It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion

In 1974 Maria Muldaur released her version of “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion”. Admittedly a raunchy lyric written in 1957, I believe it fits our political situation nicely. It’s not the man, it’s the policies. It ain’t Biden, it’s what he stands for.

A great calamity has stricken the Democratic Party over what to do about its nominee, Joe Biden. His performance in the debate against Donald Trump, which was conducted by the rules Biden laid down, and seen live by over 50 million voters, was an unmitigated disaster for Biden.  All of the mannerisms shown then were obvious to anyone who watched him for the last 2+ years: the stiff and halting gate of an apparent stroke victim, the pale look of death warmed over, the inability to complete a sentence longer than 5 words without seeming to forget where he started, the gaping mouth and blank stare, wandering off in the wrong direction, garbled speech, fantastic stories made up on the spot (like the uncle who didn’t return from WW2 because he was allegedly eaten by cannibals), and outright lies. The legacy media acted as if they were shocked, shocked and had no idea Mr. Biden was a far gone as he appeared to be.

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, they of ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ and who were complicit in the cover up, thinks the writers failed to report the truth as journalists because they feared doing so would help Trump. Well isn’t that generous of them?

Biden lies about everything but the one in the debate that I found most disgusting was his claim no member of the US military had died while he was President. Maybe it’s just my Marine Corps service, but how he could forget, if he ever knew as he has never said anything about it, the death of 12 US Marines and 1 Navy Corpsman in a suicide bombing at Abbey Gate at the Kabul airport after he ordered our forces to get out of Afghanistan? And don’t forget three Army specialists killed at our outpost in Jordan and two Navy Seals who died in the Red Sea while trying to confront Houthi pirates operating out of Yemen. He is the Commander in Chief, for God’s sake. It is as if he doesn’t care.

So now the Democrats are consuming themselves with debate over what do to.  Biden is clearly not up to another 4 year term, his Vice President Kamala Harris is even less popular than he is, and the prospect of refusing to  proceed with the candidate many millions of primary voters chose seems so – I don’t know – undemocratic. And this from the party that claims, no, screams at every opportunity, that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. 

But in spite of all Biden’s personal failings, and they are numerous, the problems facing our country are the result of the  policy decisions he and his team have inflicted on us over the last three and a half years he’s been in office. Whoever replaces Biden will remain responsible for and perpetuate his policy mistakes because they are informed by his party’s basic ideologies and there is no reason to believe they will see the light anytime soon and change the way they see the world.

The root of these ideologies is the progressive left’s condemnation of the United States, its origin, founding documents, history and current institutions. The hard left has captured his party, which suits him just fine. No mere good faith academic critique, they understand the assertion “all men are created equal” not as a forward looking plea for hope and eventual salvation but instead as a condemnation of the lecherous old white guy who wrote it while owning slaves. They’ve adopted the 1619 Project, which claims the US was not founded in 1776 but rather in 1619 when the first African slaves were brought to North America, and the American revolution was declared and fought not to gain freedom from tyranny but in order to preserve the slaveholders’ domain. And everything that happened since then shows not progress but perpetuation of white supremacy, they say. This thinking is why Obama claimed he was going to “fundamentally transform America”. If only we had taken him at his word.

Biden’s policies, like all of his party’s policies, are informed by these misguided beliefs.

One of the first things he undertook was to make nice with Iran’s government, who chant “Death to America, the Great Satan” at every public event. They call Israel the Little Satan and promise to annihilate it at its first opportunity. Biden’s predecessor, Obama, with the active assistance of our current Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, made a deal with Iran that allegedly limited Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon, which sounds so saccharine.  Can you say atom bomb? Trump wisely canceled that deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran.

Biden is trying to resurrect the atom bomb deal. To show Iran how serious we are, he waived the sanctions allowing Iran to sell oil, gave Iran over $4 billion in exchange for 5 hostages, and sits around twiddling his thumbs while Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, murder Israeli citizens, and its Houthi proxy in Yemen fires missiles at our Naval ships. Do you recall voting for that policy?

Hezbollah’s foreign relations chief, Khalil Rizk, makes no effort to conceal the identity of his enemy. He said on Al-Manar TV last month: “Is this war now with Israel? My answer is that this is not a war with Israel. Israel is merely a tool. The main war, the real war, is with America.”

An often quoted warning of uncertain provenance tells us, you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you. Joe Biden’s incompetence prevents him from taking Iran and its Hezbollah proxy seriously when they threaten us with annihilation. It is as if he didn’t hear them when they said, Death to America. Is hearing loss among Biden’s infirmities?

The Constitution grants the President the power to make treaties but only if the US Senate concurs in the treaty by two thirds vote. Biden, and Obama before him, did not ask the Senate to concur in the Iran nuclear deal and they have never explained to the American people why it is in our best interest to deal this way with a nation that hates us.

