And on that score, at least, Biden seems to have succeeded in the eyes of his supporters, despite the embarrassing fact that when he tried to say the name of Laken Riley, the nursing student from Georgia who even Biden acknowledged was murdered “by an illegal” (at least at first), he mispronounced her name as “Lincoln Riley.” Yes, Lincoln Riley, who, we assume, is a close relative of George Freud, Kayvon Martin, and Ashli Bobbitt.
But you know what? Fine. If the Democrats want to rely on weapons grade coping mechanisms to convince themselves that they aren’t nominating the human equivalent of a fossilized potato, we won’t complain. Fossilized potatoes are, after all, easier to beat than actual candidates. However, even if we concede that Biden was perfectly lucid for the duration of the speech, that still leaves plenty to discuss about why, precisely, the speech itself – and Biden’s delivery of it – was still a ridiculous dud.
First, let’s talk about the delivery, or rather, the DELIVERY, given that 90 percent of the speech seemed like it was shouted, like the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” headline from The Simpsons. Between that, and the fact that Biden’s eyes were kept perpetually narrowed to slits (presumably so that he could actually see the teleprompter), the whole speech came off as the angry, seething ranting of a frustrated old man who didn’t so much make an attempt to persuade the opposite side of the aisle as simply bark at them to give him what he wanted.
And yes, while Biden undoubtedly looked old – lucid, maybe, but still old, to the point that he seemed to age everyone around him – this particular element of the speech is not entirely his fault. The text of the speech itself was long on demands and moral grandstanding, but awfully short on persuasion. Which brings us to the actual – troubling – substance of the speech itself, even setting aside Biden’s delivery.
Firstly, the speech’s opening was apocalyptic in nature. In the space of just a few lines, Biden likened himself to both Franklin Roosevelt facing Adolf Hitler, and to Abraham Lincoln (presumably where the “Lincoln” in “Lincoln Reilly” came from) facing the civil war. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today,” Biden thundered. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the same time.”
It was at this point that Biden made the bizarre choice to pivot to talking not about America, but about Ukraine. “If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk,” Biden warned. To which the insensitive, but logical response would be, “so what?” Last we checked, Ukraine was not the fifty-first state. It’s not even a member of NATO. Why should we care if we put it at risk? We’re not raising this point to be contrarian, but rather to illustrate something: another Democratic president might have tried to explain this particular sticking point, but Biden didn’t. This was his next line:
“My message to President Putin is simple. We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.”
Again, not to spoil all this Marvel-brained #Resistance posturing, but what is he talking about? “We will not walk away” at least makes sense, but “we will not bow down?” Who’s asking the United States to bow down to Russia? Last we checked, the only government being asked to bow down to Russia is Vlodomyr Zelenskyy’s; it’s not like Putin landed in Alaska. And “I will not bow down?” What? Unless President Biden intends to admit to every single accusation about the and his family being deeply tied to the fate of the Ukrainian government due to corruption, we simply don’t see why he would personalize this. It’d be one thing if Biden said this in an interview, but in a pre-written speech? It’s weird. And that’s not all that’s weird. Biden then went on from talking about Ukraine to railing against January 6th. Except here, too, the rhetoric was bizarrely overheated:
“Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy. Many of you were here on that darkest of days. We all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots. They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power and to overturn the will of the people. January 6 and the lies about the 2020 election, and the plots to steal the election, posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War.”
Really? An unarmed mob whose only casualty was one of their own was the gravest threat to American democracy since the Civil War? Again, this is a pre-written line. Biden’s non-senile (as far as we know) White House staffers wrote this, thinking it made him sound good. We’ll give them credit for one thing: yes, an attempt to steal an election is a grave threat to democracy, but couldn’t the protesters turn that around and say that was exactly what they were seeking to prevent? Once more, a previous Democratic president might’ve tried to anticipate that, even if only to heal the country, but not Biden and more importantly, not Biden’s staff. They speak of January 6th in the same shrill, apocalyptic tones that they do about Ukraine. Because to them, both can be reduced to nothing but laying siege to their power.
The same siege mentality permeates the rest of the speech. Exclamation points are ubiquitous. Declarations of immovable principle dominate. Biden even threatened the Supreme Court with the electoral power of female voters. When he argued at all, it was with reference to moral blackmail-laden anecdotes. When it came to COVID, Biden literally told his audience to “remember the fear.” His references to “his predecessor” (IE President Trump) were nothing but fearmongering, and astonishingly blunt fearmongering at that, accusing Trump of wanting to end the Affordable Care Act, of not caring about COVID, of trying to “bury the truth” about January 6th, even though it’s Biden’s party who seeks to suppress any attempt to release footage from the day. In one case, Biden even gloated about succeeding at passing a bill without Republican help. He spent half as long denouncing Hamas as he did denouncing Israel, and made absolutely no effort to empathize with the Israeli position. In short, the overwhelming impression left by the speech was of a President who not only doesn’t care to address his opponents, but who can’t even understand them at all.
Again, if Biden had said any of this unscripted, we could’ve chalked it up to him simply being too old to grasp the complaints of the opposite party: as evidence of what William Shakespeare called the “second childishness and mere oblivion” of old age. But the fact is, this childishness and oblivion came not from Biden, but from his speechwriters, all of whom almost certainly hail from the sort of reality-repelling woke bubbles that treat any attempt to empathize with their political opponents as a compromise with the Devil. For them, this is not second childishness; their first childishness never ended. Like tattling children, they demand rather than persuade, and accuse rather than compete. That is why Biden’s speech not only sounded like a tantrum, but was written like one: because the people writing it resent the necessity of persuading anyone who isn’t part of their rapidly shrinking club of the anointed.
But contra Biden, and contra them, America is not under siege from anti-democratic forces. Rather, America is rejecting the anti-democratic woke mind virus which has seized its governing institutions. Those rejecting this virus include not only typical Republicans and MAGA supporters, but also the very “people of color” who Democrats claim to speak for, who are beginning to realize that wokeness has as much to do with their interests as the platform of the American Nazi Party has to do with the interests of blue collar whites. Wokeness has burned through the cash George Floyd brought in, murdered the credibility (and profitability) of the institutions it captured, and now can only depend on a shrieking fossil who can’t even remember what year his own son died (or when his supposedly evil predecessor was elected), and whose staff try to censor the reports of their own Special Counsel for fear of him giving the game away entirely. And now, that fossil has just shown just enough signs of life that they are prepared to keep the elder abuse going, for fear of how thoroughly they would tear themselves apart if they allowed a competitive primary to take place.
What can be said to these people, and to the poor old man they have press ganged into being their standard-bearer? Well perhaps, ironically, given that they clearly hate America so much for turning on them, we should borrow the words of one Joseph Robinette Biden: “You can’t love America only when you win.”
