Ol’ Joe Might Be Worse Than Dark Brandon

In the illustrious pages of CNN, President Joe Biden recently made his case for voting Democrat in the upcoming election. While his argument is well over 800 words, so much of it can be summarized thus: vote for Democrats because they spend a lot of money.

Before considering Biden’s reasoning, it’s important to note how much his rhetoric has cooled since his “Dark Brandon” speech in which he accused his political opponents of being radical extremists threatening democracy. Evidently, this was not a winning message for Americans, a large number of whom qualify as dreadful “MAGA Republicans” (although he did channel Dark Brandon one more time recently as the polls looks more and more desperate for Democrats)

Now Dark Brandon has returned to being Ol’ Sleepy Joe, bragging about his supposed accomplishments, which mainly include signing massive spending bills. In many ways, what he mentions in this op-ed is actually worse than what he said about MAGA Republicans. It’s bad enough to be another corrupt fascist in office who weaponizes government agencies for self-interested reasons (Thanks, Obama), but it’s even worse to be an empowered leftist who is actively turning history’s greatest superpower into an impoverished dystopia. 

Biden begins his op-ed with a lie: “We’ve created 10 million jobs, including almost 700,000 manufacturing jobs.” This makes it sound like Biden and the Democrats have personally gone out and employed 10 million factory workers, as though this is something politicians can do. Perhaps Biden can award massive government contracts to his cronies responsible for generating renewable energy, creating weapons for Ukraine, and producing ineffective medicine for Covid. Sadly, he cannot resurrect the many businesses that fell due to idiotic Covid regulations that he supported well after the virus had passed. 

More to the point, touting employment figures doesn’t amount to much when skyrocketing inflation raises prices, depresses productivity and sales, and triggers high interest rates, making all Americans ever poorer. Biden claims this is “driven by the pandemic and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine” and not on the trillions of dollars printed on behalf of his administration and Democrats who pass massive spending bills on party-line votes. Naturally, Biden’s solution to inflation is printing even more dollars to somehow bring costs down. 

But, just as government cannot create jobs, it also can’t create goods. Increasing the money supply has meant that more dollars chase a set number goods, causing prices to increase. They can call their spending bill “inflation reduction” all they like, but this doesn’t do anything to the actual cause of inflation, which is runaway spending.

The same problem applies to the cost of fuel, which Biden claims to have lowered…by tapping into the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As the name indicates, tapping this reserve was intended for national crises affecting national security and stability, not for a political party trying to stay in office. Of course, Biden’s administration could always cut the red tape, allow pipelines to be built, and approve oil leases, but that would prevent him from virtue signaling about climate change.

For the rest of his article, Biden criticizes Republicans for wanting to cut government spending and not raise taxes. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that Republicans will really do much to cut Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos’ taxes, just as it’s unlikely that Biden will do anything to increase them. Rather, with 87,000 new IRS agents, it’s all too likely that middle-class earners will be harassed into paying more than their fair share.

And, just as Biden begins his argument with a lie, he ends his argument with another one: “The fact is, this is not your father’s Republican party: Many Republicans in Congress want to pass a national ban on abortion.” He links to Lindsey Graham’s bill to place a ban on abortions after 15-weeks, a tad different than an outright ban on abortion. For his part, supposedly Catholic Biden and his party will continue fighting all limits on abortion and instead facilitate abortions all the way to the point of birth and beyond. If nothing else should make a Catholic voter reconsider their commitment to the Democratic party, this should do it. 

In itself, Biden’s op-ed is nothing unusual. It’s become the usual boilerplate for Democrats, and it’s repeated so often that even conservatives hardly bother with refuting it. Nevertheless, this humdrum argument is far more consequential since a majority of Democrat voters accept it unthinkingly and it really does threaten the continued prosperity of the nation.

For their part, conservatives and politically active Catholics today tend to focus on cultural issues like gender theory, Critical Race Theory, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives, and wokeness. This rightly elicits outrage and deserves aggressive pushback (and, like most conservative writers, I’ve written more than a few pieces on all of these issues). However, to persuade the other side and win elections, some of this energy needs to be devoted to fighting the things progressives like to brag about. Take those things away and politicians like Joe Biden will have to revert back to Dark Brandon for anyone to take him seriously.

In all probability, the GOP will have a good year and make up majorities in both houses. Unfortunately, it’s also likely that the American economy will crash as a result of these first two years of Biden’s presidency. Once this happens, Republicans will be blamed for all of it and the lies and bad arguments that Biden is writing now for CNN will be repeated endlessly on all major news outlets. If Christian conservatives want to save their country and continue fighting the culture war, they will need to prepare for this eventuality and make sure their fellow Americans aren’t duped again when it happens.  

[Photo Credit: AFP via Getty Images]