by NYP
State of the Union speeches are usually pretty scattershot, but President Biden’s 2023 version set a new record.
He ranged across a world of issues without substantively addressing the biggest ones — crime, the border crisis, China, the nation’s looming economic woes — because his record is so weak on all of them.
Instead, he offered lie after lie in a shameless bid to fool the electorate ahead of his 2024 run for re-election. His only “big idea” is to make bogeymen out of the wealthy and offer the American people more freebies, more unsustainable spending.
He blended brags about his supposed achievements (inflation-fueling blowout spending sprees), promos for various dead-on-arrival bits of legislation (even heavily Democratic Congresses have been unable to pass “comprehensive immigration reform”), blatantly insincere calls for bipartisanship, cynical and false attacks on his opponents (the chamber was in an uproar at his fake claim that Republicans want to slash Social Security and Medicare), bogus stats (billionaires pay roughly 24% income tax, not 8%), some fine tough talk on the Ukraine war and utter laughers (“as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did” — by shooting down the balloon at the last possible moment?).
It had the now-usual shout-outs to guests in the audience and the standard rah-rah patriotism (“We are not powerless before the forces that confront us. It is within our power, of We the People.”).
But he had literally no overall theme, as he has no overall vision beyond his self-serving distortions and promises of more giveaways.