by Conrad Black
Day by day, as the Biden Administration crashes into utter shambles and a cloud of dust reminiscent of 9/11, the Bidenization of America becomes more stark and horrifying.
I can remember no more pitiful words from a senior American government official in 65 years than Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s complaint that the Taliban government in Kabul was disappointing in its lack of “inclusiveness.” (To be sure, that is not all it lacks, and that could hardly have been a surprise.)
Nor can I think of any diplomatic initiative by a senior American government official more certainly doomed to ludicrous failure than environment ambassador John Kerry’s recent trip to China requesting the collaboration of the People’s Republic in this administration’s hell-bent-for-leather assault on what it is trying to identify as climate change.
Completing this unprecedented trifecta of total foreign policy failure is the revelation in the New York Times, of all places (and for which it deserves credit, given the Times‘ full-body immersion in Biden’s election), that the opening cannon in Joe Biden’s “over the horizon” reassertion of America’s righteous presence in Afghanistan was not the drone-killing of two ISIS “planners” of outrages, but rather the killing of 10 complete innocents, including seven children.
Welcome to the New Tower of Babel
China has made it clear that the quality of water and air in their country is of no concern to anyone but the Chinese. They remember that the Western powers and Japan had no consideration for environmental impacts while they massively industrialized, and only conveniently thought of such admirable concerns when they had completed their industrial development. Only then environmental matters could be raised as an obstruction to those nations rising to compete with the West economically.
The Chinese, like the Indians, also have never hesitated to assert the view—widely held among the large and growing ranks of climate change skeptics or at least dissenters from extreme eco-solutions—that the whole projection of climate as a frightening and planet-destructive development is bunk. That claim may be too dismissive, but it is a stronger argument than the Kerry-Biden-Obama horror movie of our climate’s “existential crisis.”
Bidenization may be defined as a conspicuous and humiliating failure in every major area of government activity. This catalog of disasters is too well-known to readers to require a long telling but it is notable that there is no precedent for a United States administration being uniformly consistent in turning every major public policy area to disaster. COVID-19 was the great ally of the Democratic campaign: the rabidly Democratic national political media bashed it like a piñata and terrified and shut down the country, inducing the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression; while blaming it all on Trump’s contempt for “science.” Even a vaccine would have to be distrusted and avoided if it was sponsored by Trump, Biden and Kamala Harris said; this is the same vaccine that the administration is now attempting to coerce all Americans to accept.
Now the messaging is a Tower of Babel and very few members of the public know what the administration’s position is. It seems to wish to vaccinate the whole population and at the same time to require the whole population to mask and observe social distancing as if it had not been vaccinated.
There are legitimate concerns about vaccination, especially with regard to any long-term negative effects it may have. The evidence about masks is conflicting. Instead of leading, the administration is sinking into a quagmire and losing credibility, as have the principal scientists it has always admonished us to follow slavishly.
The best course is to require vaccination of all people above the age of 65 and others with noted vulnerabilities. The administration should stop debasing itself before the corrupt teachers’ unions and leave it to parents to decide the best course for their children. But it is incapable of taking any actions except constitutionally exceptionable measures that seem likely to be ineffectual, and those incrementally.
Institutionalizing Failure
The southern border, which the homeland security secretary assures us is “closed” but privately says is “unsustainable” and where the president said the problems were “seasonal” and would abate during the summer, is now almost completely open to unprecedented masses of illegal migrants from all over the world, with no regard to their suitability to reside in the United States and no ability even to test them for COVID. It is an open artery only slightly plausibly explained by the Democrats’ desire to admit so many foreigners while they shed the requirement of citizenship to vote, that they become electorally immovable, and this horrifying sequence of institutionalized policy failures becomes permanent.
Violent crime rates continue to rise, and there are storm signals everywhere over the economy. The United States increased its money supply by 25 percent in the last year; it is impossible to restrain inflation under those circumstances and hourly wages are already rising at a rate of 7.5 percent annually.
It is also impossible to expect in these circumstances any lenders to advance loans at interest rates beneath the rate of inflation, and given the current federal public debt of $29 trillion, it is obvious that any significant rise in interest rates will create a fiscal and monetary crisis, unprecedented in the history of the country at least since President Jackson revoked the charter of the Bank of the United States in the 1830s. Recourse to expanded quantitative easing will raise the rate of increase of the money supply and therefore of inflation. The Bowden model of vast deficits to spread money around the public can never keep pace with the rate of inflation that such fiscal incontinence causes.
Economics is essentially half psychology and half grade-three arithmetic, and this administration has shown no competence at either. The only way out of the impending economic disaster is a return to Reaganomics: keeping a rod on the back of inflation by raising supply and reducing welfare costs by cutting taxes and promoting full employment and economic growth. Both of these are still rising because of the hugely successful Trump tax cuts that have been so hideously misrepresented by the Bidenizers.
As the realities of contracting employment, especially in the energy industry, that would be caused by the enactment of the $3.5 trillion “Human Infrastructure” bill before the House of Representatives sink in, there is declining likelihood that this fiscally insane Hail Mary pass will, in fact, pass.
Everything is going in the wrong direction. The military high command now stands accused, at least in the press, of acts verging on treason during the late Trump Administration. The conduct of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, has incited the inference that he has been grossly insubordinate and in more recent events in Afghanistan indicate that he is also thoroughly incompetent. If this was entirely the president’s gig, some of the senior officers would have resigned. If it wasn’t chiefly the president’s gig, he would have fired some of them.
Those responsible for the elevation of this regime are still clinging to the theory that the dangers of a second Trump term justified drastic, including apparently unconstitutional, means to install an alternative regime. This appears not to be working out. But those responsible for defaming and sandbagging the former president and for assisting in the possible theft of the election and then the almost totalitarian attempt to stamp out any question of the election’s integrity feel no remorse. The antics of all these people are claimed to be justified by the necessity of ridding the country of the former president.
The supreme irony of this terrible crisis is that it may be that only the restoration of the former president can resolve the disastrous condition of the country for which Biden and the Bidenizers are entirely responsible.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
