Waiting on the Mainstream Media to Report on Reality Used To Be A Safer Bet But I Still Have A Buck To Spare
So much history gets forgotten. His opponents highlight his gaffes. But there’s always been more substance there.
Yes, I’m talking about our president. How dare he talk to a Republican like that!
I tire of hearing people I’ve long respected for their careful consideration of election choices, folks who’ve voted for moderates of both parties, suddenly looking at the major flaws in key political actors today and saying “they’re all corrupt” without much evidence to support that conclusion.
It’s true that all people have lapses in judgment and make an occasional misstep. But corruption’s quite different. Prior to his run for President, what scandals do you recall about Biden? Bribes? Kickbacks? Sexual abuses? I recall one: he quoted from a speech by a British politician without attributing it in a speech at a state fair. A closer look at his long career provided 2 or 3 other examples where he cribbed something that another politician said. And he once said he finished in the top half of his law class. He didn’t.
Not crimes. Not vulgarities. Errors and oversights, mostly. And one lie about his college performance. Thirty six years ago.
He’s voted for things I disagreed with. One of his sons quite possibly benefited financially by being related to a powerful man. There’s not a whit of evidence that Biden made bank on that, though. In business and politics, lots of kids get good gigs by being related to successful parents.
Has he ever been prosecuted for a crime? Arrested? Have you ever heard him say something crude and lewd? While still a young man, his wife and daughter died in a car crash. His two sons were badly injured but recovered. He traveled 90 minutes each way from Wilmington Delaware to his work in DC, for decades after to maintain a daily presence in his son’s lives. I find that quite admirable.
Affairs? None. Divorces? Nope. A regular church goer, not just for show? Very much so. His long career in Congress also gave him the knowledge of how to twist an arm or two to work a legislative compromise. It’s been more than 50 years since we had a president with that kind of expertise.
What was it that another Democrat, Jimmy Carter, got wrong? Oh yeah, in the wake of the hostages taken in Iran, the rescue mission failed because desert sand caused engine failures in the helicopters. Rather than risk the hostages’ lives after that, he chose patience. The 52 hostages came home 9 months later. None died in that interim. Carter was swamped in his re-election effort as Ronald Reagan accused him of weakness.
On October 23, 1983, 241 US Marines, 58 French military personnel and 6 civilians died in an attack on a Marine barracks in Lebanon. Confusion reigned about who was responsible, though many in the Reagan administration believed Iran and Syria’s governments orchestrated that bombing. Though some intermittent naval shelling at military targets occurred in the weeks after, no real retaliatory attack occurred. Ultimately, President Reagan ordered the remaining peacekeeping force to leave Lebanon 15 weeks after the Marine barracks was bombed. Reagan paid no political price for the security lapses or for the weakness displayed by running from that disaster.
Five years after Reagan took office, it was revealed that his administration had secretly lifted Carter’s embargo that blocked arms sales to Iran and had started selling arms to Iran in his first year in office. That’s right, less than a year after Iran released our hostages, Reagan was secretly selling them weapons. Eventually, one administration official was convicted for hiding evidence in that. That guy - Elliott Abrams - was given probation for that crime and was later pardoned for that by George HW Bush, who was also involved in that Iran-Contra scandal.
But wait! Joe Biden lied about his academic performance in college 36 years ago! And Jimmy Carter didn’t rescue the hostages that came home alive 9 months later! Bill Clinton lied about a sex affair!
Right. Both political parties are completely corrupt. S-u-u-u-re. I’ll clarify that: there have been corrupt elected and appointed officials in both major parties. There are degrees of corruption, from telling a lie to financial crimes to sex crimes to high treason. It’d take several newsletters to quantify the entirety of the misdeeds when there’s been thousands of elected officials in both parties over nearly two centuries. This one is far narrower, covering current and recent presidents and some of the officials in their campaigns and administrations.
When Saddam Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait, George H.W. Bush had a PR firm telling the public that Hussein’s troops were dumping babies from incubators. To help drum up public support for the invasion of Iraq that followed. That lie wasn’t as bad as someone claiming his law school performance was better than it actually was, if you want to lose all your credibility instantly.
When Bush’s son - who lied about going AWOL during his brief military career - got elected president, he immediately began planning a second invasion of Iraq, seven months before the 9-11 attack. No intelligence suggested that Hussein was involved in the 9-11 attacks. The planners and hijackers were all Saudis and Egyptians, some with ties to Afghanistan’s Taliban.
How did George W Bush convince the American public to support the second invasion of Iraq? He claimed that a wealthy Iraqi (Ahmed Chalabi) who the CIA had previously discredited had revealed that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. And in Germany, an Iraqi immigrant nicknamed ‘Curveball’ claimed to be an Iraqi engineer who’d worked in mobile Iraqi weapons labs. Several European intel agencies determined Curveball wasn’t credible. Years later, Bush and his administration officials essentially claimed ‘he sure fooled us’. Most of them were lying. Both Curveball and Chalabi were useful as propaganda tools that they could later denounce, but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith (and likely, others) knew that both men weren’t credible sources. But when sending Americans into battle, selling the need for a war is standard political practice. They wanted Hussein dead and wanted a puppet government they could control.
It was some coincidence that the chief Pentagon spokesperson during that propaganda push was Victoria Clarke. She was previously the office director of the PR firm Hill & Knowlton.
Hill & Knowlton was a key player in selling the first invasion of Iraq by Bush’s father.
Via Wikipedia:
After drumming up support for the first invasion of Iraq with false information, now she was working in the Pentagon selling stories about WMDs that didn’t exist. UN inspectors kept checking out the claims made and kept proclaiming throughout that no evidence of WMDs existed, repeatedly urging Bush to let them continue their inspections.
