By Susan Shelley
It began in early September, less than eight months after Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States.
“Explicit chants against President Joe Biden have broken out at some college football games for the second weekend in a row,” Newsweek reported. It happened when the Coastal Carolina Chanticleers played the Kansas Jayhawks, and when the Alabama State Hornets played the Auburn Tigers. It happened in Virginia. It happened in Mississippi.
In October, it happened at a New York Jets game, at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
Around the same time, the “F*** Joe Biden” chant was heard at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama while NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast was interviewing winning NASCAR driver Brandon Brown on live television. “As you can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s go Brandon,’” Stavast said gamely.
The White House could have used Stavast’s help last week to explain the president’s dismal 36% approval rating as recorded by the Reuters/Ipsos poll, and the report from the website FiveThirtyEight that no president of the United States has ever been as low in approval polling at this point in his presidency as Joe Biden is right now.
A Wall Street Journal poll in March found that 52% of registered voters don’t think Biden will run again in 2024, but alarmingly, Joe Biden is in the 48% who think he will.
This presidency is a disaster of Biblical proportion. The Biden policies are like a siege of plagues.
The profane chants in September closely followed the feckless and deadly decisions that led to the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan at the end of August. As if that wasn’t bad enough, in January, Biden blathered into a microphone his prediction that Vladimir Putin “will move in” to Ukraine and it would probably draw no response from NATO if it was a “minor incursion.”
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine, in March the Kremlin put its nuclear forces on “high alert,” and by the end of May it had cost U.S. taxpayers $54 billion.
That went well.
Almost as well as U.S. energy policy — the chair wasn’t warm in the Oval Office before Biden declared war on domestic oil production and pipeline construction, and in record time the U.S. has gone from being energy independent, an exporter of energy, to begging OPEC nations and assorted dictators to please step up production to save us from shortages.
Speaking of shortages, when do you ever remember mothers in America forced to live in fear that they will not be able to find formula to feed their babies? Empty shelves are the result of the Biden administration ignoring early warnings and taking no action.
On the other hand, the White House was quick to take action to stop protests by parents at school board meetings. A public records request by the group Parents Defending Education uncovered that the Biden administration secretly helped to write the letter that the National School Boards Association sent to … the Biden administration! The letter suggested that parents who complain about mask mandates in schools and critical race theory in classrooms are guilty of “a form of domestic terrorism.”
Almost immediately, Attorney General Merrick Garland piped up that the FBI would lead a nationwide law enforcement investigation into what parents say at school board meetings.
Then there was the Disinformation Governance Board announced by the Department of Homeland Security, tasked with preventing “domestic terrorism” such as online commentary that the Biden administration doesn’t like. That board is now “paused,” but a February 7 National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin is still online to warn that the United States “remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives.”
Speaking of false narratives, President Biden continues to tell untrue stories about the Second Amendment, repeating for the umpteenth time his false claim that when the Second Amendment was passed, it “limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon.” No, it didn’t, and yes, you could.
The Founders’ generation was committed to the defense of the country, which is more than you can say for Joe Biden, at least judging by his utter disregard for the security of the southern border. While Americans are still standing in line at the airport with their shoes in their hands watching the TSA throw out their shampoo because, terrorists, hundreds of thousands of people are streaming across the border into Texas from countries around the globe without so much as a bag check.
And if you’re enjoying flying on a plane again without a mask after a judge ruled that there was no legal authority for the federal mask mandate on planes, you won’t be happy to hear that the Biden administration just filed an appeal of the judge’s decision in that case.
This far-from-complete list of disturbing failures hasn’t yet mentioned the failure that’s driving the president’s approval rating down to historic lows. Inflation is at a 40-year high.
A whole new generation is having the miserable experience of watching prices rise so fast that stores can’t change the shelf labels fast enough to keep up. Inflation is what happens when the government creates money out of the air, if you were wondering where the money came from for all that extra COVID relief and infrastructure spending that President Biden signed into law.
Every political prognosticator is forecasting that the president’s party will lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate, so this president is something of a lame duck already. That’s the good news. The bad news? Second terms are usually much worse.
Write to Susan at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.
This column was originally published by the Southern California News Group.