I & I Editorial BoardThis week we’ve been treated to three government reports that all point in the same direction: Disaster.
Interest payments are through the roof. Real wages continue to fall. And a record number of illegals crossed the border.
That’s just the domestic news. As of this writing, Americans are being held hostage by Iran-supported Hamas terrorists who killed nearly two dozen other Americans when they invaded Israel. Our military forces face increasing Iranian-sponsored attacks in Iraq and Syria. While President Joe Biden lets Iran off the sanctions hook for another four months.
The worry isn’t just whether Biden – the architect of these disasters – will be voted out of office next year. It’s whether the U.S. can survive until then.
Start with the terrible news on the home front. On Monday, the Treasury Department released its monthly financial report, and it was alarming. In October alone, the government made $76 billion in net interest payments – a 77% increase from a year ago and a 153% jump from two years ago.
The Treasury report projects that gross interest payments will top $1 trillion this fiscal year. That will be more than we plan to spend on defense, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or any non-defense domestic discretionary program. And that’s if all goes well, which it rarely does.
Then, on Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly inflation report for October. While the White House bragged that inflation had declined – from 3.7% in September to 3.2% – what matters to everyday Americans is whether their wages are keeping up with price increases.
They aren’t. For four months in a row – and 27 out of the past 31 months – worker wages failed to keep pace with Bidenflation. As a result, real wages today are more than 3% below when Biden took office. That, combined with rising interest rates, is costing the average family $7,400 a year, according to economist E.J. Antoni.
Also this week, the Customs and Border Protection agency reported that more than 300,000 migrants entered the U.S. illegally in October, the most ever for that month. There were also 13 arrests of people on the terror watchlist last month. Remember, none of these numbers includes “got-aways” – those who purposely avoided “encounters” with border patrol agents.
To top it off, a congressional report came out putting an annual price tag on this flood of illegals – $451 billion!
So, great. A looming fiscal calamity. Falling wages. And an ongoing invasion that is compounding the first two problems. Thanks, Joe.
Now look abroad and what do we see? Five weeks after Hamas went on its killing spree, the Biden administration was saying “we don’t know how many of those (American hostages) are still alive.” Instead of getting retribution for these killings, or protecting Jews who are being attacked in the U.S., Biden is pressuring Israel into a cease-fire while warning about “Islamophobia” at home.
Meanwhile, there’ve been 57 attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria over the past month. And our response has been, as Business Insider describes it:
U.S. forces stationed in the Middle East have endured a constant stream of attacks from Iran-backed groups over the past few weeks, violence that’s parallel to the Israel-Hamas war but nonetheless directly related to the bloody conflict.
These attacks in Iraq and Syria — mostly carried out using small drones and rockets — have injured dozens of American service members, but the U.S. has chosen for the most part to avoid retaliation against the culprits. Middle East security experts say that’s because Washington is walking a tightrope, balancing its own strategic interests in the region with avoiding escalation while also recognizing that its enemies are doing the same, trying to intentionally provoke it without taking it too far.
“Walking a tightrope“? A “balancing” act? When “experts” are using circus metaphors to describe foreign policy, you know we’re in trouble. In any case, Biden is enabling Iran, which is behind all these attacks, by letting it off the sanctions leash so it can rake in tens of billions of dollars. Just this week, Biden issued a new 120-day sanction waiver. (And this is to say nothing of the fact that Iranian spies had deeply penetrated the Biden administration.)
Now, let’s get back to the headline. The legal definition of “reckless endangerment” is a crime “consisting of acts that create a substantial risk of serious physical injury to another person.” Has Biden caused physical injuries? We’d argue that he has. But there’s no question that Americans across the country have been seriously injured in a multitude of other ways.
In any case, someone accused of reckless endangerment “isn’t required to intend the resulting or potential harm, but must have acted in a way that showed a disregard for the foreseeable consequences of the actions.”
That is the very definition of Joe Biden’s presidency.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Here, writing some 150 years ago, Theodor Mommsen’s ideas seem starkly familiar. Only the change to a few proper nouns renders the narrative of events that occurred 2075 years ago, to a current-day, or near-future, analysis of the news.
