Purely Political, By James Buckley
Congratulations to all you Democratic voters. And all you Never-Trumpers. And all of you who didn’t vote at all but stayed at home to profess your unhappiness with President Trump.
Congratulations too to you who spent many hours filling out and collecting ballots from anybody and anywhere and who spent so many early morning hours dumping those ballots en masse in those conveniently unsupervised, unregulated and unmonitored drop boxes. You got your guy in and even brought along the least popular presidential candidate in history during that eventful year of 2020. You’ve succeeded in making Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris president and vice president of the United States of America.
Let’s examine what your efforts have brought us.
There is the stock market. I do remember the then-President Donald Trump warning us that a vote for his opponent (the aforementioned Mr. Biden) would sink our 401Ks and IRAs.
It took a little time, but he’s been proven right, and the markets continue to wobble.
By Election Day 2020, the entire span of tall and virtually impenetrable fencing along the Rio Grande and through California had been nearly completed. After years of debate, the southern border of the United States was finally secure. The very first day upon taking office, President Biden halted construction of the wall, leaving giant sections of U.S. made steel barriers rotting in the sun (a feat he would repeat in spades in Afghanistan).
President Biden opened the border completely almost immediately upon taking office, and America’s schools, hospitals, border cities, and poorer neighborhoods throughout the country were overrun by a human tide of more than four million mostly non-English-speaking people. They continue to arrive daily by the thousands from over a hundred different countries. Their overpowering entreaties have enriched at least one group: The Biden administration has made billionaires of the heads of the criminal cartels (the gangs that collect from $3,500 to $11,000 and maybe more from every intruder). More than $40 billion — and counting –— has landed in cartel pockets over the past four years.
Along with a flood of humanity, the open border has allowed the now super-wealthy cartels to sneak massive amounts of illicit drugs across the border to the U.S., enriching them even more. This drug tsunami has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens (mostly young men and women) and gutted out a great number of impoverished towns and communities.
By Election Day 2020, the U.S. had become energy independent, which was the putative goal of the creation of the Energy Department under President Jimmy Carter. Already exporting millions of barrels of crude, President Trump encouraged U.S. oil and gas companies to accelerate plans to liquefy the abundance of natural gas the U.S. had developed thanks to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to be sold abroad, especially to Western Europe and more particularly Germany.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, was eagerly promoting the completion of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany. Then-President Donald Trump vetoed the completion of the construction of the pipeline and warned the Germans and the rest of Europe that their dependence upon Russian energy would leave them vulnerable to Russian interests. He strongly advised Chancellor Merkel to prepare Germany’s ports to receive U.S. Liquified Natural Gas instead.
Days after becoming president, President Biden rescinded President Trump’s order and approved Nord Stream’s completion. Soon after, Russia began supplying much of Western Europe’s energy as Germany had de-commissioned its nuclear plants and was heavily dependent upon what would prove to be unreliable wind and solar energy.
Back in the U.S., the northern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline would bring petroleum extracted out of the tar sands of Canada and send it from Hardisty Alberta through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Neb.
Mr. Trump had OK’d the completion of its 1,209 miles, but Mr. Biden halted that construction and soon after discouraged new oil and gas exploration in the U.S. As the price of oil shot up around the world in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration was forced to deplete America’s strategic petroleum reserve and beg other oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to ramp up their production to ease the shortages.
The U.S. is no longer energy independent, and Saudi Arabia recently announced it would reduce its petroleum output by two million barrels a day.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump put most of the blame on China for the release of the deadly pathogen and eventually scolded Dr. Fauci for financing some of the gain-of-function research that led to the worldwide disaster. President Trump inaugurated an “all-hands-on-deck” search for an effective vaccine against the COVID-19 virus, and U.S. companies Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson succeeded in formulating two different versions within 10 months. We have learned since that China was indeed mostly responsible for the pandemic and that it was very likely a lab leak in Wuhan China that led to the outbreak.
When President Biden took over, he claimed that he had no vaccine (he had) and insisted on extending a federal mask mandate on all federal employees and federally regulated businesses, including all public transportation. It has since been determined that masking is a useless method of controlling the virus.
President Trump deleted eight regulations for every new one approved. President Biden has expanded regulations manyfold.
As commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, President Trump disallowed transgender medical procedures in military hospitals, ended the use of critical race theory material being used in training among the various services and openly criticized allowing biological males to compete against biological females. The Biden presidency has re-instituted support and payment for transgender surgery for military personnel, brought back CRT training material in all the uniformed services, and openly supports biological males competing against biological females in high school and college sports.
President Trump cut taxes on corporations and taxpayers.
President Biden has raised taxes on corporations and taxpayers.
I could go on but Mr. Biden’s weird fixation on being known as “Mr. Opposite” to his predecessor has brought us to the unpleasant and crime-ridden impasse we currently find ourselves in as a nation.
I hope you’re happy.
I’m not.
James Buckley is a longtime Montecito resident. He welcomes questions or comments at jimb@substack.com. Readers are invited to visit jimb.substack.com, where Jim’s Journals are on file. He also invites people to subscribe to Jim’s Journal.
