Washington -- The fabulists who are covering President Joe Biden for the mainstream media have spoken. He has gotten off to a flawless start. His first week was unsurpassed even by Warren Gamaliel Harding back in the 1920s. Warren spent a considerable amount of time in bed during his first week and playing cards with his buddies at other times. Joe was more industrious. He signed executive orders, more than any president in recent years, though he also spent a lot of time in bed. You know, a guy gets fatigued.
Pore over the newspapers. Sit down before the evening news on television. You will find very little reason to take issue with the fabulists. Joe's first week was so flawless that he was almost boring. I think the columnist Ruth Marcus captured the flawlessness of it all best.
She wrote in The Washington Post Sunday: "As I write, he's been in office for all of nine days. In that time, as I've said, he's confronted more varied crises than any president; he's moved to undo some of Trump's worst policies (tax cuts! deregulation! court nominations! -- emphasis mine) and he's begun the hard slog of fixing the pandemic disaster that Trump left behind (warp speed! -- italics mine once again). The execution has been solid. There's been no distracting personnel foul-up." Bravo, Ms. Marcus!
As Marcus writes, Joe's execution has been "solid." There has been "no distracting personnel foul-up." I guess that means no sightings of Hunter. No one in the mainstream media would disagree. I think it is only a matter of time before the citizenry of San Francisco settles on the name to place on public buildings that they have recently denuded. In the place of Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington, they will raise the name of Joe Biden. Soon, the mania will spread to other cities. How about the Biden Memorial, the Biden Monument, the Statue of Biden?
Yet some of us living outside the bubble that Marcus and the mainstream media inhabit might disagree with the gravamen of her column. There was at least one episode last week that was not flawless. It was caught on tape and presented on YouTube. Joe was speaking from the White House. His eyes were a bit glassy. His speech was not quite right. He was talking about how he was going to distribute the vaccine, and I, for one, was not impressed. I transcribed him as best I could, but there are frequent ellipses because, well, Joe often descends into bibble-babble. Often it is difficult to retrieve a complete sentence from the mush. See if you can make any sense of it.
It goes like this: "We expect these additional 200 million doses to be delivered this summer ... by the midsummer that this vaccine will be there. That increases the total vaccine order in the United States by 50% from 400 million ordered to 600 million. This enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300 Americans by end of the summer, the beginning of the fall. I want to repeat, it will be enough to fully vaccinate 300 Americans."
Now I want to make clear that I do not think that Joe meant to say 400 million doses of the vaccine, or even 600 million doses of the vaccine, will be given to a lucky 300 Americans. But how many Americans will be receiving the vaccine this summer? What is more, what is one to make of these massive misstatements?
Let us face the facts. The mainstream media has done a thorough job covering for Joe and turning former President Donald Trump into an ongoing scandal. This started with Trump in 2015. With Joe, it might have been going on for decades. But things are not going to get any easier for Joe in the years ahead. What is he going to sound like when the Chinese deliver their first challenge? What will he say when Vladimir Putin steps forward? Those are just two of America's many hostile rivals. What comes next? When the media was not reporting the news but reconfiguring the news, did the Ruth Marcuses of the world ever think that the American electorate deserved an accurate sense of who was running for office year after year? Americans are going to get an accurate view of the quality of mind that they recently elected in the coming year.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the author, most recently, of "The Death of Liberalism," published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.