Let us review the events of the decade of the Sullan restoration. None of the external or internal developments during that period… necessarily constituted of itself a grave danger to the state; yet in all these struggles the nation had well-nigh fought for its very existence.
The reason was that every task was left undone so long as it still might be done with ease. Neglect of the simplest precautions produced the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing of equality…. It was no credit to Rome that in an eight-year struggle, marked by more defeats than victories, the government’s two most celebrated generals had filed to master the insurgent chief Sertorius and his Spanish guerrillas….
Little more than a century had elapsed since the Hannibalic war, and it must have brought a blush to the cheek of every honorable Roman when he reflected on the nation’s fearfully rapid decline since that great age…. Then every captain acted if need be like a general, and fought often unsuccessfully, but always honorably; now it was difficult to find even a tolerably efficient leader among all the officers of rank. Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plow rather than forego the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now it was on the verge of abandoning both these long-since-conquered regions merely to defend itself against runaway slaves at home….
The foreign wars had produced still less satisfactory results…. Once Rome, fully conscious of her irresistible power by land, had transferred her superiority also to the other element; now the mighty state was powerless at sea and apparently on the point of also losing its hegemony in Asia.
All the material benefits which a state exists to confer – security of frontiers, undisturbed peaceful intercourse, legal protection, and regulated administration – began to vanish for all the nations united in the Roman state. The gods of blessing seemed all to have mounted to Olympus, leaving the miserable earth at the mercy of official or volunteer plunderers and tormentors. Nor was this decay felt merely by those possessing political rights and public spirit. The… brigandage and piracy brought the sense of it home to the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy and constituted a personal calamity for every one who pursued trade and commerce or bought a bushel of wheat.
If the authors of this dreadful and unparalleled misery are sought, it is not difficult to share blame among many. The slaveowners whose hearts were in their moneybags, the insubordinate soldiers, the cowardly, incapable, or foolhardy generals, the demagogues running after shadows, all bore their share of the blame. Or, to speak more accurately, who did not share it? It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder were too colossal to be the work of any one man. As the greatness of the Roman commonwealth was th work not of prominent individuals, but rather of a soundly organized body of citizens, so the decay of this mighty structure was not the work of some destructive genius but the result of a general disorganization. The great majority of the citizens were good for nothing, and every rotten stone helped to bring about the ruin of the whole structure. The whole nation suffered for what was the whole nation’s fault.
It was unfair to hold the government, as the ultimate organ of the state, responsible for all the state’s curable and incurable diseases; but it was certainly true that the government deserved a liberal share of the general culpability. In the Asiatic war, for example, where no individual of the ruling group conspicuously failed,… it was all the more clear that the blame for the failure lay in the system and in the government as such….
Doubtless, therefore, the nation had good reason for blaming its failure primarily on the restoration government…. Yet never before had it shown at the same time such violence and such laxity, never before had it been so corrupt and so pernicious. When a government cannot govern it ceases to be legitimate; and whoever has the power has also the right to overthrow it.
It is no doubt unhappily true that an incapable government may long trample underfoot a nation’s welfare and honor, before men are found who who are able and willing to wield against that government its own formidable weapons, and to forge the justifiable revolution out of the moral revolt of the good and the distress of the many.
Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, ed. Dero A. Saunders and John H. Collins (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), from Section VI, Rule of the Sullan Restoration, pp. 232-235.
Anyone surprised by the detrimental actions of joe biden and the democrats hasn’t been paying attention for the past 50 years.
Their only interest is self-interest and their only love is love of self.
I don’t know all the answers, but the first answer is to quit voting for any democrat, anywhere.
Excellent argument, and the strict liability component of reckless endangerment ensnares Biden despite his mental condition or intentions.
Recovery for the American people, however, may have to wait until 2024.
Is it Obama?
I might suggest Demented Incompetence.
Treason against the united states, pretty much. Arming aiding and abetting america’s sworn enemies and facilitating and permitting crime and chaos against the american public, that kind of thing. Crapocrats at their works.