President Joe Biden, 80, delivered a clever State-of-the-Union speech Feb. 7, working the joint session of Congress like skilled impresario at a three-ring circus. For anyone listening, Biden exceeded all expectations reading short lines on his teleprompter often mangling words or grammar but nothing really mattered. Biden showed, beyond any of former President Donald Trump’s descriptions of Biden’s impaired, that he knows how to throw red meat to an audience. Biden benefited from a brilliantly written speech, allowing the president to play folksy Uncle Joe to a largely receptive audience. Whatever outbursts took place by Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Biden’s State-of-the-Union was a campaign speech, in effect, announcing that he’s running for reelection in 2024. Nothing in Biden’s speech delivered any factual accuracy, only a self-congratulatory personal sales job.
If you listened to Biden, the U.S. economy and foreign policy have never been better, touting U.S. alliances overseas to battle the evil 70-year-old Russian President Vladimir Putin. Biden didn’t admit how the U.S. proxy war, using Ukrainian troops, has fueled the worst inflation in 40 years, all because Ukraine defends European democracy against an existential threat from Putin. Much of Biden’s speech was a hodgepodge of platitudes, far from even the most partisan reality. Biden said that backing Ukraine helped save European democracy, the same malarkey said by Ukraine’s 44-year-old President Volodymyr Zelensky to a joint session of Congress Dec. 21, 2022 that Ukraine was not a charity case but an investment in preserving democracy. Biden said the same rubbish knowing that Ukraine’s war-torn, bankrupt government only fights for its own survival, certainly not Europe’s.
Delivering the GOP rebuttal, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders went over the deep end talking about Biden pandering to “the woke mob.” Whether that’s true or not, ordinary voters, those tuning into the State-of-the-Union, don’t know what she’s talking about. “Whether Joe Biden believes this madness or is simply too weak to resist it, his administration has been completely hijacked by the radical left,” a fashionable term in conservative circles. Most voters want to know what the GOP plans to do to fix the ailing U.S. economy. What, if anything, the GOP plans to do about the proxy war in Ukraine against the Russian Federation. How the White House plans to stop a war with China over Taiwan or some other useless dispute. “Everyday, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols,” Huckabee Sanders told a largely bewildered audience.
Uncle Joe spoke to the working class voters, looking for government to bail them out of their financial woes due to runaway inflation and economic problems. Huckabee Sanders grossly missed an effective rejoinder to Biden’s utter nonsense, delivering his announcement that he’s running for reelection in 2024. “Americans want common sense for their leaders, but in Washington, the Biden administration is doubling down on crazy,” Huckabee said. Huckabee tried to say Biden squandered the prosperity and peace of the Trump administration but, somehow, got lost in translation. When 58-year-old House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) kept telling Greene to pipe down, what kind of message did that send about “crazy?” Huckabee-Sanders had the perfect chance to call Biden out on his nonsense about the economy and foreign policy, when the U.S. is in the worst place in decades.
Huckabee-Sanders talked about Biden’s failure on the border, violent crime, while Democrats ask to de-fund the police, all because African American lobbying groups have a stranglehold on the Democrat Party. “Despite Democrats’ trillions in reckless spending and mountains of debt, we now have the worst border crisis in American history,” Huckabee-Sanders told her audience. Instead of offering propose GOP fixes, Huckabee-Sanders on complained about what’s not going right. Most voters like Biden’s profligate government spending because they benefit from more outlays of cash. Instead of going after Biden’s disastrous foreign policy, Huckabee-Sanders highlighted how Democrats and Republicans are on the same page when it comes to Ukraine. Only former President Donald Trump, 76, has had the guts to question Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine, telling the public the war must stop.
Biden played Uncle Joe, working the crowd like circus impresario, selling the American public a bill of goods. Trump was dead wrong about Biden’s cognitive deficits, proving he can work a crowd like the best of him. Watching Joe laugh when he accused the GOP of trying to gut Social Security and Medicare, shows that Joe knows how to gaslight the crowd. Joe managed to get applause from both sides of the aisle, even from McCarthy, who, like other Republicans, have fallen into the Ukraine trap. Biden has no plan in Ukraine other than a perpetual blank check, pouring billions in tax dollars down a rat hole. Huckabee-Sanders talks about the “woke mob,” but she doesn’t call Joe out on his reckless foreign policy that has the U.S. dangerously close to WW III, possibly nuclear War. Where’s the GOP when it comes to Biden’s abysmal relations with Russia and China?
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
