I didn’t watch the President’s speech last night, I didn’t vote for him and I expect no good to flow from his presidency. In the current idiom, “he’s not my President.”
That said, I’ve found interesting comments thereabouts from observers with whom I often agree. For example, this analysis from Scott Johnson of Power Line.
I found President Biden’s speech last night (“on the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown”) profoundly dispiriting, mean-spirited, ungrateful, petty, and otherwise wanting in good qualities. The state of mind reflected in it as craven and deceitful.
And Johnson hotly concludes:
Go to hell, you blithering phony. You can’t even fake sincerity.
Whereas Conrad Black reacted thus:
Doubtless, the gas-lit, Democratic echo-chamber of the national political media will hail this as the greatest address of its kind since Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chat on the banking system in March 1933. But I suspect that the polls will reveal that the public was unimpressed by the president’s dreary recitation of the dark and hopeless night that he pretends to be lifting.
Nor is the president’s appearance reassuring. He has a sickly pallor, is underweight, and quavers at times. Everyone will wish him good health and long life, but his appearance and manner on Thursday night will not incite confidence that he is likely to enjoy them.
On his best day, some decades ago, Joe Biden wasn’t an impressive public personage, and these are not his best days. Conrad Black notes that by laying low and saying little Biden has brought a peacefulness to American politics that was missing during the Trump years.
Clearly some will appreciate the reduced noise level. That “some” will not include the cable news networks, whose ratings are down.
