It Was Obvious All Along

It is accurately said that pride goeth before a fall. Please make no mistake: What follows is not written out of pride, nor some desire to say, “See? I told you so.”

Quite the opposite. I possess no special gift of prophecy. I have no access to inside information. I guess I have wits enough to survive — made it this far, anyway — but nothing much beyond that. Yet somehow I was able to predict a lot of what has happened in the last year or so. For example, on June 9, 2021 this appeared here:

Last week, Barack Obama said in an interview that “Joe and the administration are essentially finishing the job.” What job? Among other things, gasoline prices. Obama said in 2012 that gas should be more expensive. Biden has moved to reduce the supply of oil products and natural gas. That increases prices, including the cost of getting goods to retailers. It’s a supply chain issue, but it’s anything but temporary. So while the administration can’t make electric cars cheaper (even if that were a worthwhile goal, which there’s reason to believe it isn’t —- if you drive an electric car your hands are stained by the blood of foreign children according to the World Economic Forum), it can make gasoline-powered cars more expensive. And the government has long subsidized electric cars, up to and including Biden’s photo-opportunity drive in an electric Ford F-150 pickup to promote his plan to spend $174 billion of your dollars on electric vehicles.

A few weeks later, on August 25, there was this:

It takes a real Joe Biden —- may “Biden” become a verb, signifying abject, oblivious failure —- to make such a botch of things. I have no doubt that he could, if he put what little is left of his not-very-good mind to it, manage to bring about the collapse of Western civilization while trying to navigate to Icecreamistand. It may have escaped his notice —- pretty much everything does —- that his buddies (and new masters, it seems) the Taliban are taking away the passports of Americans. . . .

Until now, zero was the lowest amount of respect one could have for an American president. When you hear about the fate of those poor Afghan families, remember that it happened because Joe Biden, so cool in his stolen-valor sunglasses and Air Force A-2 jacket, and his ever-so-bright advisors decided to make it happen. And remember that it’s entirely a political calculation. He and his brightest boys imaginable are counting on your forgetting all about it in a few weeks.

Which many of us did. When was the last time you gave any thought to the fate of the poor people of Afghanistan, doomed to virtual enslavement by Joe “Bugout” Biden?

On November 17:

You may not have noticed it, but Russia is fixing to invade Ukraine. It has amassed 100,000 soldiers along the Ukrainian border, with tanks and other armored vehicles stationed nearby. This is a bad thing. Russia wants Ukraine’s natural gas pipelines and the geographical advantages annexation of the former Soviet territory would bring.

And on February 23:

Biden says anything that pops into what’s left of his never-very-intelligent mind. This is okay when you’re sitting out on the porch at the rest home, around the table having your afternoon Bosco and a cookie. It is not okay if you’re the putative leader of the free world. . . .

Biden affirmed that our sanctions against Russia, such as they are, will result in higher energy prices. (The 90-cents-per-gallon increase in the price of gasoline over the last year was Biden’s alone, no Russian help involved.) This seemed especially primed to stiffen our backs, to make us ready to abandon Ukraine as has become our habit, with Bugout Joe the man to lead us in glorious retreat.

And March 9:

In his speech yesterday in which he turned off the Russian gas spigot (having been forced by Congress to do so), he said, “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.” Yet “Biden Administration Halts New Drilling in Legal Fight Over Climate Costs” was the New York Times headline less than three weeks ago. Is Biden lying or too enfeebled to remember —- or maybe out of the loop in his own administration? You be the judge.

A week later, on the report that Bugout Joe and the gang were recruiting TikTok thots to serve as domestic propagandists:

The White House has recruited teenage ink monsters, butt shakers, and boobie flashers to spread the fiction that high gas prices here are the work of Vladimir Putin, not Joe Biden (even though the price of gas went up nearly a dollar during Biden’s year in office before Russia invaded Ukraine). This could be because finding anyone who would actually believe such nonsense requires the attention of a communist-Chinese-owned network of clueless teenagers and their pedophile followers.

I haven’t written much about Taliban ally Bugout Joe Biden in recent months. My constitution is not up to it, and Biden has descended to the point that he’s beyond parody. He was on a television humor show last week, during which the host Jimmy Kimmel demonstrated that he missed his calling. Instead of being a failed television personality he could have been a very good nursing home orderly.

Here are a few nuggets of wisdom from the doddering commander in chief during that interview:

“Well, in climate change, we’ve actually made some real moves. One in seven of all the changes that have taken place in terms of solar, wind, and wind pumps, and I mean pumps and like, have occurred in the last 18 months; we’ve moved.” Note that wind pumps are the windmills you see, usually abandoned, on old farms, They used to be employed to draw water from a well.

“Turn on the TV, look at the ads. When’s the last time you saw biracial couples on TV? When’s the last time you saw the way . . . People are selling products, they do ads to sell products, and they sell products when they appeal to people; this generation is going to change everything. We just got to make sure we don’t give up.” No one knows what he thought he was saying, probably not even Biden himself.

And, most famously, “One of the things is that it’s very difficult now to have… With notable exceptions, even the really good reporters, they have to get the number of clicks on the nightly news. So instead of asking a question… Anyway, everything gets sensationalized in ways that… But I’m convinced we can get through this. We have to get through it. And one of the things, look-” whereupon Kimmel went to break, the television version of saying, “That’s good to know. We need to get you back to your room now.”

After the break, Kimmel served up what he or his writers thought would be an easy opening for Biden to attack his predecessor. Kimmel asked a question about which White House toilet was used to flush sensitive documents. While it’s tempting to contemplate the ways in which Kimmel resembles Monica Lewinsky (no doubt he thinks he’s prettier, and he may be right), of more importance is Bugout Joe’s answer: “I call Trump. Everybody talks about sensitive documents and like, I don’t destroy anything, but one of the things that I spent more time with Xi Jinping than anybody, any other head of state. And I’d always be, when I traveled it was 17,000 miles, spent 78 hours with him they’d tell me, all told. And I’d have a consecutive interpreter, and he’d have one. And the difference between when I would do that and others would do it, I always handed in all my notes.” Huh?

As I finished writing this, Biden (who is still capable of reading aloud, at least) delivered a short speech about eliminating the federal gas tax for three months. This is a way of appearing to do something without actually doing anything good. To the extent it accomplishes anything at all it will increase both inflation and the already obscene federal deficit. It won’t appreciably reduce the price of fuel. Only a competitive free market can do that.

But it would tee up what Bugout Joe and his centralized-economy handlers really want, which is to establish price controls. This has never worked, never will work, never can work. It does not produce lower prices. It produces shortages.

Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Hope you liked ‘em, because if Biden gets his way they’re coming back.

My point here is that everything that has happened during the rule of this reprehensible old man and his execrable administration was perfectly predictable, and the things that are going to happen are predictable, too.