It’s Friday, January 21st, 2022…and though we’ll cover 46*’s catastrophic press conference in gory detail, our initial impression can be neatly summed up by borrowing from Cordell Hull’s response to the emperor’s envoys’ belated offer immediately following Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor: 

In all our 66 years of life, we’ve never heard statements more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions – on a scale so huge that we never imagined until today that any politician on this planet was capable of uttering them.

Which says it all about Joe Biden.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, NRO‘s Charlie Cooke records Wednesday evening’s press conference-version of the Afghanistan disgrace simply capped off…

Biden’s Year of Failure

On beating Covid, on restoring unity, on repairing the economy, Biden in fact ‘overpromised’ — and underperformed, woefully.

Of all the many unbidden iniquities that have dogged President Biden since he took office, perhaps the most unjust of all is that bad things keep happening to the man after he has done something stupid. The phenomenon has been near Newtonian in its consistency. The president blows the Afghanistan withdrawal; his poll numbers crater in response. The president chases an agenda that he knows lacks the requisite votes; that agenda goes down in flames. The president issues an order that he’s acknowledged as a violation of the law; that order is nixed by the Supreme Court. The president terrifies a close ally; that ally expresses its disgust. And on and on it goes, as if gravity itself were in play. Action, meet reaction, meet the falling of the sword of Damocles.

Biden’s apologists like to excuse their charge’s shortcomings by pointing to the poisoned chalice he was handed. And, sure enough, this president did inherit an unenviable landscape. On the day that Biden became president, Covid was still raging, inflation was beginning to materialize, the global supply chain was showing signs of interruption, crime was on the rise, and the debt had hit record levels. The trouble is, Biden has been president for a full year and Covid is still raging, inflation is now at its highest level since 1982, the global supply chain remains interrupted, and crime, somehow, has worsened. As for the national debt? We are worse off than ever before.

When he asked for the job, Biden vowed that, by electing him, Americans would be reversing those trends. But that has not come close to being true. During his campaign, Biden vowed that he would “shut down the virus” and “grow our economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” He hasn’t. In a million radio and TV ads, he guaranteed that he would “restore honor” to the White House. He hasn’t. In his inaugural address, he vowed that he would “stop the shouting, and lower the temperature” and “fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” He hasn’t.

Instead, he has proven himself to be every bit the vicious partisan that his critics expected. Instead, he has pursued a preposterously ambitious agenda — as if his party had 70 seats in the Senate, rather than 50. Instead, he has abandoned all talk of being an “institutionalist” and endorsed the wholesale destruction of the very norms he swore to uphold. Instead, he has started to sound like his predecessor, by questioning the integrity of American elections, dismissing polling out of hand, and refusing to draw bright lines with figures such as Vladimir Putin. I will grant that being a “caretaker” president is not the most exciting of prospects, even for a man as dull as Joe Biden. And yet that — and not indulging absurd, FDR-esque fantasies — is what the voters requested of both him and the closely balanced Congress that they returned to D.C. Competence, moderation, humility, experience, mindfulness — these were the qualities Biden promised the country. In his first year, he has exhibited none of them. Under President Biden, America has not returned to normal but become stranger than ever before. Why is his approval rating in the basement? How could it not be?

Yesterday’s press conference was Biden’s first in a couple of months, and, frankly, he would have been better off skipping it. The White House promised a “reset” but provided no evidence of any such thing. From start to finish, the president came across as an unfocused, unprepared, unserious, ill-tempered mess. He suggested that it would be fine if Russia invaded Ukraine so long as the move represented a “minor incursion.” He proposed that the 2022 midterms would be illegitimate if his coveted “voting rights” bills do not pass. He defended his handling of Afghanistan, despite the bipartisan condemnation of that affair. He attempted to sell his spending agenda as deflationary, though it was written before inflation took hold. He slammed Senator McConnell as an obstructionist who will do anything to make him look bad, forgetting that McConnell signed on to the same trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that Biden proclaimed as a victory in November. And he insisted, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, that he did not “overpromise” and has “outperformed” as president. The affair was an abject disaster, but it was also par for the course. And that, ultimately, is the problem.

In other words…

In a related item at the WSJ, Ronald Reagan’s former chief wordsmith Ken Khachigian notes…

Biden Is Flailing, Literally and Figuratively

The opposite, in both style and substance, of Reagan’s calmly and confidently delivered message of unity.

“After Joe Biden bitterly attacked Donald Trump only days before the inauguration, I urged the president-elect on these pages to follow Ronald Reagan’s model by rising above intemperate remarks. Mr. Biden could “be the one who isn’t petty, small and spiteful. He can stay out of squabbles, be a statesman, show honor, demonstrate how someone truly worthy of the office behaves.”

A year later, he has failed to meet that standard. (In fact, failed MISERABLY!!!) Worse, President Biden appears bizarrely determined—as he did in Georgia last week—to rupture goodwill among his fellow citizens by descending to lower levels of anger and deceit. He apparently doesn’t see that his embrace of rancor and division has contributed to the 30-point collapse in his approval ratings.

…Americans are asking themselves: Are we better off than we were a year ago? Mr. Biden should ask himself: How is it possible that the Democratic Party, which offered the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, can’t come up with anything less dopey than Build Back Better? A president who has barely 4 out of 10 Americans approving his job performance, and hovers on the brink of the collapse of his congressional support, should give all of the above serious thought.“

We’ll leave the last word on what ails the Biden clown car to the Journal‘s Kim Strassel, who accurately assesses the problem isn’t bad “messaging”, the WuFlu or inflation. It’s the Democrats’ bad ideas.

