The fact that Joe Biden was able to hold himself together long enough to give a halfway coherent speech doesn’t for a moment excuse the outright lies and deleterious fantasies he used that speech to spread.
As one might predict, he put the COVID-19 pandemic at the center of his relentlessly dark portrayal of an America facing four simultaneous crises: the artificial economic downturn (really one in the same as the pandemic), “systemic racism,” and the “existential threat” of climate change rounded out the four.
FDR inspired the nation with his “Four Freedoms” speech. Biden’s “Four Crises” speech fell well short of that standard.
Preposterously, Biden claims he is going to solve COVID with a “national plan” that he supposedly laid out in March and wouldn’t be able to implement until January. It was a laundry list of things President Trump has already done, and Biden talked about them in such vague terms that it wasn’t clear that he actually grasped them, conceptually.
He said he would have enabled testing, for instance, even though we already lead the world in testing. He said he would produce protective gear, yet the current administration has already conducted the greatest production mobilization in American history to ensure that all of our frontline health care workers have access to the medical equipment they need to save lives. Biden said he would make sure we produce what we need in America instead of relying on China, but it was he who spent decades lowering trade barriers to China and creating the globalist system that encouraged our reliance on Chinese manufacturing. It was President Trump, however, who issued an executive order designed to ensure that we are never in the vulnerable position in which the Obama-Biden administration left us.
Finally, Joe said he would have created a “national mask mandate.”
A national mask mandate?
First of all, the president has absolutely no constitutional authority to regulate mask use, and any such “mandate” would probably wind up amounting to little more than a few additional signs in post offices and courthouses, and perhaps a taxpayer-funded public awareness campaign featuring Hollywood liberals lecturing Americans about the importance of unquestioning obedience to the federal government’s so-called “experts.”
In March, every liberal publication in the country was assuring us there was no need for ordinary people to wear masks. Some were even telling us it was racist against Chinese people to post pictures of masks and personal protective equipment. Joe Biden gave moral sanction to both ideas to score political points, calling President Trump’s life saving decision to block travel from China “hysterical xenophobia.”
The lies didn’t stop with COVID. Equally outrageously, the freshly-minted Democratic presidential nominee accused President Trump — who has always pledged to protect Social Security — of threatening to take the entitlement away by cutting the payroll tax that provides half of Social Security’s funding.
In truth, Biden was referring to Coronavirus relief efforts, not some nefarious plot to neuter Social Security.
At a time when millions of Americans are out of work and Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is preventing further relief to American workers, President Trump acted alone to put more money in American families’ pockets after Congress refused to do so. Under an executive order, Americans can hold off paying their payroll tax (the largest burden for many workers) for the rest of the year, buying precious time for lawmakers to work toward a comprehensive relief package.
And Joe Biden had the nerve to spin it into an attack on Medicare and Social Security — in his acceptance speech, no less. It was a particularly low form of political manipulation, even for him.
At least Biden didn’t have the gall to elevate this imaginary threat to Social Security into his pantheon of national crises. Perhaps his handlers determined that five crises would have been a little too morose for an acceptance speech. Or maybe it just would have been too many for Joe to keep straight.
Whatever the reason, four crises or five, Biden chose to use the backdrop of an America facing real challenges to present a false picture of a nation in need of saving. To get there, he took credit for what President Trump has done, ascribed his own failings to the President, and ensured that the lies around George Floyd and “systemically racist” America will make it into the history books.
America did not need Joe Biden to save it before the coronavirus pandemic — and as much as he and his handlers might wish it were otherwise, this country certainly doesn’t need Biden to save it now.
Jason D. Meister is a political strategist and an advisory board member of Donald J. Trump for President Inc. Mr. Meister regularly appears on Fox News, Fox Business, BBC, WSJ Live, One America News, and other media channels.
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