“You got me runnin' goin' out of my mind,
You got me thinkin' that I'm wastin' my time.
Don't bring me down.
No, no, no, no, no.
Whoo-ee-ooh!
I'll tell you once more before I get off the floor
Don't bring me down.”
For those unfamiliar with classic 1970’s rock, these song lyrics stem from the 1979 Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) hit, suggestively named “Don’t Bring Me Down.” The song “only” reached number three on that year’s singles charts, so we don’t hear it played much on the radio these days -- assuming people still listen to the squawk box anymore. But one can’t help but sense that President senile Joe Biden must experience echoes of this song’s refrain whenever he receives reports on the crisis at the southern border.
To say that things have gotten out of control there is an understatement. Emboldened by senile Joe’s boasts during the 2020 campaign, illegal aliens continue flowing over the border like raging waters during a hurricane, with no end in sight. It’s left the leftist administration wondering what to do about the humanitarian crisis they created. And that’s not even mentioning the public relations flak storm the benevolent liberals are taking. Some of their own people are starting to wonder what’s going on.
The song “Don’t bring me down” -- perhaps in mariachi-band-style -- should blare from every speaker in the White House each day. Biden tapped chief sidekick and identity politics idol vice president Kamala Harris to grab ahold of the problem by the horns and wrestle it to the ground like a rodeo cowboy would a steer, but by all appearances, Kamala hasn’t even visited the situation. She’s too busy showing up at COVID vaccination centers and bakeries and cowering from the media folks who keep the pandemic panic at the top of establishment newscasts.
At any rate, the president can run, but he can’t hide from this. W. James Antle III wrote at The Washington Examiner:
“Even as most Democratic elected officials have stayed away, GOP members of Congress and border state legislatures have been conducting tours of the facilities at which migrants are being detained and surrounding areas. Rank-and-file Republican voters are increasingly telling pollsters immigration and border security are their top issues, creating the possibility that this will drive conservative turnout in the midterm elections in the same way that tax increases did in 1994 and Obamacare did in 2010.
“In those two elections, Republicans gained 52 and 63 House seats, respectively. That was enough to win the majority both times, in the former case for the first time in 40 years...
“But it is still a long way to 2022, and Republicans will need to build a broader case against Biden and the Democrats than just one issue. This is especially true as long as Biden’s big-ticket spending proposals continue to poll strongly — including, the president often argues, among self-described GOP voters.”
Fiscal responsibility ain’t what it used to be. COVID-19 changed more than election procedures last year; it altered the mindset of people in terms of government’s role and the necessity of virtually limitless spending to “combat the threat.” How many times was it said that we needn’t be mindful of how much government spent to battle the virus, presumably because it was an “emergency”? Packages that started at a couple billion bucks morphed into trillion-dollar monsters that drool red ink from every orifice.
“Spending is the largest percentage of GDP since WW II”, they claimed, and for what? Americans borrowed and borrowed to beat the Nazis and the Japanese in the 1940s. Today’s enemy is a Chinese virus that isn’t all that dangerous to a huge swath of the population, and is steadily being defeated by vaccines developed under the Trump administration. Yet the drumbeat for spending continues on.
Polls do indeed reveal that Biden’s domestic policies are “popular”, which defies common sense. This is certainly one area where the establishment media’s lack of investigative interest and sketchy reporting on the massive debt situation shows up in people’s ignorance. It seems the “sheep” only value the appearance of more money in their bank accounts as though it were an accounting error or a gift from the tooth fairy (misdirected from their pillows, of course).
Tax rebates, never! Stimulus checks, yes!
Biden’s infrastructure proposals enjoy a similar backing among the voters, which is again, hard to explain. While everyone sees potholes and decaying bridges and senses a need for something to be done, it’s difficult to envision how battling “climate change” with trillions of dollars in federal largesse will make people’s lives better. Someday, someone is going to have to pay it all back. Or maybe the government will simply default, declare the debt void and start over again.
Who will loan the United States government money from that point on? No one who cares about their bottom line.
Of course, today would normally be Tax Day, the time when annual returns are due. But with COVID, the tax collectors have given everyone another month (until May 17th) to gather receipts and pray that they’ll be spared from the tax axe another year. The occasion seems to take on less significance than it used to, with Americans naively preoccupied with getting “woke” and watching doddering Joe’s mouth move whenever he shows his mask-less face.
But immigration might still bring him down. We can only hope.
As Antle alluded to in his piece, it’s the issue that motivates Republicans the most while also drawing a semi-honest response from Democrats as to whether they approve of Biden’s handling of the crisis. It seems like centuries ago that Democrats favored strong border enforcement as a protection for their union constituencies, but like everything else in the contemporary liberal agenda, the hard left has wrested control from the dwindling number of “moderates” among them.
The Biden administration put together detention centers for the overflow but still pays for motels to house the “migrants.” It’s costing taxpayers $60 million a week to care for just the unaccompanied minors alone. Most people picture teddy bear grasping little kids and toddlers being herded by armed border guards, but 70 percent of these “minors” are aged 16 or 17, meaning they eat adult-sized diets and have other “mature” demands in addition.
Why are Republicans the only ones disgusted by this farce? Why isn’t this serving to bring Joe down with the people who voted for him? Is this what they bargained for when they decided they’d had enough of Trump’s “rhetoric” and were tired of seeing the media go off on his tweets? At least (as of January of this year) our border towns didn’t look like refugee centers under Trump. If you’re passing out “Biden for president” t-shirts, the newcomers will swamp you!
Seeing this tragic trampling of American law and sovereignty, one can’t help but figure it will fuel the revival of Donald Trump’s political career even further. Biden’s profligate spending will show its ugly side at some point and people will wake up to the reality that the Democrat controlled Congress can’t keep pushing legislation that only one side votes for.
In other words, sooner or later reality will sink in for GOP faithful as well as the persuadable portion of independent American voters who aren’t kneejerk socialists bent on punishing the successful by hiking taxes to pay for all of this. Hopefully, 2021-vintage Tea Parties will begin sprouting up everywhere and the grassroots reaction to bumbling Joe will be extraordinary.
Who knows, maybe it’ll even bring down the Democrat majorities in 2022… and Biden’s presidency along with them.
Joe Biden
Kamala Harris
border crisis
Biden agenda
Donald Trump immigration policy
border wall
Tea Parties
Republican voters
2022 Election