I’m playing around with an idea of which I’m not particularly convinced, but in which I do think there could be some truth.
That idea, specifically, is that given what’s happening at the moment it might not be such a bad thing, over the long haul, that the people who handle Joe Biden were able to — ahem — “win” the 2020 election.
This is not to say it wasn’t a bad thing. There is no doubt that it was a bad thing, and the evidence for that proposition is everywhere. It’s quite undeniable.
We are talking here of silver linings. As Stephen Kruiser said Thursday at PJ Media,
I have been hanging around the political circus for so long I take a longer view of things. Yeah, almost everything since March of 2020 has been irritating. I’ve had a sneaking suspicion all along, however, that a lot of the nutjobs like me would eventually be vindicated. That’s not an easy thing to hope for when you’re up against a mainstream press that now does nothing but lie for a living, but I knew that this clown car we’ve been watching for 17 months wasn’t built for the long haul.
It’s having its first big breakdown by the side of the road and it’s delicious to watch.
Before we get into the five quick things, which orbit around this theme that the Biden administration’s dumpster fire has only just begun, let me defend the aforementioned idea, which again I don’t profess to be fully on board with, by noting that much of what’s happening today might well be happening even had President Trump been in office for the first year of his second term — and, as Kruiser is completely correct in his characterization of our legacy media, coverage of current events would have been spun as forcefully as necessary so as to blame Trump for them.
This cannot be effectively done, things being as they are. And Team Biden is not prepared for what happens when the editors, publishers, network presidents, and other muckety-mucks in the media establishment begin throwing him under the bus in order to save what’s left of their credibility and bottom line.
Consider:
1. The Fauci Flameout
Not a whole lot needs to be said about the denouement of the career of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who more than anyone is the father of the COVID-19 disaster, which more than anything is what caused Trump’s electoral fall (even if you think Trump actually won the election, something this column will not Liz Cheney you for, you must admit that COVID was the lever by which the mail-in ballots were ratcheted onto our elections and the theft would have thus been enabled). When BuzzFeed’s FOIA request produced some 3,200 pages of emails from the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it was the end of his credibility.
Fauci is seen in this email dump knowing far more than he has shared about the obvious origins of the virus and flip-flopping like a landed redfish about whether or not face masks are a useful defense against COVID. It’s clear he’s little more than a professional grifter with little to offer in the way of expertise or prudence in treating or stopping the spread of COVID.
And despite itself, the mainstream media is actually covering the Fauci fiasco.
Remember, the Biden administration tied itself from the very beginning to this man. Now that it’s clear Fauci has no clothes and badly needs some, it’s Biden’s cheese flapping in the wind alongside Fauci’s.
Trump, for his part, is down in Mar-a-Lago ripping Fauci to shreds with “I told you so”s, something he wouldn’t have been able to sell if he was still in office and hadn’t gotten rid of Fauci. This is all Biden’s problem now, and the blood is in the water.
And the public, which has been patient to a fault with the public health bureaucrats Fauci has made himself the patron saint of, is likely to blow up completely over this subject. It’s one thing to ruin people’s lives; it’s another to lie to them about why.
GOP consultants and politicians smell this opportunity, and the full-on offensive has begun. It won’t stop even after Fauci is gone, which at this point is just a matter of time even if Jen “Circleback Girl” Psaki is still Baghdad-Bobbing the not-so-good doctor.
2. Lab-Leak Brumadinho
It got very little coverage here in America, but two years ago a dam containing mining waste broke near the Brazilian town of Brumadinho, dumping millions of tons of toxic sludge into a river valley and causing significant loss of life and property. It was one of the worst environmental disasters in modern times, and the whole thing was captured on video from a staggering array of angles.
The guess is that eventually Brumadinho will come to be used to describe every dramatic failure the consequences of which are massive and very messy.
And as the previous column in this space discussed, the legacy media, which for a year had built its own tailings dam to contain the mass of evidence that COVID-19 had been engineered in a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is now attempting to make excuses for the Brumadinho-style collapse of that containment and the public’s increasing recognition that the lab-leak theory is pretty clearly a fact.
This will hurt the legacy corporate media, to be sure, but it’s also devastating for Team Biden. For one thing, continued erosion of credibility among the alphabet soup networks and Newspapers of Record strips away much of the administration’s air cover. But when the public recognizes COVID as effectively an act of war, whether it was released as a bioweapon or by accident and begins to demand the Chinese Communist Party be held to account, it won’t look good for the Party of China not to hop to the job.
Trump is already out front of this issue, demanding the Chinese pony up $10 trillion in reparations for the Wuhan virus and the damage it has caused. That was a rhetorical masterstroke, because anything short of that on Biden’s part now looks like weakness, or worse.