Closely related and perhaps inextricably combined with the Iran policy, Biden has all but abandoned the Jewish people at home and abroad. In what appears to follow from implicit Jew hatred, Biden has slow walked the delivery of Congressionally approved arms and ammunition to Israel, who is fighting a war for its existence following Hamas’s horrific attack from Gaza into Israel. Biden attempts to micromanage Israel’s declared war to exterminate Hamas while turning a blind eye to the thousands of rockets fired by Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon, forcing over 60,000 Israelis from their homes over the past nine months while large swathes of the upper Galilee are burned to the ground.

Biden’s grandiose, self-centered promise to build a pier to move humanitarian aid from Navy ships to the beleaguered Palestinians (by Hamas can we say?), in Gaza was a complete failure. After spending US $350 million to build and install the pier, it lasted less than two weeks before coming under fire from Hamas, breaking up in a Mediterranean storm and was moved away to Israel for safe keeping. Hamas stole what little food aid was delivered.

To Biden’s credit, the money and resources spent on the ill-conceived Gaza pier is far less than the value of weapons, ammunition, aircraft and vehicles he gave the Taliban. Exactly whose side is he on?

Biden’s treatment of Jews at home is even more shameless. Riots, building occupations and violence erupted on US college campuses across the US following the October 7 attack, all of which demand the extermination of Jews and eradication of Israel “from the river to the sea” they chant. Biden has done nothing to address the problem. The problem is not “Islamophobia” as he claims, the problem is the spread of Jew hatred and it has spread to subway cars and synagogues including one in Los Angeles where Hamas supporters blocked Jews from worship.

Biden’s FBI have the time and resources to investigate parents who complain to school boards and they sent SWAT teams to their homes to arrest peaceful abortion clinic protesters who allegedly blocked access to abortions.

But they have done nothing in response to the express Jew hatred we see on college campuses and the streets of some of our cities where Jews are physically assaulted, spat upon and blocked from entering their synagogue and university classrooms. Biden’s Department of Justice includes a civil rights department that treats Jews as having no civil rights. His dementia is a real problem for sure, but his policies are a far greater problem for all of us, Jew and gentile.

Biden’s policies include full throated advocacy of the transgender ideology that claims one’s sex is socially constructed and not determined by biology. The ideology claims that one’s sex can be changed at will with drugs and surgery to remove otherwise functioning body parts, and children are the best candidates for these procedures.

It follows like hand in glove with Biden’s executive order to apply diversity, equity and exclusion (DEI) in all federal activities. DEI is said to be the antidote to 200+ years of systemic racial, gender and sexual orientation prejudice. DEI’s premise is that results prove the case. For example, that Black kids do poorly at school on standard tests means only that the tests are racially designed to keep them down.  So, DEI says eliminate the tests, and many schools have done just that. That boys beat girls at sports has nothing to do with the physiology of male and female bodies. So, DEI says let boys compete in the girls’ events as long as they “self-identify” and declare themselves to be female.

To advance the ideology, Biden adopted new regulations to change the rules governing Title IX, which was adopted to ensure girls and women have a fair chance to compete in athletics. The new rules redefine sex to mean “gender identity”. Fortunately, a federal court enjoined these new rules and declared, “the Department of Education lacks authority to expand sex to mean gender identity.” But the Biden forces can be expected to renew the effort to eviscerate the distinction between male and female.

In the last three and a half years, Biden opened our Southern Border to the illegal entry of over 10 million immigrants. I practiced in the Immigration Court before I retired, and I can tell you the law says a person who claims asylum on account of persecution at home must be detained – held in jail – until a judge can evaluate and rule on the claim. Biden has blown off the law and ordered the release of all who have swarmed across our border, setting a court date many years in the future, with no preliminary evaluation of the claimed grounds for asylum. We don’t know who these immigrants are or where they come from.

The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee just issued a report that details the Biden administration's spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on services that support illegal immigrants. "[F]ar from imposing consequences on illegal aliens and removing them from the country, the Biden Administration encourages illegal aliens to arrive at the border, chauffeurs them into the interior, and then rewards them with concierge services, all on the taxpayers’ dime and at the expense of public safety," the report stated.

As a direct result of Biden’s policies, many of our cities are straining to provide housing, food, health care, education and public safety for the newcomers and the folks who live here legally. Biden’s immigration policy violates the law and harms Americans. No Democrat has condemned Biden’s policies. How many more young women have to be raped and murdered before Biden changes his approach? Do you recall voting for that?

Last, but not least, Biden’s energy policy is a complete disaster. He promised to eliminate the fossil fuel industry, and while he has inflicted serious damage to our energy infrastructure (not to mention the Nordstream pipeline), our oil companies drilled and produced more oil last year than any year on record. His incompetence was on display when he unilaterally halted the US construction of liquified natural gas facilities.

Judge James Cain Jr. of the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Department of Energy's partial LNG export ban in a lawsuit filed by a coalition of states led by Louisiana and Texas, the Gulf states that lead the U.S. in LNG exports.  Judge Cain said the ban was implemented “completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy."

Ideocracy! Doesn’t that about sum it up?

Back where I began. It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion. Biden’s infirmities are bad enough but his policies are no good for America.  Whoever they put on the ballot in November will only make things worse.