Toward the end of his divisive and rambling incitement to class warfare, Biden served up one of the brazen, outright lies that have marred his entire career. The man deserves credit for audacity, for even in his dementia-ridden dotage he is unsurpassed in Washington (a city of politicians, which means a city of liars) in his ability to deliver an absolute falsehood not only with absolute conviction but also with passionate, self-righteous fervor.
“Some airlines,” Joe declared, “if you want six more inches between you and the seat in front, you pay more money. But you don’t know it until you purchase your ticket. Look, folks, these are junk fees. They’re unfair, and they hit marginalized Americans the hardest, especially low-income folks and people of color. They benefit big corporations, not consumers, not working families. And that changes now.”
If “fact-checkers” really actually checked facts instead of just running interference for the far Left, they would give that statement all the Pinocchios they have, for there is simply no truth in it whatsoever.
Biden, contrary to his carefully nurtured Lunchbucket Joe image, has been a member of the Beltway elite for over five decades, and so he likely hasn’t flown commercial in ages. And characteristically, his statement is not entirely clear. He is clearly saying that the airlines are racist and take money illegitimately from their non-white customers, which is viciously false and irresponsible enough in itself, but it’s not clear how exactly he is saying they do it. Is he saying that it’s wrong and racist for airlines to charge more for seats that offer more legroom? Or does he mean that the airlines are tacking charges for more legroom onto the price for a ticket that the customer has already agreed to pay, without the customer’s knowledge?
I can’t keep track of the Brandon administration’s various imaginary grievances. Are racist airline seats more or less racist than racist roads and bridges, for example?
Given how much editing NBC and its sister networks must do to get usable footage of Biden, that they allowed this to air could be a preview of how the networks will start treating him post-midterms.
UPDATE: The media bail on Biden: “All polling points to Biden’s majorities in the House and Senate being wiped out come the November midterm elections. When that happens, and I mean the very next day, these innuendos and grumblings for Biden to step aside will become full-bore primal screams, and he won’t be able to survive them.”
“Biden goes to bat for John Fetterman in Pennsylvania,” reads the headline from Bloomberg. If so, Joe Biden appears to have struck out. And Fetterman apparently never came up to bat.
* * * * * * * *
One has to wonder just how accurate the polling out of Pennsylvania has been after this rally. If the race was close and/or Fetterman was leading, they’d never have had Biden come out to campaign. Barack Obama? Sure. Even Bernie Sanders might have done better with working-class voters. Bringing Biden in to close the sale for Fetterman, however, feels like a desperation move as the candidate spins downward with voters — especially if they were relying on Biden to bolster their campaign’s coherence.
I wonder how far down the list of closers Biden was. “We can’t get either of the Obamas. We can’t get Bernie. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to go with the old man at this point. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“After my stroke,” Fetterman opens, “I was just grateful to see Giselle and my kids.” In the soft-focus spot, Fetterman denounces “politicians” who “spend so much time fighting about the things that don’t matter.” What does matter, says Fetterman, is having the economic security to be able to spend time with loved ones because we never know how much time we have.
It’s a touching message, but it hardly allays concerns about Fetterman’s ailments. The point of an ad like this is to “hang a lantern” on the candidate’s negatives, thereby reframing the issue in more favorable terms. That’s a workable strategy, but it comes at the cost of conceding that the negative in question is a real and pressing concern for voters.
More ominously, from the perspective of Pennsylvania’s Democratic voters, is the prospect of President Joe Biden’s imminent return to the state.
As the midterm election season heads into the home stretch, the president will host a fundraiser in Pennsylvania alongside Fetterman. Biden hasn’t been seen with Fetterman in any capacity since September 5; indeed, the president hasn’t campaigned much at all of late. “Biden doesn’t appear eager to land Air Force One in states where he’s underwater in the polls, and incumbent Democratic senators are fighting to hang on,” Axios reported on Friday. “And he’s yet to headline any campaign rallies this month where he is in front of big audiences to make his closing argument.” Pennsylvania is just such a state where Biden’s presence could do more to harm than good for Democratic prospects.
September’s Franklin & Marshall Poll of the Keystone State showed that only 28 percent of Pennsylvania’s registered voters say the president is doing a “good” or “excellent” job. Seventy percent describe his performance in office as “fair” or “poor.” While that poll showed the race for Senate tightening significantly from August, Fetterman maintains a narrow lead over his Republican opponent. Moreover, the Fetterman campaign has outraised and continues to outspend Mehmet Oz, who has pumped at least $17 million of his own wealth into his campaign. The wisdom of the Fetterman camp’s decision to tether itself to the Democratic Party’s unpopular figurehead is questionable unless we assume that Democratic wallets are starting to tighten up as enthusiasm for the candidate wanes.
