By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
Joe Biden’s speech last night at Independence Hall in Philadelphia was a disaster — several bad ideas terribly executed at once. It was a speech that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, delivered by a man who didn’t believe it. And it will come back to bite him in court and on the campaign trail. Let us count the ways.
Problem #1: Giving the speech at all. Biden’s greatest political asset is when Americans are focused on Donald Trump and not on the bumbling, rambling fossil in the White House and his overreaching and under-delivering presidency. A big, set-piece Biden speech that was supposed to highlight Trump instead consumed media attention that would be, for the Democrats’ interests, better spent on more news cycles about Mar-a-Lago and Trump talking about holding a do-over election.
Problem #2: The title. Biden’s speech was entitled “The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” If Biden is trying to present himself as a unifying, back-to-normalcy figure who can calm the waters — a guy who, in the words of the speech itself, wants to “see politics not as total war but mediation of our differences” — talking about a “continued battle” won’t help. If he wants to reassure us that the president is sticking to his day job, talking about how he wants to shape “the soul of the nation” won’t help. And really, talking about a national crisis of soul is reminiscent of nothing so much as Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which is remembered today simply as the “malaise” speech. The scorched-earth partisanship of the speech is a replay of his disastrous Georgia voting-rights speech.
Problem #3: The staging. Independence Hall was lit up as if somebody directing one of the later Star Wars sequels said, “We want the new Empire to look just a little more Nazi.” The building was dark, but with blood-red eagle wings and Marines flanking an angry, fist-shaking Biden, the photos from this speech are certain to be used by a lot of campaigns this fall — none of them Democrats. Even aside from the politics, if Biden wanted to reassure ordinary Americans that he isn’t declaring some sort of war on his political enemies — taking a page from the Democratic Party adviser who declared that “the Republican Party is basically a domestic terrorist cell at this point and they should be treated as such” — he accomplished precisely the opposite. The best thing you could say about the staging is that it reminds us that this White House is run by incompetent amateurs who couldn’t get jobs on the Obama team.
Problem #4: Indecision. Biden still can’t decide what kind of president he wants to be, so he couldn’t decide what kind of speech he wanted to give. Did he want to use the moral authority of the presidency to speak in nonpartisan terms about a threat to the country? Did he want to give an arch-partisan speech denouncing the other party’s leadership? Did he want to lay out a contrast between the two parties on social issues? Did he want to offer a laundry list of his accomplishments and his agenda? Yes, he wanted to do all those things, so he tried to cram them all into a 3,000-word speech that stepped on its own messages.
Problem #5: Insincerity. Time and again, Biden accused “MAGA Republicans” of the things he refuses to denounce when they come from his own side, his own White House, or his own mouth and pen. He told us that, “There is no place for political violence in America. Period. None. Ever.” He denounced “rioting in the streets” and thundered, “We can’t allow violence to be normalized in this country. It’s wrong. We each have to reject political violence with — with all the moral clarity and conviction this nation can muster.” But in 2020, Biden was conspicuous in not naming any of the violent actors and rioters on his own side as they torched their way through American cities. That pattern continued last night: “We saw law enforcement brutally attacked on January the 6th. We’ve seen election officials, poll workers — many of them volunteers of both parties — subjected to intimidation and death threats. And — can you believe it? — FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens.” Notice what’s missing from that list? Firebombings of pro-life crisis-pregnancy centers. An assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. If Biden really wanted “all the moral clarity this nation can muster” against political violence, his Justice Department wouldn’t be cutting sweetheart deals with political protestors who threw Molotov cocktails into a police car during a riot.
Examples proliferate. Biden wrapped himself in the mantle of the “rule of law,” which his administration has so flagrantly disregarded with illegal orders on the CDC eviction moratorium, the OSHA vaccine mandate, and now student-loan debt. He talked about the Constitution, yet his list of rights he intends to protect — “right to choose,” “right to privacy,” “right to contraception,” “right to marry who you love” — consisted entirely of things the Constitution never mentions; he couldn’t spare a word for free speech, free exercise of religion, the right to bear arms, or due process of law, all of them punching bags for his administration. He complained that, “Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated,” that, “You can’t love your country only when you win, and that, “I will not stand by and watch — I will not — the will of the American people be overturned by wild conspiracy theories and baseless, evidence-free claims of fraud.” Again, he attributed this only to his political opponents, ignoring all manner of offenses against this norm by his own side, ranging from Biden himself branding the 2022 elections as illegitimate unless Congress passed a bunch of bills that won’t pass, to Chuck Schumer calling American elections a “rigged game,” to election-deniers Terry McAuliffe (whom Biden eagerly supported in 2021) and Stacey Abrams (whom Biden is eagerly supporting in 2022).
