As the midterms are underway, even CNN knows Joe Biden is full of malarkey and always has been

The midterms were always going to be a referendum on President Biden, and no one should be surprised to learn that the country isn’t enthused with a chronically incompetent, serial liar in the White House.  This is who Joe Biden has always been.  It’s the reason no one wanted him in the first place, and even some in the media are now starting to notice.

The tragic irony of the Joe Biden Presidency has always been that next to no one wanted him in the first place.  Prior to his win in South Carolina during the 2020 primary, the future President was a political punchline for decades after a plagiarism scandal in 1988 ended his first bid for the White House.  President Biden had developed a reputation as a unique combination of incapable of controlling his mouth, stunningly wrong about almost everything and anything, and arrogant beyond belief regardless, believing he was possessed of the kind of raw charisma and political talent that comes along once in a generation.  Those who knew him best and worked with most closely were well aware of this truth.  Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense in the Obama Administration, wrote in his memoir, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”  Rumor has it that President Barack Obama himself did not want his own Vice President to make a run in 2016. He is said to have quipped, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”  Thus, it was not surprising that Mr. Biden was no one’s first choice in the 2020 primary.  Democrats were desperately hoping that someone else would arise, variously flirting with Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and even Michael Bloomberg.  Nor was it a surprise that Mr. Biden was thoroughly trounced in the first three contests, earning only 13.7% of the vote in Iowa, a paltry 8.4% in New Hampshire, and 18.9% in Nevada.

Suddenly, however, establishment Democrats found themselves in a political bind:  Bernie Sanders was prevailing while everyone else was floundering.  Despite the attempt to coronate Pete Buttigieg, Senator Sanders won Iowa with 25.9%, New Hampshire with 25.6%, and Nevada with 40.4%.  The Democrat establishment’s loathing of Senator Sanders was no secret after the 2016 primary was literally rigged against him in favor of Hillary Clinton.  If Senator Sanders prevailed in South Carolina, he would have been unstoppable. This could not be allowed to happen, and so an establishment that spurned Mr. Biden for the better part of a year, suddenly realized he was their only option, despite his obvious and perennial flaws.  To put their challenge in perspective, this was his third run for the White House and yet he’d never won a single state.  Everything now depended on a victory in South Carolina, and the future President was bolstered before the primary by an endorsement from the influential black Congressman and civil right leader, James Clyburn, who as Karl Rove recently pointed out is actually a 2004 election denier.  “I’ve known for a long time who I was going to vote for,” he said at a press conference the previous week. “I’m voting for Biden. South Carolinians should be voting for Joe Biden.”  Somehow, Mr. Biden pulled it off, achieving a dramatic, first ever victory when he needed it most, an event even Republican strategists said at the time completely reset the race.  “This result totally resets the race. The fact that Joe Biden won big — and the result was clear early in the evening during prime time in the eastern time zone — provides an enormous boost to his campaign. If Joe Biden can ultimately defeat Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, we will look back on this night as a key moment in American political history,” Republican strategist Whit Ayres explained to NPR.  This is what would ultimately occur.  Senator Sanders never recovered, and Mr. Biden quickly prevailed, but a funny thing happened as well:  In perhaps history’s most severe case of political amnesia, Presidential candidate Joe Biden was instantly transformed into an elder statesman and political superstar.

By the time November 2020 rolled around, candidate Biden was no longer an also ran in the right place and the right time with an unfortunate habit of running his mouth to the point where he once described President Obama as “clean.”  Instead, he was precisely what this country needed and the only man in the country that could save the country.  As such, the mainstream media piled on the endorsements, over 40 of them:  “Biden is a worthy antidote to Trump’s unbounded narcissism and chronic chaos,” according to USA Today.   The Washington Post claimed, “Mr. Biden is almost uniquely positioned for the moment. He would restore decency, honor and competence to America’s government.”  The Los Angeles Times had it, “Trump’s record easily justifies a position of ‘Anybody but Trump.’ But Biden isn’t just preferable to Trump; in many respects he is Trump’s antithesis.” Rolling Stone had it this way, “The 2020 election, then, offers the nation a chance to reboot and rebuild from the racist, authoritarian, know-nothing wreckage wrought by the 45th president. And there are few Americans better suited to the challenge than Joe Biden.”  The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune took a slightly different tack, “The fact that Biden is not an ideological firebrand, and is thought unlikely to pursue reelection in 2024 if he wins this November, augurs well for the central challenge that will confront the next president: how to repair the damage from Trump’s four years” and “By endorsing Joe Biden, we are emphasizing that there is value in electing a president of the United States who does not engage with others with petulance. There is value in electing a president who does not insult, mock or demean. Our country can and must do better.”  Perhaps The Seattle Times said it best, “Biden can fix this mess.”