As Michael Graham wrote in 2004 after Frank Lautenberg was swapped in to replace Bob Torricelli on the Democrats’ Senate ticket in NJ, “Don’t assume you know who’s on the Democratic ticket until Election Day.”
But here’s the interesting part. Qiu is the paper’s designated “fact-checker.” So, if Biden is habitually spinning yarns that unravel, she must be busy with Biden checks, right? No. She hasn’t “fact-checked” Biden since Aug.20, 2021, on the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco under an extremely mild headline: “Clarifying Biden’s Take of Evacuation.”
A peek at her archive of articles since then includes at least 14 “fact-checks” of Republicans and/or conservatives. This 14-to-1 imbalance in target selection would remind you of PolitiFact — which makes sense because that’s where Qiu worked before joining the Times.
Jake Tapper’s snarky chyron says: “No, he wasn’t.”
President Biden on Thursday told State Department employees he was “shot at” overseas — reviving a claim that previously stirred controversy.“You have great personal courage. I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at,” Biden told a group of diplomatic aides in Washington.
Biden did not offer a detailed description of being shot at. But he was forced to walk back a similar claim in 2007 as veterans warned him not to exaggerate.
Biden said during a CNN-hosted Democratic presidential debate in 2007 that he was “shot at” inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone.
He later revised the claim, saying that in fact, “I was near where a shot landed.”
To be fair, Obama-era staffers routinely exaggerate their wartime peril:
President Joe Biden appeared to incorrectly claim on Wednesday that his late son, Beau, “lost his life in Iraq.”
Giving a speech in Colorado to designate Camp Hale as a national monument, the president discussed the many sacrifices that soldiers make before citing his son Beau as an example.
“I say this as a father of a man and won the Bronze Star, the conspicuous service medal, and lost his life in Iraq,” Biden said.
Although Biden’s son did serve in Iraq, he died of brain cancer in 2015.
And there is the foundation. Holding Joe accountable for what he says is not on the table. But what are journalists to do, after years of telling us a President lying is horrible? The answer: Reclassify Jose Biden’s lying as something else. To the rescue, in rides Sheer and Qiu with their handy guide. In this lengthy explainer of Biden’s fables, they deliver a wide array of new terms for lying in a helpful manner for journos. Buckle in – this is a long ride through a forest of ambiguity and double meaning.
The habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity…exaggerated biography…has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience…Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore…the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful…Mr. Biden’s fictions…weave together his political identity…he could stretch the truth up to a point…a serial exaggerator…continued to shave the truth…curious stories…
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden appears to ask if dead congresswoman is at White House speech: “Biden’s mistake came during his remarks at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. [Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN)], who was tragically killed in a car crash in August, was a core congressional ally in planning the conference alongside Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN). ‘I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like Rep. McGovern, Sen. Braun, Sen. Booker, Rep. — Jackie, are you here?’ the president said near the top of his remarks. ‘Where’s Jackie? I thought she was going to be here — to help make this a reality.’ In August, when news of Walorski’s passing first broke, Biden wrote in a statement that the accident left him and first lady Jill Biden ‘shocked and saddened.’”
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden’s Old Man Filter Goes Haywire Again: “Biden with his arm around Elton John: ‘It’s all his fault we are spending $6 billion in tax payer dollars on HIV and AIDS this month.’”
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! On 60 Minutes, President Biden Admits His Student-Loan Order Is Illegal. “‘The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,’ President Biden tells 60 Minutes in an interview in Detroit. Why does Biden’s statement matter so much? I’ll tell you: It matters because the memo that the Biden administration released to justify his order rested entirely upon there being an ongoing emergency, and because, as Biden has just confirmed, there is no ongoing emergency.
President Klain is not happy: “Biden’s insistence on Sunday night that the pandemic is over caught several of his own health officials by surprise. The declaration was not part of his planned remarks ahead of the ‘60 Minutes’ interview, two administration officials familiar with the matter told POLITICO.”
President Joe Biden is going to be expected at the forthcoming Detroit Auto Show that will be taking place in two weeks. It’ll mark the first time he has visited Detroit since his days as Vice President, Bloomberg noted last week.
“I’ll be there. I’m a car guy, as you kind of noticed,” Biden said last week when asked if he was going to attend.