Indeed, if Biden really believed that “MAGA Republicans” were an existential threat to the country above politics, he would speak out against his own party spending tens of millions of dollars to intervene in more than a half-dozen Republican primaries across the country to boost such candidates solely for the purpose of yielding less-electable Republican nominees. Biden acted as if that isn’t happening.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets primaried.
They are setting up how to do that.
First, they made Biden look like Hitler on purpose.
Next, they will removed him, showing how much the Democrats are “not like that.”
Then they will create a J6th false flag, conjuring a new “Hitler” out of Trump or something.
It’s how they do it. They want to induce that Trump-is-Hitler in the minds of their idiot follows, so you make a fake president into a fake Hitler, then simply pin that idea on someone else.
Like Russia Collusion.
Like Biden withholding aid to Ukraine.
Like the rigged election.
Like J6th.
It’s getting old now.
There is NO Hitler speech that remotely resembles ANYTHING President Biden said, and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. Lavern Spicer is bat shit crazy.
If you listen long enough to idiots like her, you’ll become bat shit crazy yourselves. Evidence of that is close at hand.
@greg
You’re an idiot, and you can’t possibly defend what this illegitimate stooge both said and did.
The imagery was extremely “Third Reich”, and Biden told me and about 100 million or more Americans we are “threats to democracy” because we are simply voting democratically.
And in losing the argument, as you almost always do, you resort to the childish “you are crazy!” default moron response.
Saying that is more than a concession of your defeat.
You lose.
We need to protect our Constitutional Republic from this illegal regime.
Biden has no authority, and the Federal Government has stepped outside of its mandate and reason for being when it fell to outside, and inside, interests.
It’s now an illegal government that needs to be replaced, legally.
Biden is a direct threat to our democracy. Not hyperbole, not exaggeration…but demonstrated fact.
NO IT WASN’T, and no one can demonstrate that it was—which why IDIOTS like Spicer aren’t even trying to do so. They just yell mindless bullshit like this through their megaphones.
Haha. We’ll see what the voters think, moron.
Karens don’t like toxic males in black block with snipers, even if they are protecting drag queen pedophiles.
And they certainly don’t like angry old white men screaming from a podium, lit in red, flanked by Marines.
Biden’s call for violence against half of America ensures that Democrats will lose the House and the Senate in November, so he can do this all he wants.
From there, we pull his ass out with an impeachment….a real one…and we get these traitorous paid scum out of our government.
What Biden did, what he said…how he said it…is extremely Third Reich.
Yup. greg is full of shit.
Voters will remember this in November.
@Greg
You might want to refer to history. EVERY speech Hitler incited hatred and focused that hatred on his political enemies. EVERY speech Hitler made was slathered in propaganda accusing his opponents of what he and his party were guilty of. EVERY speech Hitler made identified a villain, accused that villain of being a threat to the nation and used that threat to justify extra-Constitutional powers.
But, hell, let’s not pick solely on poor old little Hitler. EVERY despotic dictator uses the exact same rhetoric and tactics.
Direct from the jackasses mouth.
biden is Adolf Hitler
Barstool Sports Founder Dave Portnoy: “Our President Looked Like F**king Hitler and Anyone Who Says Otherwise is Full of Sh*t!”
The Democrats House of Cards is finally coming down…thank God.
Expect more erratic, dictatorial behavior from these clowns.
November is coming, and voters will sends these jerks out on their ass….in numbers not seen in our history.
Republican Senate, Republican Congress…then we go to work and this Biden-Hitler the fuck out of our country.
Who is the Leni Riefenstahl in the WH that turned biden and his set into Hitler and the Nuremberg 1933 speech?
Susan rice or Anita Dunn?
Elon Musk.
Joe Rogan.
Russel Brande
Dave Portnoy.
These are LIBERALS that are calling for the Democrats to get ousted.
The party is over, thank God.
biden is the 21st century Adolf Hitler. Will he start a MAGA holocaust?
biden has now fully adopted the ideology of Adolf Hitler
I think it would be fitting to officially name greg as Adolf bidens Josef Goebbels
Who cares what billionaires, celebrities, or their fanboys think? For any one of them you can find another saying the opposite on any issue. Have you got a mind of your own, or not?
