Biden doesn’t get to the second part of his State of the Union speech. People who work for President Biden are not Olaf Scholz, and they are not the same.
President Biden had the same choice this week when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. The new German chancellor broke with decades of center-left German security and energy policy, and Mr. Biden had the same choice in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He didn’t make the second. The President stayed on the same policy path that he took in his first year, but in a new anti-inflation package.
Extra spending on protection to deal with threats from autocrats? No. A new sense of how important fossil fuels are to the safety of both the United States and Europe? Not a word. A notice that the best inflation rate in 40 years was due to government spending. Nope. How would you say thanks to the private Pharma company that came up with Covid medicines and vaccines? He said that the government should look at controls as an alternative.
Mr. Biden did give Ukraine and its fight for freedom a lot of help, which got a lot of applause from both parties. His administration should be praised for getting Europe and other countries to impose sanctions and give more military support. He was correct in his criticism of Mr. Putin.
However, he didn’t pay attention to the fact that he didn’t stop the Russian autocrat. “We had been ready” if Putin invaded, Biden said. But if the U.S. had been ready, Mr. Putin would not have invaded, because the U.S. would have been ready. Because he thought the West would do little, the Russian went to war. There are 41 million Ukrainians who have been brave enough to fight for their country, not Europe or the United States. This is why Putin is in a fight now.
We also didn’t hear a promise that Russia would not be able to beat and keep Ukraine. There was no warning for Mr. Putin not to launch missiles into people’s homes or encircle and starve cities into submission like a mediaeval siege. This was not Harry Truman calling for the world to fight a new threat at the start of the Cold War.
On his home agenda, Mr. Biden talked about inflation because he had to because of the polls. While the pandemic and greedy businesses are to blame, he says that the rising prices are caused by them, and that he wants to unleash prosecutors and antitrust cops, as well as spend more money on social welfare and entitlements. As far as he was concerned, his programme would “cut energy costs for households by a typical of $500 each year.” This was his most out-of-this-world line.
To make energy more valuable for people, he wants to cut the availability and raise the price of coal, oil, and natural gas so that people can’t get enough of them. Every day, his regulators are trying this in every way they can think of. Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas looked like it had never happened. It was as if the horror of the last week had never happened. Presidency: The left still has a chokehold on this Presidency.
An anxious world is looking for American leadership in a dangerous new era. To fill in for Biden, he went over his first-year home agenda, which has shown him how low he has been politically, It’s disheartening that a White House that has to deal with so many big problems can give you so little. The President wants to fire some people and get better reviews.
