OPINION:
The White House intended President Biden’s first State of the Union address to be a chance for the struggling president to “reset” his administration amid free-falling poll numbers. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine lent even more urgency to the speech.
As expected, some in the corporate news media came to Mr. Biden’s aid to prop up his failing presidency.
Knowing that many Americans are focused on personal economic concerns, news outlets attempted to smooth a path for Mr. Biden by preemptively deflecting blame from him.
“The U.S. economy has been hit with increased gas prices, inflation, and supply-chain issues due to the Ukraine crisis,” bleated a February 22 tweet from CBS News. Incredibly, the news organization tried to convince Americans that the economic pressures they’ve been feeling for months were somehow new.
Notably, this tweet was posted two days before Russia actually launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a week before Mr. Biden’s remarks to Congress.
A day after the first Russian attack, The Washington Post came to the rescue, insisting the Biden economy had been poised for takeoff until that moment. “U.S. economy appeared ready to surge, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could send shockwaves,” the headline read.
In truth, most Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, and the economy isn’t poised for anything except worsening inflation.
In his speech, Mr. Biden outlined a variety of economic sanctions on Russia, rightly designed to force Mr. Putin to pay a stiff price for his belligerence. But there is one economic weapon Mr. Biden has so far refused to deploy: sanctioning Russia’s energy industries, which have filled Mr. Putin’s coffers, bankrolled his military and given him leverage over much of the world.
Blake Hounshell, a New York Times editor, sympathized with Mr. Biden’s plight.
“Republicans want to be able to criticize Biden either way: They are calling on him to stop importing Russian oil, but if he did, gas prices would go up, which they’d also criticize,” Mr. Hounshell tweeted on Tuesday. “Not clear how the White House gets out of this jam.”
But Mr. Biden created this “jam” by purposely squandering American energy independence achieved under former President Donald Trump. What Mr. Biden should do now is unleash domestic production again to compensate for targeting Russian energy sales. But the environmental radicals who run his administration won’t permit that, meaning that the green extremists are effectively making foreign policy decisions for the United States.
Mr. Biden also touted a variety of his past and future spending plans, apparently oblivious to the fact that pumping government cash into the economy has helped drive inflation, and he made an emphatic political point on an issue that could again haunt Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
“Fund the police,” he said, taking aim at the widespread “Defund the Police” movement popular among many high-profile Democrats.
Afterward, Politico helpfully claimed Mr. Biden “has long rejected the concept of defunding the police,” even though during the 2020 campaign, he expressly agreed with the idea.
Defunding the police isn’t some fringe idea rather it has attracted broad support among Democrats over the past few years, including from now-Vice President Kamala Harris, who also helped raise bail money for people arrested in the 2020 Minneapolis riots.
Thirty seconds in a speech won’t wipe that away, though the media are trying.
At one point, Mr. Biden called for easing tension among people with differing views on COVID-19 masks, mandates and vaccines, saying, “Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.”
This is the same man who cast doubt on the safety of the vaccines while they were being developed during the 2020 campaign, who later demanded that employers fire workers who were not vaccinated, and who said his “patience is wearing thin” with the unvaccinated and warned them of a “winter of severe illness and death.”
This same Biden also recently name-checked notorious racists and segregationists George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis to smear anyone who disagreed with his plan to loosen election security.
Can’t you just feel the togetherness?
Never fear, though, because The Wall Street Journal gifted him the headline, “Biden Makes Appeal to Unity.”
The morning after the address, White House press secretary Jen Psaki took to MSNBC to defend Biden’s omission of the 13 American service members who were killed during his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Mr. Biden didn’t “have the time” to get to it, she explained.
Ms. Psaki’s continued appearances on MSNBC and CNN are curious, though, since it’s been reported that she’s “in talks” with both networks about hosting her own show when she leaves the White House.
That certainly raises ethical questions, but it shouldn’t be surprising because it’s often difficult to tell the difference between the Biden White House and the media anyway.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs, a communication consulting firm.
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