Archive for 2022

YOU GO TO WAR WITH THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE: Biden declares war on half the country.

What we are seeing, in fact, is the promulgation of a neo-Manichean philosophy. That heretical sect, named for a third-century A.D. Parthian seer called Mani, was an astringently dualistic creed that divided the world into light and dark, the saved and the damned. According to the creed of Biden and the elites who formulate his thoughts and speeches, the radical Democratic agenda of climate change, “green” intimidation, wealth redistribution, and sexual perversion is the gospel of light. Outer darkness is occupied by people who espouse such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the canons of private property that guarantee those rights. It is a strange and unforgiving religion, one whose primary sacrament is excommunication. Ultimately, as some wag put it, its goal is a world in which everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.

That is the background. You often hear the world “democracy” uttered in these heady precincts, usually in the now-noxious phrase “our democracy” (translation: their prerogative”). As I note in a column on “Joe Biden and the Sovietization of America” for the October edition of the Speccie, it is a world in which “democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.” To the question “was the election fair,” what you need to know in order to answer is who won. If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen.

In any event, Biden’s speech consisted of a series accusations directed at “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

Lest you think that attack on 74 million Trump supporters was an aberration, note that a week earlier at a Maryland fundraiser, Biden had insisted that the problem for those wishing to conserve the “soul of America” was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the…semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda.

To be fair, Biden did say “nevermind” yesterday: ‘I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country’: Now Biden walks back his attacks on MAGA Republicans — and insists he was talking about people who call for ‘use of violence’ and reject election results.

People who reject election results are the worst:

Just ask President Klain:

 

GOOD: MIT’s MOXIE experiment reliably produces oxygen on Mars. “On the red and dusty surface of Mars, nearly 100 million miles from Earth, an instrument the size of a lunchbox is proving it can reliably do the work of a small tree. The MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been successfully making oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere since April 2021, about two months after it touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover and Mars 2020 mission.”

BYRON YORK: Biden’s American carnage speech.

That was the conventional campaign part of Biden’s speech. Next came the abortion part. And no, Biden did not say the word “abortion.” Instead, in attacking Republicans, he harkened back to one of the ugliest speeches ever given in American politics — the “Robert Bork’s America” speech given by Biden’s old Democratic Senate colleague, Ted Kennedy, in 1987. Back then, Biden and Kennedy were working to block the Supreme Court nomination of Bork. Kennedy’s speech, delivered as Biden looked on, has become legendary for the sheer number of false charges it contained. Here is an excerpt:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens…

It would be hard to equal that, but on Thursday in Philadelphia, Biden tried. He was never the speaker that Kennedy was, and now he is old and slow, but he still managed to evoke the spirit of “Robert Bork’s America” when he said: “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”

It was an old-fashioned Democratic attack ad. It could have come from 1992. But Biden slapped a MAGA label on it and tied it to Trump, even though the issues had been litigated long before Trump ran for president.

The true darkness in Biden’s speech came in his long attacks on Trump and Trump’s supporters, whom he sometimes called “MAGA Republicans” and sometimes called “extreme MAGA Republicans.” In all, the acronym appeared in Biden’s speech 13 times.

“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution,” Biden said. “They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. … They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

So you’re saying they view the Constitution as a living, fluid document? Liberals Confirm They Hate the Constitution. “Apparently it isn’t ‘living’ enough for the left, so they want to kill it completely.”

SALENA ZITO: Colorado’s sleeper Senate race just got real. “There is something going on here in Colorado politics that is not much different than what happened in Virginia exactly one year ago — a shift away from the status quo and the odds-on favorite Democrat toward his Republican challenger.”

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