When the media shielded the public from the lab-leak theory, there were more possibilities available to Team Biden. With this sludge-flood now rolling downhill, things have changed. Biden had to do an about-face in the last few days, from shutting down an investigation of COVID’s origins to now demanding answers from the intelligence community on that issue within 90 days.
And heaven help this administration if that investigation is a whitewash, because then the dam will really break.
3. It’s the Stupid Economy
By the time you see this column, the May jobs report will be out. It’s unlikely to be very good. The April jobs report was a disaster — only 266,000 jobs were filled when the better part of a million of them were projected. For May, the initial projection of 916,000 new jobs has been revised downward to 770,000 and then to 630,000.
We all know why. Pay people not to work and they won’t work. That’s why red-state governors have one by one announced they’re pulling their states out of the Biden unemployment-as-welfare plan at the behest of small business owners who can’t fill positions of employees who make less than, say, $40,000 per year and currently are just as well off sitting home and watching TV.
The political implications of the economic mess Biden is making are beginning to hit home among the more sober Democrats. Politico puts on as brave a face as it can:
Democrats have downplayed the concerns, maintaining that the path back to full employment was always going to be winding and stacked with challenges. And economists are predicting the report will show 630,000 jobs were created in May, a robust number. But while Biden has been polling strongly on his handling of the economy, a second straight month of slower-than-expected job creation could embolden critics of his multitrillion-dollar infrastructure spending plans and raise fears that the labor market is facing a long road back to normal.
Consider all of this in concert with the first two items. COVID wrecked the economy and created this misery, and Team Biden turns out to be wrong in every particular on the virus, including covering for China, which caused the whole thing, and then they botch the recovery. That’s the kind of failure that doesn’t work well in advance of an election cycle.
4. Global Milding
Here’s something fun. From Power Line:
The covid epidemic has had several silver linings, one of which is that we haven’t heard so much about global warming lately. It is hard to sustain multiple hysterias at the same time, apparently.
In any event, if you have been wondering what has been going on with the Earth’s climate, Christopher Monckton has the latest at Watts Up With That. Bottom line: we have now gone more than six years without any net increase in the Earth’s temperature:
The effect of the small la Niña southern oscillation is waning. Nevertheless, the New Pause has lengthened from 6 years to 6 years 2 months in the UAH data….
IPCC’s prediction in 1990, on which the global-warming scare — justifiably described by Professor Lindzen in an excellent recent lecture as “absurd” — was based, has turned out to be a near-threefold exaggeration compared with sober reality.
The long and short of it is the Earth is not warming.
And none of the predictions by the so-called “experts” who built this entire religion out of climate change theory have come true.
This while Biden is doing everything he can to destroy domestic American energy and replace it with fantasy — and gas and utility prices, along with the prices for everything else that must be manufactured and transported using energy along the way, are reflecting the stupid policies of his de facto Green New Deal. And the Left is busy trying to deny banking services to the coal industry and attempting hostile takeovers of Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
A reckoning for all this is coming. It can’t be avoided. It might be ignored. But in the Pennsylvanias, Ohios, Alaskas, and West Virginias of the world it won’t be.
5. The Auditors Cometh
As we noted in the last column here, the legacy media had to admit that they discounted the lab-leak theory because it was the notorious poopy-heads Donald Trump and Tom Cotton who were most prominent in touting it last year. The pathetic cretin David Leonhardt of the New York Times defended that prevarication by accusing Cotton of fabulism on the question of a stolen 2020 election.
We asked whether the retreat on the lab-leak theory shouldn’t open up the question of the election. That’s only logical, right?
Well, they might or might not be finding out in Arizona, as the audit of the election results in Maricopa County continues apace despite Arizona’s Democrat secretary of state and others doing everything they can to stop it.
And that contagion has spread.
A delegation from Pennsylvania arrived in Phoenix to view the audit and then went home and called for the same to begin in the Keystone State. Georgia and New Hampshire have followed with their own renewed processes, and things are messy and contentious in both places. There are rumblings of more.
None of these audits will result in Biden losing his presidency. This business about Trump being “reinstated” in August is without any reasonable legitimacy.
But in the event any or some of these audits turn up evidence of the irregularities most of the country knows or suspects, the above-mentioned four factors coupled with an increasing public sense that this is an illegitimate regime and a Babylonian captivity of sorts could make for a very powerful backlash.
Given that several states have already instituted some key election reforms and there are undoubtedly more on the way in special sessions and next year’s regular legislative sessions, a spreading sentiment that the election was indeed stolen could make the current hints of deluge look like nothing by comparison.
