RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-1-23-re2mtojknndidfelg5aio0ugr7pn5a

January 2009, when Barack Obama took office as President, was several years before I began this blog. Of course I realized from the start that I disagreed strongly with nearly every policy that Obama intended to implement. However, I also recognized that Obama had been duly elected President, and was entitled to exercise the powers of the office. Therefore, I would oppose his policy initiatives as best I could within the bounds of the law. In my case that mainly meant collecting evidence and presenting to the world what I think are sensible arguments, in the hopes of swaying some potential voters over to rational positions. Within Obama’s first term, I had the blog up and running.

Well, now it’s Biden. Time to renew the commitment.

In his inaugural address on Wednesday, Biden’s principal theme was the call for what he called “unity”:

To overcome these challenges, to restore the soul, and to secure the future of America, requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: Unity. Unity. . . . Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of this is our historic moment of crisis and challenge. Unity is the path forward. We must meet this moment as the United States of America.

And then, on the same day, Biden proceeded to execute some 17 Executive Orders to implement various parts of the program of the progressive Left. Much more of same is to come.

There is a fundamental disconnect here. The program of the progressive Left is foundationally inconsistent with the whole idea of “unity” among the people. The progressive program is a program to achieve a vision of perfect fairness and justice and utopia through force and coercion, and those who disagree or stand in the way are to be pushed aside or defeated or crushed. Suppose you disagree with almost all of of this program (like me), or even just some of it. There is no “unity” on offer to you. What is on offer is that you must surrender and accept your defeat.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/joe_biden_signs_whatevers_put_in_front_of_him.html

EXCERPT

To begin his largely symbolic, retribution-based term of office, “President” Biden issued 17 executive orders on his first day.  There can’t be any real doubt in peoples’ minds that Biden didn’t write or conceive any of these.  The 17 E.O.s presented to him in a painfully choreographed, ostentatiously grandiose fashion on his opening day in office were quite obviously prepared by his Progressive-minded operatives well in advance, his group of unelected, unaccountable sycophants who will control the puppet strings for as long as Biden is able to sit upright and remain awake behind the desk.  Biden dutifully and unthinkingly signed each one, as his minions of O’Reillys looked on, satisfied with knowing they had put one over on the big guy, much as the 4077th’s clerk consistently hoodwinked the oblivious Col. Blake.

Looking at the list of orders, one is struck by their uniformity, their sameness: every one of them is a pander to a voting bloc, a cave to a Progressive constituency for the sake of political correctness or to further the appearance of compassion or a supposed enlightened understanding of humanity.

Missing from all of them is any concrete action that makes America safer or more prosperous or enhances our national security or improves our position of energy independence or creates jobs or reduces the tax burden on the average wage-earner or moves to strengthen our fundamental constitutional rights of free speech, self-protection, and the right to peacefully assemble.  Not a single executive order redounds to the concrete benefit of the country as a whole.  Instead, all of them amount to nothing more than political sleight-of-hand, smoke and mirrors, activity and movement without meaning.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/22/joe-bidens-unity-that-crushes-truth-that-lies/

Joe Biden gave one of the most terrifying inaugural addresses in American history. For friends of constitutional government, it is far more disturbing than Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural. 

Clothed with clichés and disguised in dull language, the 20-minute speech bristles with arrogance. What it lacks in charisma it makes up for in its cultish Karenism. Moreover, the force of Biden’s words came to life in the 17 executive orders and memoranda he signed shortly after the inauguration. 

Every American should read the speech and read it warily—that is, with a politically skeptical eye. The smooth-talking demagogue from Delaware is open in his intentions, which he stated earlier in his campaign speeches (such as they were). Even as he and his campaign blasted Donald Trump (and implicitly his supporters) for “racism” (the “most offending president ever,” Biden contended in his campaign), he proposed to increase race consciousness throughout the government and society.

The Cure for What Ails America?

His speech is readily summarized: My election shows that “democracy has prevailed.” To escape the “dark winter,” we need to unify to confront the virus, the hobbled economy, racial injustice, and the dying planet, and stand against “political extremism, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism.” Our sick, fragile, frightened nation needs unity, and, quoting Abraham Lincoln from his announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, our democratically blessed St. Fauci declares: “my whole soul is in it.”

Dr. Joe Biden prescribes unity as the cure for what ails America. But that unity requires truth. “We face an attack on democracy and on truth.” And Dr. Biden somehow personifies the truth that produces unity against lies. America now will be united against the liars. Otherwise, we cannot be secure. Biden does not need to plagiarize FDR. Fifty years in public life have taught him the technique. All this, as images of (mostly) armed troops and symbols of COVID-19 deaths and absent crowds and a damaged (and deliberately unrepaired) Capitol assaulted viewers.

It is all too clear that Biden is engaging in the demagoguery that has marked his public career, going as far back as the notorious Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. By making “unity” his goal and “truth” his defense, he can label his opponents as liars and threats to democracy. These threats constitute the “domestic terrorism” he denounced along with “political extremism” and “white supremacy.” The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Defense, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, along with the FBI and IRS, have to be unleashed against enemies of the state. They are the domestic arm of the global war on terror. Compare FDR’s closing lines to his 1944 State of the Union Address, where he likened 1920s Republicans to fascists. 

Biden further bolsters his argument with resources other Democratic politicians lack. First, he has his vice president, sufficient just as a racial-immigrant prop. (Wouldn’t her role be more effective had her Jamaican father, the Marxist economist, been with her?) 

Abusing Augustine

Second, he quotes St. Augustine, in what appears to be the high point of his speech. After all, “History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity.” His occasional speechwriter, historian Jon Meacham, used a quotation he often cites in his own writing, “Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.”