In the wake of President Biden’s second State of the Union address, most of the mainstream media’s attention, as usual, was directed at the gaffes and the drama: The President mistakenly called Senator Schumer minority leader! How dare Marjorie Taylor Greene call the president a liar! Did you see Mitt Romney and George Santos trading insults? And why did the First Lady kiss the Second Gentleman on the lips?
In comparison with the usual Capitol Hill theatrics, the GOP response, delivered by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was sedate and to the point. But it was also substantially correct: Behind Biden’s bumbling, avuncular, superficially conciliatory persona, the agenda was as left-wing and radicalized as ever.
Take, for example, the unapologetic defense of Big Government involvement in healthcare, something Americans have become resigned to since ObamaCare foisted socialized medicine on the United States. Biden doubled down on last year’s bloated spending bill, the grotesquely misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, touting its targeting of “Big Pharma,” which is allegedly solely to blame for soaring drug prices. To be sure, gargantuan pharmaceutical companies employ a gamut of shady practices to limit market access and drive profit margins to the stratosphere — but in so doing, they are enabled by Byzantine and unjust patent laws and the almost unlimited discretionary power of the FDA to delay public access to needed drugs. And large numbers of FDA officials and Health and Human Services functionaries are plucked from the ranks of Big Pharma, so it isn’t difficult to imagine where their sympathies lie. Meanwhile, those same pharmaceutical corporations have successfully lobbied to turn America into a high-price prison for those dependent on overpriced drugs such as insulin; diabetes patients are still free to travel to places such as Canada and Mexico, where insulin can be bought cheaply — but they are now violating federal laws if they dare to bring any such legally purchased drugs back to the United States.
None of this would be possible without the complaisance of Big Government; absent the stifling controls of FDA bureaucrats and misapplied patent laws, bona fide market competition would permit speedy production of generics, and competitive demand would quickly drive prices down. And Biden’s solution? More Big Government controls, including price caps, expanding Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, etc.
Add to that Biden’s lavish public works projects aimed at job creation, and we are seeing a rehash of the New Deal and the Great Society boondoggles, but dressed in 2020s attire.
And despite the mostly measured cadences, Biden the Wild-eyed Leftist Radical was only partly concealed. Biden insisted that the “climate crisis” is nothing less than an “existential threat,” a smugly pointed justification of his administration’s ruinous energy policies that have sent fuel prices skyrocketing and have catapulted the United States from Trump-era energy independence back into dependency on foreign oil suppliers such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
As for social issues, Biden remains as unrepentantly pro-abortion and pro-sexual deviancy as ever:
The Vice President and I are doing everything we can to protect access to reproductive health care and safeguard patient privacy. But already, more than a dozen states are enforcing extreme abortion bans.
Make no mistake; if Congress passes a national abortion ban, I will veto it.
Let’s also pass the bipartisan Equality Act to ensure LGBTQ Americans, especially transgender young people, can live with safety and dignity.
And Biden remains adamantly anti-gun, expending considerable vitriol in this year’s address advocating a permanent ban on so-called assault weapons. Anyone curious as to what this might entail need look no further than Canada, whose government has been on an anti-gun rampage of late; what began as a ban on scary-looking semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines was quickly and arbitrarily expanded to include all types of shotguns, rifles, and handguns that had been presumed safe. Before too many more years, Canadians will likely be facing a near-total ban on firearms, along the lines of the U.K. — and all in the name of banning “assault weapons.” It’s not too hard to imagine the real scope of Biden’s anti-gun agenda.
In fine, Biden’s latest rhetorical flourish is more of the same socialist pap. House Republicans, at least, were not impressed and were uncharacteristically rowdy, booing Biden loudly on several occasions. Some of them have clearly grasped that, even though he doesn’t wear a tie-died shirt or march through the streets torching police cars, President Biden’s mild-mannered exterior conceals a heart as far left and as dedicated to the overthrow of traditional America as any Antifa radical who ever donned the black bandanna.
