RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well-known Washington creature Amy Walters wrote this week on the “challenge” that Joe Biden is facing early in his presidency: “The former senator and vice president looks more like a helpless bystander than an experienced Capitol Hill deal maker…”

That, in a nutshell, is the national media’s preferred framing of the absolute breakdown we’re witnessing under Biden. A collapse that he created and is wholly responsible for.

The media want Biden to look like a “helpless bystander,” a victim of circumstances out of his control. He’s not. He’s the perpetrator of nearly every disaster anyone with eyes can see, from the obscenity at the southern border, to the loss of 13 service members (not fighting, but leaving a war zone), to the stratospheric inflation of household necessities.

We’re led to believe these are simply “challenges” Biden is facing rather than the results of his own deliberate screw-ups.

These are things happening to Biden.

CNN did a remarkable job handicapping Biden’s presidency earlier this week. In a Sept. 20 segment on Jake Tapper’s show, correspondent Phil Mattingly said Biden was “grappl[ing] with one of the most consequential weeks of his first year in office.” The graphic on screen noted that Biden was “faced with foreign policy turmoil…” Mattingly later said Biden was in “a key moment, particularly in the wake of a bumpy last several weeks.”

Let’s take stock of what’s happened during those “bumpy last several weeks”: On Sep. 20, there had been a total of 676,718 COVID-related deaths. Roughly 270,000 of those happened under Biden.

Pretty bumpy!

Also, on Aug. 26, 13 members of the U.S. military were killed during a suicide bombing attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, where operations were underway to withdraw from our decades-long effort in that sandpit. Eleven of the brave men and women were under the age of 24.

That feels bumpy, too.

In just the month of August, U.S. Customs and Border Protection encountered nearly 209,000 migrants illegally crossing into the country. That’s the second-highest monthly number of illegal border crossings of Biden’s presidency (far eclipsing the rates under Donald Trump) and his administration still won’t say how many of them — undoubtedly most — will be allowed to indefinitely stay here on the American taxpayer’s dime.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that skyrocketing inflation “is eroding household-spending power,” and that “for the lowest-paid Americans,” wages fell half of a percent compared to last year.

We’re in the middle of a pandemic — a pandemic that Biden promised to “shut down” — and wages are falling for our most vulnerable people. The Journal attributed the problems in large part to “trillions of dollars in federal aid” that has “coursed through the economy.” That’s a reference to the massive welfare program, sometimes referred to as “COVID relief,” passed by Biden and congressional Democrats earlier this year.

That’s kind of bumpy, right?

This is all “bumpy” in the same way that flying on American Airlines Flight 11 was turbulent.

Biden politicized the COVID vaccines by saying he would hesitate to receive one produced by the Trump administration. Now we’re going through the second-worst wave of new infections since the pandemic started. Biden invited all of the world’s destitute to America by promising to take them in at the newly opened border. Now they’re all here.

Biden oversaw our incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now more than a dozen of our service members are dead and scores more are injured. Biden wanted to pump trillions more into our economy to keep would-be workers at home and give out goodies in hopes to reelect more Democrats. Now we’re suffocating under astronomical food and gas prices.

Biden is not a “helpless bystander” to all of this. These are not “challenges” he is facing. Biden is the accident. He is the challenge.