Evacuating Afghanistan is one thing, but letting the Taliban immediately take over, kill the innocent, destroy rights and oppress is something else. Our allies are aghast, knowing this evil force will align itself with Western adversaries, threaten 9/11-style terrorism and help make egregious world trends persistent realities. Guess what? There were other, safer, more effective, wiser approaches, but President Joe Biden was unavailable.
Here is pretty much his chief failing, choosing wrong-headed means to achieve his ends, perhaps just not getting it, for instance, that thoughtful delay can be preferable to fast-footed fallacy. For age reasons, he’s likely a one-term guy. But he aspires to renown, and four years of properly studied, testable, incremental steps won’t make him FDR. His policy overload dictates error, and then there’s compassion for the down-and-out. Abetted by ideological dogma and political purpose, it often translates to callousness for other sufferers getting in the way.
What better example of this than $4 billion in government debt relief to “socially disadvantaged” farmers defined as Black Americans and other minorities who, in years past, were unforgivably mistreated. Struggling white farmers are left out in the cold under this portion of a Biden administration COVID-19 relief measure, including, as one interesting example, a desperate white farmer with two prosthetic legs.
But look, let’s say thank you to a judge who understood that discrimination on the basis of skin color is against the law. Doing a favor for abused Black American folks is terrific, but what exactly is achieved by generosity accompanied by racial heartlessness? Is that rectification of just maybe revivification of the past?
Next let’s go south to the border with Mexico and consider how Biden first off as much as signaled those even further south to cross the line illegally. Wrong stuff, he maybe thought as his VP then said the border would be absolutely closed to everyone while the United States changed the culture, economies and politics of their home countries.
Now we’re back to his generous beginnings on this issue, an invitational deficiency of common-sense deterrents as unauthorized immigrants arrive in the highest number in 20 years. Desert trekkers suffer gangster abuses that are sexual, bloody and occasionally deadly, get painfully sick, are impossible to take decent care of when they arrive, wander into the United States, spread COVID-19 and wreck small border towns.
Climate change is a real problem, although to Biden, it is more than that: an “existential threat,” which is to say, if we muff things up, goodbye civilization and life on earth. His way of dealing with it is to muff things up, as in killing the Keystone XL Pipeline along with thousands of jobs, a trade relation with our good friend Canada, less dependence on adversaries and economic oomph. Interestingly, his old boss, President Barack Obama, presided over varied State Department studies that concluded, in environmental and climate change terms balanced against alternatives, there was little to worry about.
Biden nevertheless wants to cut off further fracking on federal land, something President Donald Trump permitted to the extent of helping to make us energy independent. Until the day of adequate non-carbon replacements, Biden’s naysaying is economic foolery. He reversed himself in using special authority to allow a Russian natural-gas pipeline to Germany that will strengthen Russia but please Germany. He has also mostly been kind to Russia, along with China, in his response to cyberattacks on government agencies and businesses. Is this diplomatic timidity versus the efficacy of carefully devised, needed retribution?
The list of Biden’s objectives making any action admissible extends to his saying phooey to a Supreme Court ruling instructing him that Congress alone had the right to do what he himself did anyway. He bowed to teachers’ unions at a mighty cost to youthful minds. He plans to risk a robust future for the sake of a likely unsustainable welfare state. There’s lots more, and the need is for wise and talented candidates winning mid-term elections.