But Bush and Dick Cheney had spent more than a year planning to invade Iraq so it was already a done deal.
So we got our longest war in history, more than half a million Iraqis died - most of them civilians - and that war resulted in the creation of ISIS and spilled over into a second big war in Syria.
But at least Victoria Clarke never used the words of a British politician in a state fair speech, which would have been worse, if your logic bone isn’t working.
Setting those propaganda efforts aside, some claim the Republicans are better at economy stuff, right? Let’s review how many job gains have been made with Republicans in the White House for 16 of the last 34-2/3 years.
Republicans will say my starting point isn’t fair because Jimmy Carter had a terrible economic record and Reagan had a great one. Okay, let’s review their job gains, too.
In Reagan’s 8 years, 16,128,000 non-farm job gains were made. That’s 2,016,000 per year. In Carter’s 4 years, he only had 10,343,000 more non-farm jobs. That’s 2,585,850 per year. What? Carter had more new jobs per year than Reagan did? According to the Department of Labor Statistics, that’s exactly right. And Bill Clinton did better than Reagan or Carter with new jobs.
Biden’s doing better than all of them.
Another way to measure economic performance is by looking at annual median income, after inflation is factored in. That’s pretty close to the median buying power for most working Americans.
That was $37,707.75 in Nixon’s final year. It dipped more than $2,000 for Gerald Ford ($35,621.42 in 1975) and the rise in 3 years of Carter’s term was minimal. In Carter’s final year though, 1980, it jumped to a new high of $37,762.63, about $55 higher than the previous 1974 high.
In Reagan’s first 3 years, it dropped each year, hitting $34,116.55 in 1983, the lowest median income in 16 years (since 1967). It then rose five years in a row and finally in 1988 (Reagan’s last year) it set a new high of $38,667.94. It broke above $40,000 in 1990, GHW Bush’s 2nd year. That record stood till Clinton’s 6th year (1998) and continued to a new peak of $43,925.00 in Clinton’s final year.
Now, the mainstream media and pollsters keep saying the public isn’t happy with the economy and that’s true. We’re fine with jobs creation and low unemployment and for many, higher wages. The dissatisfaction is mostly because of inflation. Looking closely at the numbers, a lot of our common purchases don’t display so much inflation. In the food sector, for example, breads and baked goods and non-alcoholic beverages have jumped, but meat, dairy, eggs, fruits and veggies are only slightly up. Eating out at restaurants, the prices show inflationary jumps.
Overall though, the food sector’s not the big concern of many. It’s shelter costs (housing & heating) and gas prices that are drawing the most complaints. Younger people, fresh out of high school or college (with the latter group burdened with college debts), are also pretty vocal about how hard it is to get by on the low end of wage scales.
Shelter costs have exacerbated the numbers of homeless and that’s causing further disruptions in civil order. High fuel costs cause higher prices for all transported goods. Surely the President oughta do better fixing all that.
Just like Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had to contend with OPEC oil embargoes that triggered massive inflation, Biden has things going on that aren’t so easy to control. Global oil & gas prices generally reflect how much oil Saudi Arabia is producing and exporting to the world. They’ve been refusing to produce more so gas prices have been at record highs in 2022-2023.
Russia, the third largest oil producer, is also restricting production to keep prices high. Because of the costs of Putin’s war and the economic sanctions against Russia from the US and Europe, the high fuel prices keep them from financial ruin.
So what’s a US president to do? Putin knows the US and our NATO allies won’t back off unless Trump wins back the presidency a year from now. A majority of Congressional Republicans don’t want to stop helping Ukraine because they well understand that isolationism is always a fail when violent expansionists like Hitler or Putin are on the move. Only the small group of extremists in the GOP are dumb enough to surrender Ukraine and several other European nations to Putin.
Thua, it’s pretty obvious that taming oil prices means Biden’s gotta work out a deal with the Saudis. The brutal attack on Israel by Hamas puts pressure on the Saudi government to make that deal. Hamas and Hezbollah clearly are aided by Shia leaders in Iran, Syria and to some degree, Iraq and Lebanon. The Saudi royals are well aware that strong Shia governments are a threat to their country and their oil fields. Now they have a fresh motivation to work with Biden. It’ll be interesting to see if oil prices fall and inflation drops considerably by November 2024.
When Trump was first briefed by Obama officials about the greatest threats to our country, Putin didn’t top that list. Kim Jong-Un did. His long range missile development has advanced rapidly since 2014. Putin well understands that a nuclear conflict means Mutually Assured Destruction. Nobody knows if Jong-Un does. Trump met him and treated him like a clown. (How’s that working out for you, funny guy?)
In the wake of the deadly Hamas attacks, Jong-Un has been busy working on a greater alliance with Putin. The major conflicts in the Middle East and the invasion of Ukraine should make us all feel uneasy. Things far worse than the current inflation could happen. They already have happened … in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza.
Biden’s already done a helluva job rebounding the economy, helping job growth, taming unemployment and providing a major infrastructure rebuild bill, a need that every president in the past 20 years understood had to be met.
For an older guy whose athleticism has lost a step, his achievements make it clear his brain is sharp as ever. There remain big challenges ahead. He’s done an unmatched job getting women and POC into higher offices all across the federal government.
When I weigh his competence, personal behavior, his capacity to make effective legislative compromises, the way he speedily got NATO members on board to create a united front against Russia’s aggression, his economic successes and more, I really can’t think of another politician, business leader, academic, mob boss or con man in the country right now that I trust more to win the inflation fight, hold off the nukes and kick the ass of any opponent next year than President Joe Biden.
Meanwhile the mainstream media keeps talking the same old Trump-fluffing shit.
Enough. Time for some serious shit. Here’s 5 of the best music videos in the history of all the YouTubes since the Dawn of Time.