President Biden’s nothing address

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Last week we wondered what President Biden was going to say in his first State of the Union address that was new, upbeat or important.

Unfortunately, this week we found out.

Nothing.

Biden meandered around for an hour.

Committing a few gaffes and making false claims about his alleged successes, he pretended his 13-month string of failures at home and overseas was some other country’s nightmare.

He pandered to union auto workers and spent most of the time rehashing the Build Back Better promises he made but couldn’t deliver because two principled senators in his own party blocked them.

As the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists said in reaction to Biden’s lousy address, “The President really does need to fire some people and get better advice."

Better speech writers would help, too. Especially ones that know the difference between canned rhetoric and actual facts.

One thing Biden did that really annoyed me was when he was talking about how competition among businesses keep prices lower.

He said, “I’m a capitalist, but capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation ….”

Yeah, OK, Joe. Everyone who’s passed Econ 101 agrees competition is good for society.

So if competition is so great, why don’t you and your party allow competition to produce its miracles in the field of public education? A lot of families in Blue cities would benefit greatly from school choice.

Biden’s speech was so bad, it wasn’t even good theater.

A couple of House Republican gals did some heckling, but Nancy Pelosi didn’t rip up her copy of his awful speech.

Meanwhile, the tragic and bloody war in Ukraine – which Biden and his crack diplomats were helpless to stop – has wiped the COVID pandemic from our TV and computer screens as if it never happened.

We used to binge on Netflix. Now we binge on war – in real time. The war in Ukraine has got it all - heroes and villains and violence and tragedy.

By the way, I refer to the war in Ukraine as the “Green New Deal War.”

The Green New Dealers here want to shut down our oil and gas industries so that we have to get our energy from solar and wind. So far they’re being successful.

But do they know that while they’re hurting the USA they’re helping Russia and China?

Do the Green New Dealers who pull Biden’s strings know that while our fossil fuel industry has been hobbled by federal regulators we are buying 200,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia?

Or that most of our solar panels are made in China?

When the president said in his speech we need to buy stuff from America, he got a standing ovation.

So can Joe explain why we are still buying oil from Russia? Sales of oil to the West is where Russia gets the rubles it needs to fund its invasion of Ukraine.

Biden’s state of the union speech showed us again what a weak leader he really is.

For the first 12 minutes he talked about defending Ukraine like a sideline cheerleader at a football game holding up a big “D” sign, but did little to actually help Ukraine defend itself.

As a member of the Ukrainian Parliament said, the speech was a “total disappointment” because we were “promised protection” while Ukrainians were being “executed.”

A major problem we have in the “Free World” today is that there are no strong leaders except maybe for Ukraine’s heroic president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

To keep Putin from invading Ukraine, we needed a strong leader like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul. Instead, all we had was Joe Biden.

So for now, it looks like the only way to end the war in Ukraine is if the people of Russia bring on a coup.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.