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The Genius of Joe Biden
“[I]f the old Emperor had been surreptitiously smothered; that same crowd in a moment would have hailed their new Augustus. They shed their sense of responsibility long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, bread and circuses.” — Juvenal, Satire X: the Vanity of Human Wishes
If I told you that Joe Biden has shown more vision and courage in advancing the leftist agenda than FDR, McGovern, Clinton, and Obama, would that shock you?
The American Dream has always been a thorn in the side of career statist politicians. Politicians have little power to make an economy grow faster but lots of power to screw it up. When the vast majority of citizens take responsibility for their own lives and derive sustenance and wealth accumulation from their efforts freely joined with others, they are likely to expect accountability, transparency, integrity, and competence from those who govern — and limit the scope of their governing power — all of which must be really annoying for the ruling class.
Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, inspired by visionaries like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, the emerging new American political class sought to reduce the freedoms required for self-reliance and replace all that with new forms of dependency. But it never reached the critical mass the left sought and needed. George McGovern was the last major figure to propose an outright income guarantee. Nixon greatly expanded social welfare expenditures, but that annoying middle class (a) resented the certainty of higher taxes to pay for it and (b) resented supporting some who were simply freeloaders and imposed political limits.
In the 1980s, with Republicans in the White House and the ever-annoying middle-class politically ascendant, Democrats pushed for mandated benefits — making employers provide what was politically impossible for statist politicians to do, but that was “progress” on an unsatisfyingly small scale. A stealth campaign was underway to seize control of education, corporations, and culture, forms of control that elections would never have given them. No one dreamed of how successful that campaign would eventually be. But despite the seizure of every major cultural institution and many board rooms, the free-market lovers, the middle class, and pro-private ownership types have remained firmly in the way. They even smuggled Trump into the White House without approval.
It turns out that FDR, McGovern, Clinton, and Obama lacked the vision of Joe Biden. The solution to that damn middle class was not to persuade or bludgeon them but (a) to first undercut and bypass them by taking away every supporting institution that then (b) replace them outright with a flood of almost entirely dependent persons without skills, education, experience of freedom, or the cultural background to cherish (increasingly old-fashioned) American notions of limited government and self-reliance. Open the borders, destroy public education, spend lavishly without (immediately) taxing the self-reliant, and thus establish a new dependent, unfree majority that will stop demanding competence, accountability, and integrity. And (c) for the coup de grace, circle back from the cultural conquest of the universities and all bureaucratized entities to persuade successful young women that self-reliance is simply too risky and that loss of freedoms is a small price to pay for (the illusion of) security and guarantees — and for saving the planet and not letting mean people win.
That normal working men are demonized as haters, clingers, racists, insurrectionists, sexists, etc., is born of the enemy’s perception of the last bastion of potential resistance to the imposition of The Vision. The mindset that believes that the Proud Boys were a mortal threat, that SWAT teams need to go to the homes of pro-lifers, that misgendering pronouns is a crime but looting is not, and that anyone who noticed the extensive irregularities of the 2020 election should be jailed for insurrection is now cognitively dominant even if demonstrably nuts.
Conservatives chuckled when “sanctuary cities” mayors screamed about the cost of mass illegal immigration and we enjoyed the finger-pointing about who is at fault and who pays what. But the apparent conflict is pure kabuki. The “solution,” if you listen to Schumer and the White House, is work permits and de facto citizenship to provide eligibility for direct aid. Oddly enough, deportation or any other action that might discourage further influx is not discussed. Shocker, eh?
Undercut, destroy, and then end the political majority of the normals with an imported wave. Hail, Caesar! And soon, all that nonsense about democracy and being a republic will be like some weird dream. More importantly, any accountability for the permanent ruling class will evaporate. In the years to come, a few marginal nutballs will talk about restoring the republic but be powerless to do so–and probably be arrested.
So, will history hail Joe Robinette Augustus, visionary?
Published in General
No.
The “hero” will be Barack Obama.
Almost everything you describe came from decisions and policies of President Obama. He just couldn’t get it all fully orchestrated in the eight years he was in office. But, he installed into the critical offices people who could see Obama’s vision, and moved the critical mass of bureaucratic thinking to a tipping point that meant it would continue even when Obama was no longer in office.
Biden is an evil man, but he is not smart. Either he is being well manipulated by the people Obama put in place, or he is smart enough to see that the motion Obama started could easily be continued.
You are not wrong. The wave of Marxism always broke on the middle class in the US, and Joe has that squarely in his cross hairs. The left also learned from the gay marriage and 2020 election that all you have to do is keep socializing people ahead of time to expect less and then when they get it, they think you’ve done your job. It’s easy to do when you control the narrative and when they’ve scared us into thinking that everything that the middle class has traditionally worked for is killing the planet.
That and they probably believe that THEY will be able to continue living a rather easy life, it’s all those OTHER people out there who must do without.
Well … someone in the Biden camp is genius.
Running as himself – or as what he billed himself to be – moderate, centrist, lunch pail Joe – he had lackluster support in the primaries. In Iowa he finished behind Mayor Pete, Bernie and Fauxcahontas. He did even worse in New Hampshire. His performance in Nevada was anemic, still trailing Bernie.