Then again…

Here’s the juice: If Russia invades Ukraine, be their incursion large or small, as the Morning Jolt records, Hunter’s daddy will have no one to blame but himself.  Which will of course be small consolation to the good citizens of Ukraine, who, despite yearning to breath free, awake one morning to find themselves under the boot heel of Biden’s best buddy Vlad.

In a column written in anticipation of 46*’s self-inflicted fiasco, NRO’s Kevin Williamson made an observation which deserves repeating:

“…I do sometimes wonder why presidents, especially Republicans, speak to the press at all. I suppose I am glad that they do, to the modest extent that this contributes to transparency and accountability. But if I were — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — advising a President DeSantis or a President Ponnuru, I would advise them never to speak to the New York Times or the Washington Post, to CNN or NPR or the CBS Evening News with Whoever the Hell It Is These Days. What good could we expect to come of it? Everybody, including professional politicians, makes mistakes when speaking extemporaneously, even with the Wagnerian predictability of the typical American presidential interview. Everybody forgets things. Everybody has dull moments: It took me five guesses to solve a Wordle one day last week, and I misspelled Neiman Marcus in my newsletter — nobody is proud of that sort of thing.

Trump liked to talk to the Fox News gang quite a bit and to call into talk-radio shows, but, of course, his favorite medium was Twitter. For a more disciplined sort of president, that wouldn’t be a bad way to communicate at all: directly to the people, in your own words or those of some highly paid professional (the Peggy Noonan of the 21st century will be an author of tweets or something like that, not speeches) who can make sure that you say just what you want to say and nothing else. Of course, what most presidents want to say most of the time is approximately nothing, and a really good communications professional can help them do that effectively. There is an art to saying nothing — and if you are no good at it, you end up speaking like Kamala Harris and sounding ridiculous: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” Hit the return key every seven words and that’d be postmodernist poetry…”

Which begs the question why Republican presidential candidates agree to debates with MSM moderators.

Next up, we offer another octet of specially selected items certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:

(1). Courtesy of The Epoch Times, Jeffrey Tucker reminisces about what might have been had the WuFlu been approached with calm, protection and care.  You know…like every other virus outbreak in world history.

(2). As contributor Speed noted, if you can cut through the need to take digs at Trump, it’s surprising the following was featured on CNN: Fact check: A look at Biden’s first year in false claims.

(3). Sorry, but as this forward from the New York Post via George Lawlor correctly concludes, who else but a complete narcissist has an over-sized portrait of themself…

…hanging over the desk in their office?!?

(4). Despite all three…count ’em, ALL THREE…SCOTUS justices involved specifically denying Nina Totenberg’s report Neil Gorsuch refused to mask up despite Sonia Sotomayor being a diabetic, NPR stands by its story.  If anyone ever needed a reason to defund this haven of Socialist sympathizers, this is it.

(5). In a definite sign the Pentagon needs to be overhauled from top to bottom (or, perhaps more appropriately, keelhauled!!!), courtesy of Breeze Gould, Military.com reports the Defense Department has quietly begun looking into how it can allow troops whose gender identity is nonbinary to serve openly in the military.  Yeah, THAT oughta have America’s enemies shaking in their boots…with laughter.

Think about it: Russia, with the permission of a sitting, albeit illegitimate U.S. President, is set to attack Ukraine, the ChiComs are poised to invade Taiwan, and the Mad Mullahs are on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons.  Meanwhile, America’s top brass is preoccupied with providing opportunities for the mentally ill.  Is it any wonder the great VDH sees the United States joining Rome on the ash heap of history.

(6). At the request of the Daily Mail, Jim Geraghty details the contents of the so-called “voting rights” bill Progressives have deliberately failed to mention.  This bill is as much about voting rights as the government response to the WuFlu has been about controlling the virus.

(7). Proving even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, the man who until quite recently ignored the massive 2020 electoral fraud which occurred under his very nose, expressed his dismay with President Joe Biden’s recent rhetoric surrounding the 2022 midterms and election integrity.  “Between his speech last week here in Georgia, and his remarks last night, President Biden has surrendered any credibility he had on the integrity of America’s elections,” Raffensperger stated.

 

(8). Since we’re on the subject of the Peach State, Georgia Dimocrat Hank Johnson claimed on Thursday that “in some respects” the United States is presided over by a “racist Senate” and accused Texas Representative Chip Roy of promoting “white privilege” and “white power“.  This from a man perhaps best known for expressing concern an additional 10,000 U.S. Military personnel proposed to be stationed on Guam might cause the island to capsize.

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these from Speed…

…and the lovely Shannon:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with Something You Don’t See Every Day, in this case, the oddity being a…

Moose found trapped in a Colorado basement

Reports the family’s annual Groundhog Day table tennis tournament has been postponed remain unconfirmed.

Though there’s one thing of which we’re 100% certain: Until Mars chooses to change, we’ve bought our last bag of M&Ms. 

Magoo

Video of the Day

The great VDH on the breakdown of American society. This isn’t an accident, it’s by design. And the disintegration isn’t an unfortunate, unforeseen side effect, it’s the goal.

Tales of The Darkside

Tucker reacts to 46*’s two hours of continuous stupidity punctuated by moments of sheer disaster.

On the Lighter Side

Courtesy of Carl Polizzi, a commercial appropriate to our passion.