Sure, we noticed. In fact, we couldn’t help but notice that Biden is such a car guy that his administration is trying to force through counterproductive and burdensome environmental and EV requirements for auto manufacturers. Biden apparently has such reverence for the industry he has decided that it needs to be changed in its entirety.
The new requirements and subsidies under the Biden administration have forced automakers to fundamentally change their vehicle lineups and how they operate. They’ve also become a tax on the American people that is dropping straight to the bottom line of auto manufacturers, as we’ve noted over the last week that automakers are raising their EV prices by almost the exact amount that the Biden administration is offering in subsidies to buyers.
And he’s such a fan of U.S. auto companies that Biden has barely acknowledged U.S. automaker Tesla’s existence, simply because the company isn’t embracing unionization amongst its workers.
But with midterms approaching, Biden wants us to forget all that — and Thursday “Dork Brandon” debacle — by reverting to his Corvette-loving old image temporarily.
MORE: Granholm: California’s New Gas Vehicle Sale Ban ‘Could Be’ a National Model. “Elex Michaelson [of Los Angeles’ Fox affiliate] asked [Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm], ‘California made national headlines by becoming the first state to say, by 2035, we’re not going to have any gas-powered vehicles that are new that are being sold. You can still drive your old ones, but you can’t sell new ones. Do you like this concept?’ Granholm responded, ‘Yeah, I do. I think California really is leaning in. And of course, the federal government has a goal of — the president has announced — by 2030 that half of the vehicles in the U.S., the new ones sold would be electric.’”
[B]ased on his speech on Thursday, President Biden taught me that the MAGA goals were all evil. I felt horrible.
He even stopped calling us Ultra MAGA. Whenever a cleaning product introduces a more robust version of their product, they use Ultra as a prefix to the product’s name. When our President called us Ultra, I thought it was meant as a complement.
Thursday night President Biden, who campaigned on the basis of uniting the country, but never kept that promise, was at his most divisive. He singled out the people whose political positions were close to mine as evil and unAmerican.
I took the Presidents words to heart and cried all night long.
But on Friday, I felt so much better because the POTUS no longer thought I was a bad person. I was no longer very evil, maybe as bad as Generalissimo Francisco Franco ( who, I have been told is still dead).
President Biden on Friday said he does not consider any Donald Trump supporters to be a “threat” to the U.S. He said things that most people who supported MAGA goals would agree with.
He said the failure to condemn violence for political gains was “inappropriate.”
Holy Cow. I agree. People who use violence to make a political statement are wrong, and our leaders should condemn them publicly. I may have been sick with COVID and missed when the President scolded the people who encouraged and attempted to kill Supreme Court Justices after they ruled that abortion was a State rather than a Federal Issue.
As Byron York asked on Friday, “Huh? Biden’s remarks at the White House cast a cloud of confusion over what he said the night before. Did he mean it? Did he fully understand the kind of accusations he was making in Philadelphia? Was he confused? The president’s rhetoric was terribly serious and terribly divisive. It was hard to understand why he even gave the speech. Now, it is not clear whether he understands it, either.”
Dan McLaughlin compared Biden’s Philadelphia debacle to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech of 1979. But I don’t recall Carter saying “Whoops — never mind!” the day after.
These are two important races in a battleground state, and it’s concerning that Joe Biden doesn’t seem to know which candidate is running for which position.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday demanded oil companies explain why they aren’t putting more gasoline on the market, sharply escalating his rhetoric against industry as he faces pressure over rising prices.
Biden wrote to executives from Marathon Petroleum Corp, Valero Energy Corp, and Exxon Mobil Corp and complained they had cut back on oil refining to pad their profits, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters.
“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote, adding the lack of refining was driving gas prices up faster than oil prices.
“The lack of refining capacity – and resulting unprecedented refinery profit margins – are blunting the impact of the historic actions my Administration has taken to address Vladimir Putin’s Price Hike and are driving up costs for consumers.”
The letter is also being sent to Phillips 66, Chevron Corp, BP and Shell, a White House official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.
In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.
There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?
Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?
There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.
Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”
So despite Biden claiming today that high gas prices are Putin’s fault, is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
His tweet also garnered support from Chinese state media, with Chen Weihua, China Daily EU Bureau Chief, responding that Biden “finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation.”
Biden’s tweet comes as gas prices are averaging at $4.822 nationwide, which is up over 20 cents from just one month ago.
Who could have seen praise from the CCP coming for Biden?
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