OPINION:
A female friend of mine said recently: “Every woman knows there’s one eye where your makeup looks great and another where it looks like a mess. The front end of 2021 was the good eye; the back end was the other eye.”
That’s probably optimistic. Most people had limited expectations from the get-go, which became even further minimized as the year progressed.
The year started with the single most effective instance of voter suppression in memory, when former President Donald Trump convinced enough of his own voters that their votes would be meaningless to help the Democrats win both runoff elections for U.S. Senate in Georgia (and thereby earn the right to preside over the Senate) on Jan. 5.
The next day, a riot was marketed by the legacy media as an insurrection despite the absence of a leader, firearms or fatalities (other than one rioter) on Capitol grounds — still waiting on those first treason charges.
In April, this column predicted that in the wake of the American Rescue Plan ($2 trillion of your money), Team Biden was at its peak and that the remainder of the three years would be a steady downhill slide punctuated by the occasional embarrassment in foreign policy (like August’s chaotic and fatal withdrawal from Afghanistan) and perhaps fleeting episodes of competence concerning domestic issues (still waiting for one of those).
That prediction has stood up pretty well.
Immediately after passage of the American Rescue Plan, Team Biden proposed the largest sort-of infrastructure legislation ever ($4 trillion as proposed, $1.3 trillion in final). The legislation was presented as the product of negotiations between Republican and Democratic senators. That seems unlikely. There is not a single Republican priority or program in the legislation. If it were the product of negotiations, it seems reasonable to assume Republican senators wouldn’t have given their votes away for nothing. Would they?
The year was also notable for what Congress didn’t do.
The liberals are still waiting on legislation to tax the rich, federalize elections, empower unions, give statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, “reform” the police, increase the number of Supreme Court justices, kill the filibuster (technically a Senate rule, not a law), etc., etc.
The liberals also waited patiently, and (so far) in vain, for the massive welfare legislation known as Build Back Better.
Inflation soared to its highest levels in four decades, which means people under the age of 55 got to enjoy the destruction of wage gains and savings for the first time. There has been no net growth in the economy in almost three years, yet we have expanded the money supply. When the money supply is disconnected from wealth creation, currency devaluation is a necessary consequence.
Anywhere from three to 10 divisions of light infantry crossed our southern border every month in contravention of the laws that every single appointee in the Biden administration took an oath to uphold.
In the World Series, the Atlanta Braves beat the Houston Astros, who I thought had been thrown out of baseball for cheating.
Robert Dole, Donald Rumsfeld and Rush Limbaugh died. We will miss them, and not because they had the “courage to be bipartisan,” as numerous Democrats remarked on the death of Dole. We will miss them because they dared not to be bipartisan when the ideas in question were terrible.
Conservatives joined hippies and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in opposition to vaccines. In a similar vein, White Republicans finally caught up with Black folks and discovered that federal law enforcement is a political agent of the regime, not an impartial effort to exact justice (think the fabrication of the Russian collusion in 2016).
The phrase “only two trillion dollars” was uttered thousands of times without any self-awareness whatsoever.
Those who claim to champion public education and racial equality closed public schools in cities and stole a year of education from young Blacks and Hispanics.
House Democrats voted for an enormous tax cut for the rich (the removal of the deduction cap on state and local taxes, known as SALT). It’s the costliest provision in the House version of BBB. House Republicans voted against it.
Former President Jimmy Carter and the Republicans joined in canceling the Beijing Olympics. At the same time, the NBA, Disney, Intel, Apple, etc., made it clear that they care more about access to China’s markets than opposing slavery and genocide.
There was bipartisan agreement that violent protests should be prosecuted only if the other side does it.
American generals surrendered to the woke media; France managed to hold the line and resist.
Finally, just this week, President Biden offered his de facto resignation when he told governors that the COVID-19 response was a state, not a federal problem. He, of course, specifically ran for president vowing to end/cure/fix COVID-19.
Have a healthy and happy new year!
• Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the president of MWR Strategies. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House.
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