No Way Out For Joe Biden Amid Cycle of Doom
Also: Woke U.S. companies lose out and Taiwan needs to wake up
You no longer have to take the word of pollsters and conservative media that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats are in trouble. Progressive media outlets and commentators are now openly lamenting a White House in chaos and possible loss of one or both houses of Congress to Republicans this November.
What’s worse for Joe Biden: given his extreme partisanship, fanatical staff, and inability to change course, he has no way out of this predicament.
First of all, voters despise the Democrats’ woke agenda. From coast to coast, they vote against it each and every time it is put before them. Liberal Los Angeles residents may soon elect a conservative real-estate developer to crack down on crime and bums in their city. Fanatically progressive San Francisco voters fired District Attorney Chesa Boudin on Tuesday for coddling criminals and turning parts of their city into a cesspool. Previously this year, San Francisco voters canned three school board members who were acting like Soviet commissars. If this is happening in Nancy Pelosi’s hometown, imagine what normal America thinks about Joe Biden’s woke desires to define everyone by race, treat all cops as racists, tell parents how to raise their kids, and fire anyone who doesn’t embrace the transgender lie.
Since Joe Biden now has U.S. embassies flying rainbow flags in an intentional woke affront to host nations—important U.S. national interests be damned—we can probably conclude he is unwilling or unable to curb the woke agenda.
On the economy, the outlook is just as bad for Joe Biden. He inherited a recovering economy from Donald Trump. Voters still remember the Trump boom and wage gains before the pandemic. Now inflation is out of control and recession looms. For April, the consumer price index was up a whopping 8.3% from a year ago. Most consumers believe real inflation in their everyday lives is higher.
The Labor Department will issue an updated inflation reading on Friday, and it won’t be pretty. Even Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her globalist friends at the World Bank finally conceded that inflation will persist. Joe Biden could help matters by cutting government spending, but he is trapped by his religious view that more government spending and borrowing are unmitigated virtues. His spokeswoman even said higher taxes can somehow lower inflation. Biden is stuck: Progressive calls for more spending will only increase as the economy enters recession and bubbles in the housing and stock markets deflate.
Joe Biden’s spiraling energy crisis isn’t helping either. His plan is to blame record-high gasoline and diesel prices on Russia and greedy energy companies. That will also be the plan when food prices increase further because of the cost of fuel. In fact, Joe Biden created the crisis by discouraging domestic oil and gas production, alienating Middle East allies for not being woke democracies, and putting excessive sanctions on oil-exporting Russia that spiked prices but didn’t change Moscow’s behavior. (Establishment Republicans unfortunately have thrown Joe Biden a lifeline of sorts by supporting costly and ineffective sanctions on Russia and failing to offer voters a clear alternative to his forever-war, Europe-first foreign policy.) The price of gasoline won’t come down until Joe Biden’s recession starts to kill economic demand. Even then, it will probably remain elevated and Joe Biden is beholden to ideologues who tacitly want higher gas prices to force an unrealistic transition to alternative energy.
The rest of Joe Biden’s foreign policy is a disaster as well. After failing to win through blitzkrieg early in its invasion into Ukraine, Russia has gotten its footing, at least for now. Unrealistic hopes that Ukraine could outright beat Russia fanned by the Biden administration, NATO’s repressive and corrupt puppet government in Kiev, and western media should now give way to the more realistic perception that Russia will achieve its revised objectives. Before the war, instead of negotiating seriously with Moscow, which basically sought preservation of the status quo (i.e., Ukraine not in NATO, agreement to keep earlier promises not to station U.S. forces east of Germany), Joe Biden wanted to appear tough after his massive failure in Afghanistan. He publicly ridiculed each Russian concern. Now Joe Biden is stuck with a prolonged war of attrition and seems unwilling to push for negotiations with Moscow to end the killing.
While Moscow is to blame for its invasion, Joe Biden’s performance led to the war. Even though his actions have been cheered by the bipartisan national security establishment that loses every war for America, voters will not let Joe Biden off the hook. They will grasp instead that he has weakened American power dramatically and brought us closer to war in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific.
Most presidents could make a course correction amid failure at home and abroad. For example, when the Republican landslide of 1994 made it clear to Bill Clinton that his presidency was imperiled two years into his first term, he stopped listening to his radical wife, hired Republican Dick Morris, agreed with Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich on welfare reform, tax cuts, and eventually a balanced budget, and then won reelection. But Clinton was a young, energetic former southern governor and attorney general with pragmatic instincts. Joe Biden is a decrepit, arrogant former senator who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and is trapped by his rigid ideology and his woke staff’s even-more-rigid ideology.
There is no recovery for Joe Biden, only doom.
Taiwan Missing Out
In our latest edition of Simon & Whiton, Mark (former senior executive at Apple Daily and Next Media, and Jimmy Lai’s deputy for 22 years) and I discussed whether woke Unilever is in trouble, how China may never catch the USA, Nordstrom going nuts, and why American companies are losing out abroad because of politics. We also criticize Taiwan’s current political situation. On this last topic, we touched upon:
Taiwan’s government losing out on the exodus of talent and money from Hong Kong
The ruling DPP’s anti-business policies
Taiwan remaining effectively closed to foreigners for the better part of three years
Taiwan’s policies against expats
Taiwan overestimating its influence in Washington
Taiwan underestimating the speed at which people will go back to not caring about semiconductors and other boring hardware after this year
Taiwan’s affinity for Kurt Campbell and others who profess to care about defending against China but who enable U.S. policies that sell out to China
Taiwan playing along with the Biden administration’s phony trade initiatives, including groveling (without effect) to be included in the nothing burger Indo-Pacific Economic Partnership
We criticize because we love.
Please take a look below. The podcast is available in video or audio formats.
Biden walked boldly into this mess of his creation. Now let him walk back.