim that climate change is also responsible for earthquakes, hemorrhoids, color-blindness, Alzheimer’s, and railway accidents. We may yet have that to look forward to but it is unlikely that much of the country will follow the administration into such a nether region of convenient fantasy. 

Ida will settle down before Biden knuckles under to the Taliban’s August 31 deadline for abandoning many hundreds or thousands of Americans in Afghanistan and tens of thousands of Afghans whose lives are in danger because of their previous collaboration with the United States and its allies in the 20-year struggle to drag that godforsaken country into the 21st century. Biden won’t even be able to say of the basket case Afghanistan, as Henry Kissinger did of Bangladesh at its founding in 1971, that it’s “not necessarily our basket case.”                                        

It has been interesting to see which of the Trump-haters have been prepared to try and mount any kind of defense for the general disintegration of the Biden Administration: soaring crime, uncontrollable illegal immigration, gathering inflation, and now the shameful disaster in Afghanistan. Most of CNN has scurried down the hawsers and essentially left the Biden national security team to fend for itself in trying to explain away this strategic, humanitarian, and public relations catastrophe. Even Fox News host Chris Wallace, a formidable Trump-hater who claimed to find Biden’s platitudinous and a monosyllabic inaugural address the best he had heard, starting with and including John F. Kennedy’s in 1960, has handled this debacle professionally. 

The last stand of the Trump-hating media in defense of Biden appears to be underway at MSNBC. Lawrence O’Donnell, the square-faced self-avowed socialist capable in the last five years of seeing, hearing, or speaking no evil other than to trace all the sorrows of the world to the turpitude and incompetence of Donald Trump, stands his ground for his president. He simply ignores the abandonment of thousands of people to whom the United States and its allies owed protection; he ignores the betrayal of the allies who were providing three-quarters of the personnel of the NATO mission when Biden scurried out. He ignores the sense of betrayal among America’s allies, the abandonment of some $85 billion of sophisticated military equipment to America’s mortal enemies, the instant return of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and others. He resolutely proclaims that history will applaud Biden’s “courage.”

His consistency is admirable in a way; O’Donnell chose fidelity to his views—no opportunistic scrambling to the lifeboats for him—and such tenacity in adversity should not go unnoticed. What is more worrisome is O’Donnell’s inability (and the inability of the diminutive corporal’s guard of the national political media that is going down with this ship with him) to consider for an instant the enormity of his errors, the dishonesty and unprofessionalism of the bigoted reporting, and the terrible damage O’Donnell and his colleagues have done to the franchises where they appear and to the craft whose integrity and investigative utility they are pledged to uphold. 

The self-destruction of the integrity of the national political media of the United States will be as great a casualty of this terrible, “woke” explosion of American self-hate as the accompanying destruction of the academy, of the state school systems, of the civil rights movement, the Democratic Party, and much of the higher ranks of the Armed Forces. Repairing all this terrible damage will take a long time, and if anyone is listening to this nonsense about Biden’s courageous abandonment of Afghanistan, that will only make the reckoning with this colossal failure more painful.

First published in American Greatness.