The Patriot Post® · Biden's Town Hall Debacle

President Joe Biden trotted out to the friendly confines of CNN for a town hall last night, wherein he lied about his COVID record, hectored a couple of Democrat senators for hampering the clean passage of his leftist agenda, and made various other pronouncements that reveal he’s not governing as the “moderate” he claimed on the campaign trail or as the bringer of “unity” he promised in his Inaugural Address. Maybe that’s why his approval ratings are so low.

Let’s start with the vaccine lie. “When I first was elected,” Biden said, “there were only two million people who had COVID shots in the United States of America — and the vaccine. Now we got 190 million, because I went out and bought everything I could do and buy in sight and it worked.”

This lie was so blatant that even the Associated Press fact-checked him:

No, that’s not how the vaccine rollout in the U.S. happened. Biden is overstating his part.

First, it’s not true that 2 million people had shots when he was elected in November. The COVID-19 vaccines were still awaiting emergency authorization then. The first shots were administered to the public in mid-December.

Nearly 16 million doses had been administered by Jan. 20, the day Biden took office. And Biden didn’t buy up all the doses — the Trump administration had purchased 300 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna in December, weeks before Biden was inaugurated.

Next up is the fact that Biden stood by his mandate on employers, which is badly mangling the jobs market and outraging many Americans. His response? To blame opponents for making this “a political issue.” He mocked the unvaccinated by putting words in their mouths: “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID.” He derisively added, “No, I mean, come on. ‘Freedom.’”

We know freedom is a foreign concept to him, but isn’t it simply beneath a president to mock his fellow Americans? Isn’t that what we were told was wrong with the last president?

Also don’t forget that, prior to the election, Biden, Kamala Harris, and other Democrats were the ones politicizing the vaccine, even opposing a mandate. Now they’re claiming credit, mandating it, and mocking and cajoling anyone who disagrees or has questions.

On a final vaccine note, one of the town hall participants asked Biden when vaccines would be ready for kids. The better question might be when Biden will mandate vaccines for people receiving money from the government instead of only the employed.

Let’s move on to the Senate. Biden is so frustrated by Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, and with the 50 GOP senators who won’t go along with the Bernie Sanders spendapalooza, that he’s now openly talking about the need to “fundamentally alter the filibuster.” His specific gripe was the Republican hesitance to raise the debt ceiling, but 11 of them eventually went along with it, and Biden’s warnings about how we’d “default on the national debt” are little more than crocodile tears. We won’t default and maybe — just maybe — the bigger problem is all the profligate and unconstitutional spending that keeps taking us to the limit.

Between the Democrats’ radical spending agenda and their hyper-partisan effort to rewrite every state’s election laws to benefit their own party (which they and the media euphemistically call “voting rights”), Democrats are really becoming quite bitter against the Senate filibuster.

On Biden’s designed border crisis, he expressed little more than calloused disregard. “I guess I should go down” to the border, he complained, “but the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion damage done by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world.” Talk about a non sequitur. Not that his going to the border would solve anything, especially given his intentionality in creating the crisis, but I’m too busy to address a national security emergency is hardly the stuff we want to hear from a president.

Time and space won’t allow us to address everything Biden said, but we’ll close with his words concerning related issues that affect every American — inflation and the supply chain. Asked whether he believes the experts who say high inflation will run well into 2022, Biden said that will indeed be the case “if we don’t make these investments.” By which he means spending trillions more in taxpayer money on leftist entitlement state programs. That will, of course, cause more inflation. Come on, Joe.

High gas prices? Well, you’re stuck with that into next year at least: “I don’t see anything that’s going to happen in the meantime that’s going to significantly reduce gas prices.” After all, he’s made the U.S. fossil fuel industry Public Enemy Number One, and OPEC won’t pick up his slack.

And as for the supply chain, his paternity leave transportation secretary isn’t quite up to the task of breaking the union stranglehold, so Biden’s solution might be to deploy the National Guard. We suppose now that they’re no longer guarding the nation’s capital, they don’t have anything better to do than save Biden’s political bacon.

In short, Joe Biden is a remarkably poor leader, and if it weren’t for the circled wagons at CNN, his public support wouldn’t even be as high as 37%.