Biden has no cult following. He has millions of people who agree with what he said, who may disagree with him on other points. I disagree with student debt cancellation, as many democrats do. I disagreed with his meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince, though I understand the necessity of maintaining relations because of their oil while Putin threatens Western Europe.
I certainly understand the threat that Donald Trump represents. Trump is the closest thing we’ve had to Hitler’s personality cult in decades.
“Who cares what billionaires, celebrities, or their fanboys think?”
You do.
Because you vote Democrat. That’s who supports and funds the Democrat Party in bypassing democracy.
Citing that ONE billionaire and THREE celebrities, in the face of your lack of intelligence, is of course, lost.
These are real thinkers with real influence. They are not paid by Globalists through the federal government and the media (like Bezos, Zuckerberg, and all of hollywood) to parrot your message.
Your cathedral cracked a long time ago, and now we’re watching it come down.
The real question you have to ask yourself is this:
Who cares what a racist, old white guy who definitely didn’t win an election has to say?
As we’re seeing, no one.
He is defaulting to his inner Hitler, which any sane person knew was in there.
“Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” Have you forgotten who was chanting that, and where, and who set them off?
Trump is a dangerous lunatic, because of the hold he has on the minds of his cult followers. Were it not for them, he’d just be a billionaire lunatic.
Meh, who gives a shit.
Trump certainly had NOTHING to do with that.
Compared to Biden literally calling for the genocide of Trump voters, all 100 or so million of us, it’s irrelevant.
I see armed antifa in the streets in Texas “protecting” child-molesting gays.
I don’t see the Right doing anything…at all.
The bullshit outrage generated by the J6th false-flag ran out months ago, greg.
All the violence, fear, and anti-democratic behavior is on your side, the Left.
Clearly.
Yeah, ol’ “greggie Goebbels” doesn’t have to hide his nature anymore.
We certainly understand the threat that Joe Biden represents. Biden is the closest thing we’ve had to Hitler’s personality cult in decades.
Trump is the opposite, and even Biden knows it.
The Leftist Woke Death Cult is crumbling before our eyes.
If a mob assembled chanting “Hang Donald Trump!” after a Biden speech, you and the rest of the girls would throw hissy fits.
Huh? You monkeys have been doing just that since 2016.
Comedians and even serving politicians have called for Trump’s death, daily.
You and your people want blood and are calling for violence to get what you want.
Me and mine are just maintaining our constitutional republic.
You don’t get to support a deep State insurrection and then take over umbrage at a few people chanting something.
Your time is over. Cope.
@Greg
Idiot Biden, apparently. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been colluding with Facebook and Twitter to censor free speech.
He has a following of idiots and morons. No one with the capacity to think follows idiot Biden. That is what makes that 81 million votes lie such a farce.
Do you disagree with the REASON behind meeting with the Saudi Crown Prince? Do you disagree with idiot Biden’s destruction of our energy independence and production which not only enabled Putin to invade Ukraine but also necessitated idiot Biden crawling on his hands and knees to Saudi Arabia and begging for more oil? No, you probably don’t. You don’t disagree with any of it; you follow orders.
Yeah, he is a threat to Democrat single party rule. He is a threat to the totalitarian police state. He is a threat to the political establishment that enriches itself while taxpayers struggle and suffer.
No, we haven’t. Question is, why hasn’t Ray Epps and the other FBI operatives that incited the riot been questioned by your beloved propaganda committee?
Who the F wrote that speech?!
The satanic look lighting, the guy that was going to heal and unify the nation. We have no intention of selling our soul to the ilk of this regime. Having been put in front of the microphone then having to be led away, hurry before the mega dose of what ever they are pumping into him begins to wear off.
09/01/22 – Biden approval rating up 9 points since July
Uh, sure greg.
You trust those polls when they serve your agenda.
That’ll show’em.
Biden is a National disgrace, with no support. None.
He’s still in Iowa stumping to crowd of 30 people who mostly hate him.
He will be legally removed long before 2024, probably charged with High Treason.
Greg, joe bought those poll numbers by promising a $1 TRILLION dollar college loan forgiveness to people who refuse to pay their own bills.
Of course they like that.
Just wait til they learn about all the fine print that precludes their personal benefit.
