Friday, March 29, 2024

Day 98: Remember Biden’s Joint Address? No, Nor Do We.

On Day 98, Biden delivered an incredibly boring address to Congress that doubled-down on tired tropes and outright lies. 

In Boring Address, Biden Keeps His Distance From America.

President Joe Biden finally delivered a joint address to Congress on April 28, 2021, having delayed the event all the way until he could tout his first 100 days in office. 
There were no special guests—at all. No guests joined the First Lady in the chamber, and there was barely any mention of American citizens by name. Although the office of the First Lady barely preserved the tradition of hosting guests (in a virtual afternoon reception) the tradition of recognizing exemplary Americans, well-known and unknown alike, was absent from the president’s speech. It wasn’t enough to cut them from the chamber—they had to be cut from the whole event, apparently.
“I stand here tonight… 100 days since I took the oath of office and lifted my hand off our family Bible and inherited a nation—we all did—that was in crisis,” Biden said in his introduction.
“The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” He confirmed later that by “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” he indeed meant the actions at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. 
“The images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remain vivid in all our minds. Lives were put at risk—many of your lives. Lives were lost. Extraordinary courage was summoned. The insurrection was an existential crisis—a test of whether our democracy could survive. And it did,” Biden said.
For Biden, the riotous trespass on the Capitol in January is a far greater threat to America than the prolonged, demonstrably violent illegal immigration surge. His speech notably omitted any mention of the crisis he has caused at the U.S. border, other than to say that we “have to get at the root problem of why people are fleeing, particularly to our southern border from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.”
He added that his efforts to address root causes were producing results under the Obama administration, but were abandoned by the Trump administration—which is lie.
“When I was vice president, the president asked me to focus on providing help needed to address the root causes of migration. And it helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. The plan was working, but the last administration decided it was not worth it,” Biden falsely claimed. Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid flowed to Central America annually under the Trump administration.  
The vast majority of Congress has now been vaccinated—but everyone in the sparsely-occupied chamber was socially-distanced and wearing a mask. The president removed his mask to deliver remarks, but in an inscrutable bid to, apparently, undermine vaccine confidence, Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seated behind Biden on the dais, wore masks the entire time. 
There are only two possible interpretations: that health officials and elected leaders do not have confidence that the vaccine will actually protect them from coronavirus, or that they blatantly deny the science on the issue and urge others to do the same. 
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