The Prophet Isaiah at the State of the Union

by Roger L. Simon

A reader of my weekly newsletter from Texas wrote me this morning (March 8) his negative response to President Biden’s State of the Union address the previous night.

He concluded with a quote from the Bible, Isaiah 5:20.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

The words of the prophet summed up my reaction to the president’s dark, angry, hyped up as if heavily caffeinated (if that’s what it was), yet still slurred speech better than all the talking heads put together.

That the Republicans answered it with the puerile, stagey maunderings of a very freshman senator talking from a “homey” kitchen that looked like a set from a 1960s sitcom was not reassuring.

The women I know found it insulting.  It’s easy to see why.

That Sen. Mitch McConnell  (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had written excitedly about her selection on X made it all the more depressing, given the serious issues this person seemed unqualified to address.

With the Democratic Party having gone willy-nilly off the deep end of woke leftism, you would think it would be incumbent on the powers that be behind the Republican Party to address the public with an adult analysis of the issues and a modicum of gravitas. No such luck.

If I had to give a very distant second prize to Isaiah (how could it be otherwise?), it would be to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Mr. Rubio opined that when Mr. Biden referred to the “two-state solution” he was really talking about Michigan and Minnesota.

Touché.

The bleak part of that lust for votes is that the only newsworthy moment in the proceedings, leaked earlier in the day, was that Mr. Biden is throwing Israel further under the bus, pledging to build some kind of port in Gaza to deliver aid.

How this could be done without giving aid and comfort to the enemy—Hamas—was not explained, because it couldn’t be.

Hamas’s billionaire overall leader, Ismail Haniyeh, watching from his luxurious hotel suite, must have felt like the cat that ate the canary.

Hamas had been publicly lobbying for that and they seem to have gotten what they wished.

When, during the speech, Mr. Biden pronounced himself a great friend of Israel and bragged that he was the only president to visit the country during the war, it was a hard moment to swallow, to say the very least.

Meanwhile, a Gold Star dad was thrown out of the SOTU for interrupting the president who also mangled the name of murdered jogger Laken Riley, calling her “Lanken.” (Nancy Pelosi was apparently upset they called her murderer an “illegal” immigrant. Perhaps they should have asked his pronouns.)

Other than that, the speech was the usual litany of Democratic Party causes delivered with, shall we say, unique intensity.

Putin ally and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev evidently was displeased with the speech, particularly with the references to Franklin D. Roosevelt with which Mr. Biden began, writing on X:

“Even though Roosevelt was an infirm man in a wheelchair, he raised America from the Depression; Biden, on the other hand, is a mad, mentally disabled individual who set his mind on dragging humanity to hell.”

As they say, FWIW.

Interestingly, I spotted Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.… or is he an “independent”?) sitting listening to the proceedings holding one of those oh-so-familiar blue paper COVID-19 masks in his hands, but not wearing it, as if it were a pagan talisman of some sort.

This is where we are in our country where new forms of primitivism are being invented.

Isaiah understood it better thousands of years ago.

It’s worth repeating.