The lowest approval rating ever for Biden put out by RCP was on July 21, 2022 at 36.8%. Today, it is at 42.1% for an uptick of 5.3%.
Your poll is an outlier. But you will grasp any straw you can as you see your side is going down with the ship.
Today, joe tried to “walk back” everything he said in his “speech” last night.
Either he’s so senile, dementia-ridden as to have forgotten, or he just reads what’s in front of him and has no idea he said the opposite last night.
Someone said, if you simply substitute the term, “Jews,” when joe said, Trump supporters or MAGA Republicans you can see how like the rhetoric of Nazi Germany it was.
The idea that it’s “my way or the highway,” is old (Love it of leave it, from the 1960’s) but it has never come from our “head of state” before.
Who you talking too, son?
09/02/22 – US Employers Add 315,000 Jobs as More Workers Join Labor Force
09/01/22 – Here’s another sign high U.S. inflation is starting to wane
09/01/22 – Gas prices continue on the longest downward trend since 2018
The economy is the worst it’s ever been in about 70 years.
The post covid and post great resignation numbers are not positive in the least.
Gas prices are higher than they ever were with Trump.
Biden’s failed economy is reason enough that Democrats are going to lose big in November…
The strong labor market suggests that the economy, in fact, is still doing reasonably well, despite inflation.
Democrats will likely pick up seats in the Senate because of several of the handpicked candidates Trump has foisted on the GOP.
Yeah, greg.
Because they had to.
See?
http://charts.gasbuddy.com/ch.gaschart?Country=USA&Crude=f&Period=18&Areas=USA+Average%2C%2C&Unit=US+%24%2FG
A long SLOW slide down after his constant rise up until June.
LOOOooooooong way to go, greg.
And what percentage of those jobs are now filled by teenagers?
You clearly don’t do the grocery shopping for your house.
So you think that when Democrat policies cause the increase in gasoline prices that is not their fault but if gasoline prices go down it’s “hip, hip hooray for the Democrats?”
On August 26th, diesel went up 31 cents a gallon FROM 8:00 AM TO 3:30 PM from $4.289 to $4.599.
Oh, but for the good old days when Obama told us that federalizing the student loan industry was going to create revenue for the government. How did that work out, Comrade Greggie?
Nothing you can say is going to make me as angry and depressed as you seem to be.
The Democrats will lose seats in the Senate
Nothing indicates otherwise.
Trump’s endorsement is a winning stroke, at least as far as objective truth is concerned.
His candidates win.
With the Senate and House, we can remove unelected Biden and “Right” the ship.
It’s listing too far Left, and is threatening to kill us all.
Herschel Walker, who held a pistol to his ex’s head? Dr. Oz, a reality TV carpetbagger and pseudoscience quack? I think republican voters might be smarter than Trump thinks. Though I did think that in 2016, and was unpleasantly surprised. We’ll see, come November.
August Labor Report Shows 315,000 Job Gains, Internal Data a Much Bigger Concern
@Greg
Unemployment claims ticks up.
Yeah, a recession and shrinking economic activity will do that.
After they were driven up by idiot Biden’s policies to the highest in HISTORY, they are still almost $2 a gallon more that where the last legitimately elected President the US has had had them. Drive prices through the roof then brag because recession brought them down just under the rafters? Kind of pathetic.
Nothing seems to make you as angry as the embarrassing spectacle of idiot Biden doing his Hitler impression has.
Walker is better than Warnock, who ran over his wife with his car. Oz is better than the career mooch Fetterman, who wants to dump more dangerous criminals onto the citizens as he disarms them. Fetterman won’t even debate Oz because his stroke-damaged mind isn’t up to it. While that might make the perfect Democrat senator, it’s not the characteristics that benefit the American people.
@Greg bwahahaha, any of thse things you say about the republicans are they as bad as the things we know about Biden aka Pedo Pete showering with his daughter? Marrying his babysitter after breaking up her marriage? Well she still babysits.
I see the LSD is still working for you greggie!
*Soul Man
Um… aren’t they all FROM the Obama regime? It is loaded with communists and fascists; I doubt they could put forth any different imagery than something that invokes communism and totalitarianism.
09/03/22 – Trump Shred’s Biden’s Fascist Speech
Well said.
Someone should explain to you that Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, and Vladimir Putin all made the same sales pitch.
@Greg
… as idiot Biden.