Then something happened. South Carolina political icon Rep James Clyburn saved Biden’s bacon. Clyburn’s endorsement catapulted Biden to a victory in SC and he was rolling from then on. But Biden’s positions morphed as well. Lunch pail Joe still billed himself as moderate but his positions swung Left until they were virtually indistinguishable from Bernie’s.
Did Biden know this? Or was he just mouthing what he was told? Whomever it was that cemented Clyburn’s support and steered the Biden campaign Left while still playing Good Old Joe as a moderate is the genius. That’s for sure.
My only quibble is that Obama is the smart one. I submit he was the facilitator: his administration served to put the most career marxists/sqft ever imagined. He isn’t smart enough nor hard working enough to design and execute the effort. He was an excellent front man tho. Biden is indeed evil. Not smart. Just a really nasty, foul minded, craven jerk who could be bought early on for pretty small sums.
I agree. Obama may be smart, but he wasn’t even the one behind all this rot. It is bigger and more tyrannical than he would have been. We may never know who has been behind all of this.
Biden’s handlers’ accomplishments owe a great deal to the many executive orders that Clinton signed off on in the 1990’s.
Cheney and his evil partners and their adjustments of our society after Nine Eleven have had a lot to do with the devolution of the American Republic as well.
Some people here seem amazed that recently Cheney has declared Donald Trump to be an outlaw of the state.
But how did the folks who are amazed by him now so completely avoid realizing what he was doing to us via the PNAC-desired restrictions in the wake of Nine Eleven? (The US Patriot Act, all twenty gazillion pages of it, were fresh off the top government printers within days of the 2001 attack. How was that accomplishment brought about? The Nine Eleven attack assured Congress that the only way forward was to vote for this horrendous slash on our founding principles.)
Then under Obama there came about the revocation of the Smith-Mundt Act, such that our major traditional media outlets have all become the Department of Truth and Real Facts. Whatever the Deep State now desires as the message, the Deep State gets.
If you want a decent account of what this revocation means, read here: https://northwesternlawreview.org/issues/apple-pie-propaganda-the-smith-mundt-act-before-and-after-the-repeal-of-the-domestic-dissemination-ban/
Not only that, all major news media outlets employ state-sanctioned-hypnosis techniques. This is why viewers are subjected to the best techniques large scale media outlets can insert into broadcasting abilities.
So the fancy pants graphics with blaring music always precede more important news broadcasts desired to be implanted in our subconscious. If the colors of the banners fade in & out, or have little lights & explosions – well, that is a well established technique to hypnotize a viewer.
Pair the above with the fact that only one aspect of a story is ever told to the public, & you have a situation where an invisible threat called a virus ended our lives as we once led them.
The media eagerly instilled the suggestions of ultimate panic via “COVID will kill us all!” “Do social distancing. Wear a mask or granma will die.” “Go get the vax. The US government will look the other way. The government and all the branches of it will ignore how your rights as an individual mean nothing whenever Bill Gates & Fauci start whining ‘Emergency!'”
Yes since under 3 years of COVID protocols, people did little but comply with orders from the Chinese-controlled UN, & its top org The WHO, along with the bought and paid for servants of those oppressors, it is now established that whenever the government wants to, it can again declare an emergency and take even more draconian steps than before.
As far as rampant immigration, Republicans liked it too. The gift horse of hungry, hard working people willing to work for sub minimal wages is just too sweet to pass up!
I think that you make a good point about immigration, OB. I note, though, that much of the GOP was in agreement with the Democrats on this issue, for most of the past 25-odd years.
We had the election of Donald Trump on an anti-immigration platform, with majorities in both houses of Congress, and yet there was no restriction imposed on legal immigration, nor was funding provided for the wall.
So on the immigration side, I think that it was a bipartisan problem. At present, I see a serious conflict inside the GOP over this issue. In short, the vision regarding immigration that you criticize on the part of Obama and Biden was also supported by both Bushes, Romney, and McCain.
I’m less sure about your comments regarding the “middle class,” because I’m not sure what you mean by the term. Are you referring to upper-middle-class college folks, like professionals and business managers? Or are you referring to lower-middle-class blue-collar working folks?
I think that the free-market policies that were a bipartisan consensus since Clinton has served the working class badly, especially the promotion of foreign trade, and most especially the policy of free trade with China. That policy was significantly changed by Trump and, from what I’ve heard, Biden has generally continued the Trump policy in this area. A more protectionist, pro-American industrial policy remains a subject of significant dispute within the GOP, I think.
Yes – because it’s out of character, and because @fullsizetabby is right: Biden is an evil man, but he is not smart.
Yes. I’ve never seen any vision or courage coming from that man (other than the vision to run a grift for his entire life). Never underestimate the ability of Joe Biden to F things up.
The Democrats realized that it didn’t help to select more intelligent or more persuasive leaders, as long as they had to win votes from American voters at some point.
So they fixed the vote problem. And now, they can do whatever they want, and it doesn’t matter what leaders they select. Obviously.
