God Does Bless America

by Conrad Black

The consequences for the country of the Biden administration’s cascade of blunders in every policy area are serious, and the vacuum created in the world by the evaporation of American leadership is dangerous and worrisome.

But no one who felt the agonies of the Trump–Russia collusion fraud and the fatuous Trump impeachment trials, and the enthronement of megalomaniacal scientists in order to justify shutting down the economy so that Trump could be blamed for an economic depression, and who was disgusted by the unconstitutional changes to voting and vote-counting rules and the abdication of the judiciary in addressing these issues, can fail to find the disintegration of the Biden regime and its media allies somewhat amusing.

Chris Wallace, formerly of Fox News, led the lionization of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose professional and administrative competence are not at issue but who was transported by the great eminence suddenly conferred upon him to lead the nation in a zig-zag pattern of changes of pace and opinion that continues still and undoubtedly resulted in a great deal of needless economic and psychological hardship.

Fauci white-washed the role of the Chinese Communist Party and of the World Health Organization, both of which we are now almost certain were duplicitous and negligent in not doing all that was possible to prevent the spread of the coronavirus from China. Fauci also appears to have disguised his own organization’s role in financing the research that may have accidentally led to the creation and escape of the coronavirus. The entire anti-Trump media was responsible for the lionization of Fauci far beyond what his performance warranted, but Wallace started the ball rolling with an infamously sycophantic interview.

His conduct as moderator of the first presidential debate was also so partisan that it was, as Trump himself stated in the course of the debate, almost as if he were debating two opponents. Just as the media during the campaign permitted Joe Biden to remain in his basement in Delaware while they conducted his campaign for him by smearing the Republican administration, Wallace effectively provided the same service during the first debate (though it must be said that Trump did himself no favors by his gratuitous bellicosity and over-frequent interruptions).

Wallace gave a fair exposé of his biases when he pronounced Biden’s platitudinous and monosyllabic inaugural address as the best that had been delivered of all the 16 that he had heard, starting with John F. Kennedy’s celebrated remarks in 1960.

In most cases, it’s distasteful and unsportsmanlike to celebrate the setbacks of other people, and I moderately reproach myself for doing it here, but there’s something naturally just and exquisitely symmetrical in the quick sequence of Wallace leaving Fox News for CNN, declaring his pleasure at joining “Jeff Zucker and his great team” and helping launch the CNN streaming service, as that network lost almost 75 percent of its primetime viewers, Zucker resigned, the new streaming service attracted approximately 5/100 of 1 percent of adult Americans, and it was shutdown after approximately three weeks. Though he was undoubtedly well paid for his brief sojourn on the CNN streaming service and will be back somewhere, the professional whereabouts of Wallace are unknown.

The exposure of the apparent fraudulence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) is another welcome development: Who can forget the ludicrous spectacle of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) marching with them a few days after the tragic death of George Floyd and declaring his adherence to the movement, as many of the nation’s largest and stupidest corporations deluged BLM with hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions without, apparently, the elemental verification that these were authentic charitable donations. It’s clear that they were not, that the corporate donors emancipated themselves from the least professionalism or thoroughness before pitching out the shareholders’ money in a manner that is probably not tax-deductible and went to an organization that originally became well known for condoning the murder of white policemen, and is now an alleged tax cheat. Even as corporate America was opening up its wallet, BLM’s leader in New York (Hawk Newsome) threatened to burn America down.

The tragedy and the outrage on the southern border in which more than 2 million people surge into the country illegally, annually, in a process more reminiscent of the barbarians overwhelming the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. than it does any recognizable form of immigration, vastly enriches the brutal Mexican drug importing and slave-trading gangs. It has from the start been more infuriating because of the uninterrupted mendacity of the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. From his first weeks in that job, as the Trump wall was stopped and the new president effectively invited the desperate and the derelict of the world to come to America and straight onto the welfare rolls and into its public health and education systems, and millions have answered, Mayorkas was doggedly announcing, “The border is closed,” as the other half of the split television screen showed pictures of large numbers of people walking or wading or swimming across the border at various sites and all hours.

What must surely be the coruscation, the ne plus ultra of the hypocrisy and incompetence of the whole Bidenization phenomenon must be Mayorkas’s happy announcement at a congressional committee this past week that his department was setting up a “misinformation and disinformation board” to correct falsehoods in the media and that it was being led by a person who has already proved herself to be a compulsively untruthful, rabidly partisan myth-maker who had stooped to putting on the Internet her own screechy rendition of the Mary Poppins song in the service of the full canon of Trump-hating mythology. It’s humorous, but it is, unfortunately, insane.

Vladimir Putin is supposedly causing inflation, the oil companies are themselves responsible for the decline in American oil production, and no one has any idea what America’s war aims are in Ukraine other than to prevent Russia from taking over the entire country. It’s a pitiful and contemptible administration, but events elsewhere have reassured Americans who are seeking it that God does bless America. Otherwise, Russia, which could easily have humiliated the West by simply seizing another chunk of Ukraine and leaving it at that, has bungled this invasion so badly that if Putin thinks he can take the Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine and continue to shower missiles down on the populated areas of the whole country indefinitely, NATO will have to give Ukraine the ability to reply against Russian territory. All Putin’s huffing and puffing about nuclear weapons is just buffoonery when all you will need to do to end the war with no attacks on Russia itself is accept a quarter of a loaf. China will have to take note of the Ukraine fiasco—Taiwan is a highly sophisticated, very well-armed island 110 miles of open water away from China. Invading it would be a terrible challenge, and the Chinese should understand that.

This awful time of poor government in the United States will disabuse both parties of mindless lurches to the left, will reinstall a sensible Republican administration and Congress, and the blunders of America’s rivals in the world will make the international cost of the Biden fiasco reasonably affordable.

First published in the Epoch Times.