Whether this was willful ignorance or outright lies, it was not even close to the truth. Candidate Biden, and ultimately President Biden has always been all the things they said he wasn’t and far worse, but this didn’t prevent an initial euphoria over his ascension to the Presidency brimming over into near parody.  Immediately after he took office, we were inundated with comparisons between the small, petty, incompetent man from Delaware and legends such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson.  In April 2021, NPR was considering where Biden fit into the Presidential Pantheon.  “As we approach President Biden’s 100th day in office at the end of this month, some observers are flattering him with comparisons to two legendary Democratic presidents of the 20th century — Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.”  In those early days, the question on their minds was, would President Biden be Roosevelt, Johnson, or perhaps both?  As they put it, the “sheer scale of Biden’s spending and change agenda finds its analog only in the early achievements of FDR and LBJ.”   “Even if you adjust for inflation and use constant dollars, there is far more money in what Biden is doing than in the programs Roosevelt put in place in his first hundred days,” explained journalist and historian Jonathan Alter.  Otherwise, “As a candidate, Biden preferred to talk about the New Deal,” claimed Mark Updegrove, the president of the LBJ Foundation in Austin, TX.  “But if you look at what Biden might be able to achieve, it equates more to LBJ.”   “The remarkable similarity between Biden and LBJ, is that they’re both creatures of the Senate, they understand the legislative process, they understand the importance of relationships and they understand the ephemeral nature of political capital…They know that’s going to evaporate,” he added.  At the time, the answer appeared to be a toss up, at least to NPR.   They noted, “Biden is more easily pictured smiling like FDR than glowering like LBJ. He has probably had as many good relationships with Republicans in Congress as any powerful Democrat has had in the last two or three decades.”

Fast forward eighteen months, and the bloom is entirely off the rose, as the saying goes.  The Biden Administration has not delivered on any of the promises made, and the average American is struggling to deal with out of control inflation while Europe is embroiled in the first large scale military conflict on the continent since World War II.  Voters are poised to repudiate the President in the midterm elections today, and even reliably friendly outlets are starting to provide more clear-eyed coverage.  Better late than never, I guess.  Hence, CNN finally appears to realize that many of the President’s statements simply cannot be taken seriously as has always been the case.  On Saturday, they noted that “Biden’s midterm message includes false and misleading claims” as if this should be any surprise for a known plagiarist, serial exaggerator, and outright liar, man who has claimed everything from being arrested with Nelson Mandela to coming under fire in a helicopter.  President Biden’s more recent falsehoods include the claim that he has personally increased Social Security payments that are in fact tied to inflation by law, and have only increased rapidly on his watch because of his own failure to keep prices in check.  “He hasn’t explained that the increase in Social Security payments for 2023, 8.7%, is unusually big simply because the inflation rate has been unusually big. A law passed in the 1970s says that Social Security payments must be increased by the same percentage that a certain measure of inflation has increased. It’s called a cost-of-living adjustment.”  Additionally, his boasts include forcing all large companies to pay a minimum tax, when dozens of companies are excluded, “there will clearly still be some large and profitable corporations paying no federal income tax even after the minimum tax takes effect in 2023. The exact number is not yet known.”

These were not President Biden’s only lies on taxes, either.  He continues to insist that President Trump’s tax reform plan “affected only the top 1% of the American public.”  Meanwhile, the Tax Policy Center think tank found the new tax laws “reduce individual income taxes on average for all income groups and in all states.” They concluded that “between 60 and 76 percent of taxpayers in every state will receive a tax cut.” H&R Block concurs, saying that a full two thirds of returning customers paid less in 2019 than 2018.  Even The New York Times had to accept reality, writing “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut.”  The President also claims to have cut the debt in half, despite it reaching a staggering $31 trillion.  He takes credit for reducing a deficit artificially juiced by his own coronavirus spending.  It’s “highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for even the reduction in the deficit. Biden doesn’t mention that the primary reason the deficit plummeted in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 was that it had skyrocketed to a record high in 2020 because of emergency pandemic relief spending. It then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned.”  “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it,” explained Moody’s Analytics’ Dan White.  Further, the President boasts that the unemployment rate is the lowest in 50 years, even as it went up this month to 3.7% and the lowest figure, 3.5%, for his administration matches the lowest point of the Trump Administration, before the pandemic.  Incredibly, he insists that he “signed into law” a student debt forgiveness program which he decreed via executive feedback and might well be stopped by the courts.  He claims gas prices were $5 per gallon when he took office.  The actual figure is less than half that, at $2.49.  Some of his claims are simply bizarre, like the amount of time he says he’s spent traveling with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.  “I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping of China than any world leader has, when I was Vice President all the way through to now. Over 78 hours with him alone. Eight – nine of those hours on the phone and the others in person, traveling 17,000 miles with him around the world, in China and the United States,” he bragged to a Democratic gathering in Oregon in mid-October.  As CNN noted, “Biden has not traveled anywhere close to 17,000 miles with Xi…Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted in 2021 that the two men often did not even travel parallel routes to their gatherings, let alone physically travel together. The only apparent way to get Biden’s mileage past 17,000, Kessler found, is to add the length of his flight journeys between Washington and Beijing, during which, obviously, Xi was not with him.”

Sadly, none of this should be surprising.  This is the man who Biden has always been:  Boastful, prideful, and completely full of shit.  The media simply can’t hide the truth anymore, and if the elections today result in a Democrat blood bath as expected, things will only get worse.  It is both a blessing and a curse that our system of government locks in a President for four years.  A blessing because we are not subject to the tumult shaking our British allies, who are on their third Prime Minister in less than three months.  A curse if you are shackled to a man no one wanted in the first place, one who’s bonafides were entirely a creation of the media, and whose reality over 40 years in government has been failure and lies.  There are many who would claim that Trump was worse, and lies in the service of defeating him served a noble purpose, but the difference is the millions of Americans who actually wanted Trump in office in the first place.  The Trump supporters who are still enthusiastic about a leader they believe is the right man for our polarized, corrupt era.  This is a difference every voter can feel in their pocket book right now, and will continue to feel as long as President Joe Biden is in office.