President Biden told vast lies about the vaccine roll-out - but the groveling US media was too busy putting halos on Saints Joe and Kamala to say so
Well, the brave new world of honesty in American politics lasted a grand total of 24 hours. President Joe Biden promised an immediate end to the constant lying from the White House that we endured over four years of Donald Trump's tenure.
But then he couldn't help himself and promptly spewed the kind of brazen, bare-faced, media-bashing whopper that Trump is accused of loving.
Biden's made a big noisy deal of setting a target of 100 million coronavirus vaccines in his first 100 days.
But he knows that hitting this target would be a completely bogus 'achievement' because the US is already at that level of vaccination, averaging 914,000 daily doses administered last week according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and rocketing to 1.6 million on the very day of Biden's inauguration.
So, at this rate, the goal will be easily attained, and masks the reality that America could and should be aiming a lot higher.
That, though, wasn't the lie. That was just the kind of under-promise, over-deliver type of sneaky political spin designed to grab headlines and win a cheap 'victory' down the line when the target is easily met.
No, the lie came when Biden was asked by a reporter at the White House to defend such a comparatively derisory target and angrily snapped back: 'When I announced it, you all said it's not possible. Come on, give me a break, man. It's a good start - 100 million.'
This was utter nonsense. Nobody qualified to comment in the mainstream media said it was impossible. In fact, on the day in December when Biden first made his 100 million pledge, CNN's medical expert Dr Sanjay Gupta said it was 'very doable' given what he'd been told by the vaccine companies controlling supply.
Biden knows this, because he'll have been told the same information by the same companies. Yet he chose to pretend the media had ALL attacked him for making an impossible promise. And he did that to deflect them from rightly pulling him up on the weakness of his pledge.
Good politics, bad optics – especially from the man the media seems to think is more Saint than President.
I didn't have a problem with the generally euphoric reaction to Biden's inauguration. Like most people, I found his unifying speech very inspiring and it was a welcome relief to hear some civility coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States again after four long profane years.
But by the following morning, I expected the US media to start doing to Biden what they did to Trump from the moment HE got elected and hold his feet to ferocious fire. After all, the most important function of the media is to make government accountable for its actions.
Instead, the open fawning has carried on in a quite nauseating manner. With the exception of Fox News, which naturally is trashing Biden with the same fervour it defended Trump – often indefensibly - America's news networks and newspapers have fought amongst each other to see who can win the title of Biggest Biden Toady.
One journalist was even fired by the New York Times for being too overt about her breathless excitement after she tweeted 'I have chills' over a photo of Biden's plane landing for the inauguration.
I don't agree with the firing, not least because she was only tweeting what 99% of other New York Times journalists would have been thinking. But the fact she was happy to be seen to be so publicly partisan is a very bad look for the liberal-dominated media.
We've seen the same kind of cringe-worthy groveling across cable news too. Former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly lambasted the media this week because she claimed they 'checked their objectivity' when covering Trump and the public 'lost trust' as a result. She even said this abandonment of normal impartial journalism was partly to blame for the riots at the US Capitol three weeks ago.
Kelly makes a good point about the danger of supposedly impartial journalists bringing personal feelings into covering a president, any president.
For example, I can't have been the only CNN viewer who was shocked when Anderson Cooper described President Trump as 'an obese turtle on its back flailing in the hot Sun'.
Cooper, who spent four years openly sneering at Trump on air, including spending two years gorging over a Russia collusion story that turned out to be a nothing-burger, has been barely able to contain his personal glee since Trump's downfall and Biden's election.
But Cooper's not alone. Much of the US media is currently in the grip of an unctuous prolonged period of gratuitously intense derriere-smoke-blowing towards 'Halo' Joe and his Vice-President, Kamala 'the new Mother Teresa' Harris.
Laughably, the only time the media's got angry about anything involving Ms Harris is when they thought her recent Vanity Fair cover wasn't flattering enough.
Yet she is now the second most powerful person in the country, already involved in huge decisions with huge ramifications for people's lives and livelihoods.
The vaccine roll-out is a perfect illustration of the double standard at play. The media's largely been very content to play along with Biden's narrative that Trump did nothing on vaccines, it's all been a 'dismal failure' and he's now the jab-administering cavalry to save everyone. One White House official even asserted as fact about the vaccine program: 'There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch.'
This completely false statement was quickly debunked by Dr Anthony Fauci who said: 'We certainly are not starting from scratch because there is activity going on in the distribution.'
There certainly is….
It's perfectly true the Trump administration fell short of its own pledge to deliver 20 million vaccine doses by the end of 2020.
It only delivered around three million by then.
However, by the time of the Inauguration on January 20, that number rose to 16.5 million including, as I said earlier, 1.6 million that day alone.
This was equivalent to five doses per 100 people and put the US fourth in the world behind Israel, the UAE and the UK.
So, not the best, but considerably better than most other countries including European power-houses Germany and France. And the US federal government had actually distributed 35 million doses to the states by January 20, but less than half had been given.