It’s cute that you think Biden is running things/anything other than a figurehead.
Biden has nothing to do with anything but his corruption racket, and that’s unraveling. OB, I still think you’re stand-up, but recently I get the feeling that you’re new to this mess. You may be not nearly cynical enough to see how bad things really are. Naturally, you may feel that I’m over the edge and a dashing blemish on an otherwise respectable party effort. I submit that it’s not true.
If Republicans have an Original Sin for which we will repay each stroke of the lash with blood at the stroke of a sword, it isn’t slavery (Democrats) and it isn’t even immigration (hardly a partisan project), but the PATRIOT Act.
We are being ground between the millstones of Obama’s army in the streets and the deep state’s shadow government — enabled by the PATRIOT Act and facilitated by Obama on behalf of his thoroughly Marxist molders/handlers.
Does that sound unhinged? @oldbathos, tell me true — do you think that I overstate our predicament?
Sadly, you are spot on.
We should make the permanent ruling class fear us.
By taking voters out of the equation
Everybody acts as if nobody got the memo. What is illegal immigration for? To Save Social Security, of course. As Bloomberg now complains, we entice all these illegal immigrants, give them benefits, and prevent them from working? Nonsense. We say we prevent them from working to keep those low on the economic ladder from revolting and it’s not true. We look the other way and they get fake SS cards and work. Hence the Chamber of Commerce and Repbulican support. When Trump curtailed illegal immigration, the construction industry in Texas all but shut down.
The really good part of the whole fiasco is that those illegal immigrants with fake SS cards that work, pay SS taxes, but will never be in a position to collect SS. Or so the theory goes. Hence there is a massive shift in funds from working impoverished illegals to retired and disabled Americans (many of whom scam the system themselves). While illegal immigrants get benefits out the wazoo, and scan their way through American tax dollars like there is no tomorrow–health benefits, CHIP, food stamps, Obamacare, Medicade, etc, etc. And while Americans are paying for all of that, that is supposed to go to Americans but finds its way into the pockets of very enterprising illegal immigrants, American fools, er, that is, voters, keep voting for American politic ians who promise not to touch their SS benefits. Only they need a lot more illegal immigrants to do that.
I also pointed to The US Patriot Act, in my reply, #7.
Not only was the act passed in extreme haste, it was all up and raring to go, within days of the Nine Eleven attack.
It also was enthusiastically given an extension by Congress in 2013 or ’14. (Maybe if it had been titled more truthfully as: “The US Act to Take More Tax Monies, Demand Foolish Behaviors at Airports & Destroy Any Vestige a Citizen Once Had Of Being a Free and Respected Human Being,” it would not have been so wildly embraced by our Congress critters on two separate occasions.)
We “fixed the glitch.”
This is absolutely correct. I read an article about this in the late 1990s.
And it explains why the feds are so lax on border control. They are exploiting these people.
The feds make money from illegal immigration; the states, cities, and towns lose money.
I have long wished we spent Labor Day honoring the unions who are largely responsible for the high standard of living for the American middle class. I grew up in a Republican family (I rebelled and became a Democrat for twenty years, but now I realize they were right), and they were right about a lot of things. But I don’t think they understood the economics of employment.
Those union guys from 1880s to the 1940s would be appalled at their Democrat descendants’ bringing in hordes of unskilled laborers.
The old timer union guys understood basic economics better than anyone does today, I think.
Unions used to have a better justification. Like the Civil Rights fascists now, the Union people outlived their utility but kept right on plugging. FDR was appalled at the idea of public sector unions — FDR!
Right — in fact what will happen is by then they will be voting and holding office, and the threadbare scam will be “fixed” to pay benefits out to anybody who paid in, nonsense SSN or no. Don’t even ask how things will be verified. Indigenous knowledge and lived truth will carry the day.
Nobody involved in this scam is stupid except we who think we’ll vote our way out of it.
I agree completely.
Government unions have been a disaster at every level of government.
And you are right, that they outlived their usefulness even in the private sector.
The original labor movement accomplished a lot like the forty-hour workweek. They fought against child labor, and they fought for better working conditions. They deserve our respect and thanks. They succeeded only because they were not competing on a global scale with low-skilled labor.
Many Democrats have government-union-protected jobs. If the government were replacing them with cheaper labor from other countries, they’d be singing a different tune.
For a long time the AFL-CIO lobbied for tighter enforcement of green card requirements because a tide of cheap, under-the-table labor has a downward ratchet effect on wages. The US Chamber of Commerce agreed with that assessment but claimed they were merely protecting employers from burdensome liabilities.
As unionization declined and became more about government employees, the labor unions started bowing to the DNC and lefty logic: more illegals eventually jammed into the voting booth, the more Democrats can legislate mandates to keep unions alive–the loss of wage growth (and jobs) in the meantime is the price. Like everything else, working class Democrats get the shaft for endorsing the preferences of the ruling class.
Senile Joe is surely a genius at destroying the country.
Which is why I favor giving the option to put Ss taxes in one’s own IRA or 401k instead of sending them to the feds. Yes, for the illegal imigrants, too. Viola’! Privatization of SS