In his first State of the Union address, President Joe Biden spoke for more than an hour. Were he an honest man, the entire address could have been delivered in less than a minute. All he needed to say was this: “My fellow Americans, because the policies of my administration are abject failures and my leadership is so embarrassingly feeble, the state of our union is dangerously weak. Thank you and good night.”

Had Biden delivered this honest and forthright message, he would have told the American public truth they already know. Instead, he employed a three-pronged fallback strategy common to today’s Democrats: Ignore obvious bad news, distort reality and attempt to rhetorically co-opt the best aspects of the Republican platform.

Let’s begin with the herd of elephants in the room the president ignored. Our southern border is an open door to criminals, sex traffickers, drug cartels and other malefactors. The cost of everything is rising. We have transitioned from energy independence to dependence on Russia for oil. Every drop of oil we buy from Russia helps finance Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Americans are suffering with unprecedented inflation, empty store shelves and supply-chain backups. The government is supporting censorship by third-party social media companies and stifling freedom of speech. At one of the most dangerous times in America’s history, our woke U.S. military leadership has become more fixated on pushing critical race theory and “gender choice” than protecting the American people.

In addition to ignoring the failure of his socialist domestic programs and weak foreign policies, Biden engaged in an egregious distortion of reality during his SOTU address. His claim to have united our allies is nonsense. Russia’s vicious assault into Ukraine and the courage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his countrymen is what awakened NATO and focused our European partners on the stark reality of their vulnerability to Putin. Biden touted economic sanctions but conveniently overlooked the fact they were too little too late to prevent Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s war crimes and the horrific humanitarian tragedy unfolding there.

The president claimed freedom will always triumph over evil. This is an appealing sentiment, but he neglected to mention a crucial fact: Freedom prevails over evil only with strong, smart, consistent leadership, something he has failed to provide. In a pathetic attempt to address spiraling gasoline prices, Biden claimed he convinced our allies to release billions of barrels from their strategic reserves. This may be the most obvious distortion in his address. Tapping our strategic petroleum reserves to bring down the price of gasoline is like filling a bathtub with a teaspoon.

Perhaps the most disingenuous lines in the SOTU address came when an obviously desperate president tried to co-opt some of the more popular planks in the Republican Party’s political platform. Hearing the president who hung a “welcome sign” at our southern border announcing, “come one, come all” claim we must take control of the border and our immigration system was nothing less than blatant hypocrisy. Since the first days of his presidency, when he used executive orders to cancel everything his predecessor did to control the border, Biden and his leftist fellow travelers have welcomed the worst kinds of miscreants into America.

He wasn’t done. Viewers stunned by the president’s comments regarding our border had an even bigger shock coming. After claiming we must close our border to the illegal immigration he has championed for more than a year, Biden had the gall to claim we must not “defund the police!”

Joe Biden has no idea how to lead, but he knows how to lie. May our righteous God help us all.

COPYRIGHT 2022 OLIVER L. NORTH AND DAVID GOETSCH