If they'd all been administered, the US would have been even higher up the global vaccine league table.
I have no desire to defend Donald Trump but to pretend his administration did nothing on vaccine distribution is palpably untrue; another Biden administration vaccine-related lie in fact.
And ironically, the main reason President Biden will comfortably hit his 100m target is because his predecessor had already got the vaccine roll-out to the required daily levels.
So, why isn't Biden being torched for all this disingenuous self-promoting vaccine bullsh*t?
Sadly, I fear it's because the liberal torch-carriers in the media are reluctant to light the flame because Biden's one of them.
CNN's media correspondent Brian Stelter, an evangelical Trump-basher, added a personal comment to an image on his show yesterday featuring new White House press secretary Jen Paski. The banner headline said: 'Psaki promises to share 'accurate info' (How refreshing)'.
Hmmm. If would have been rather more 'refreshing' if Stelter had got Ms Psaki onto his show to flame-grill her about her boss's untrue claims about the vaccine roll-out.
He'd have certainly been all over the lies like a cheap rash if it had been Trump spewing them, as would the rest of the news media.
The non-questioning hero-worshipping treatment of Joe Biden and his administration is gut-wrenching and needs to stop immediately. And the media needs to start doing its job properly.
Otherwise, the 75 million Trump voters who suspected there was a media bias against their guy will have all those suspicions confirmed before their very eyes on a daily basis.
And that will cement rather than repair the shockingly partisan disunity that has enveloped America in recent years.
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Lockdowns cripple the poor and pamper the rich
Lockdown has improved the physical and mental health of the wealthy, while devastating the poor.
A new poll from Morning Consult provides a stark illustration of the unequal impact of personal finances, mental health and physical health.
Those in the US earning under $50,000 per year were the most likely to report a decline in their personal finances in 2020, whereas those earning over $100,000 reported a net improvement. The job security, take-home pay, personal life and work-life balance of the poorest have deteriorated significantly, too.
More strikingly, lower earners also experienced the greatest deterioration in mental and physical health. Those with postgraduate degrees, on the other hand, reported improvements in their physical health – by a whopping 23 per cent.
As spiked has repeatedly highlighted since the lockdowns began last year, the consequences for the working class have been devastating, while the more affluent seem to have profited from the restrictions.
In the US, between 18 March and 10 April 2020, over 22million people lost their jobs. But in the same three weeks, the wealth of billionaires increased by $282billion, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies.
And in the UK, an Instititue for Fiscal Studies report found that between March and September last year, the average monthly savings of the poorest fifth of people fell by £170 compared to a normal year. Higher-income quintiles, on the other hand, enjoyed a rise in their savings.
All this gives the lie to the absurd claims that opposition to lockdown serves the interests of the wealthy. Supporters of the lockdown – particularly on the left – are quick to denounce any call to reopen society as an attempt to ‘save the billionaires’.
But the billionaires and the well-heeled have done brilliantly out of lockdown. It is the poor who have suffered most from the shutdown of society, as they are less likely to be able to work from home and more likely to be hard-hit by redundancy and declines in pay.
Lockdowns are crippling the poor and pampering the rich.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/21/lockdowns-cripple-the-poor-and-pamper-the-rich/
**********************************Biden's 'Illegals First' Amnesty Plan
Joe Biden plans to put the concerns of American citizens and their interests in the back seat as he will return to the disastrous Barack Obama-era immigration policy. Noncitizens and those who gained access to this country illegally will now receive priority treatment as if they were not only welcomed guests but were themselves citizens of the republic.
Biden has proposed a plan that will put an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the country on an eight-year path to U.S. citizenship. The Washington Post reports, “To qualify, immigrants must have been in the United States as of Jan. 1, a move meant to blunt any rush to the border.”
Well, so much for preventing that border rush. A migrant caravan that has formed in Honduras is not only expecting but demanding that Biden open the border for them. As one migrant stated, “I just want patience and prayers that we can get to the U.S. because they have a new president, Biden. He’s going to help all of us, he’s giving us 100 days to get to the U.S. and give us [legal] papers, so we can get a better life for our kids, and for our families.” Who can blame these migrants? Biden has essentially laid out the welcome mat by eliminating Donald Trump’s “wait in Mexico” asylum policy and suspending deportations.
Meanwhile, American citizens, especially lower-income working-class Americans, will be the ones feeling the brunt of Biden’s amnesty policy as they see their wages and job opportunities diminish due to an influx of illegal aliens.
Of course, for Biden and company, the prospect of gaining 11 million new Democrat voters outweighs any concerns over the plight of the American working class. As Breitbart reports, “Under current rules, legal immigrants can get citizenship and voting rights five years after getting green cards. But the Biden bill would allow the migrants to convert their green cards into citizenship in just three years.”
By the way, aren’t we still in the middle of a “dark winter” of a global pandemic? Why fling the immigration door open wide right now? Well, because the Democrats’ agenda on immigration has not changed. It is what it always has been — making more Democrat voters.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77173-bidens-illegals-first-amnesty-plan-2021-01-21
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