At all costs. By whatever means necessary.
Defending, justifying, rationalizing, excusing, dismissing, or outright lying, nothing stood in the complicit media’s way of propping up an aging, mentally-failing man who half the time didn’t know which state he was in, confused his wife with his sister, referred to the U.S. Constitution as “the thing,” and declared every American has a right to “badakathcare.”
After four years of the “abnormal” and “dangerously unpredictable” Donald Trump, the media told us, Joe Biden — “Joey from Scranton,” as Biden sometimes refers to himself and his childhood days — was who we needed. America was desperately in need of a return to “normalcy,” they told us. And “average Joe” was their man.
Conservative commentator, media host, and founder of The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro doesn’t see it that way. “Average, normal Joe,” that is.
In a Daily Wire op-ed on Wednesday, titled “Shapiro: This Is Not Normal,” the conservative activist took apart the notion that Joe Biden — specifically, the Biden presidency — is “normal.” As Shapiro sees it, Biden’s presidency so far is anything but.
“Now, the media inform us, we have been graced by the most normal normal person to have ever normalled: President Joe Biden. Biden, they proclaim, is utterly boring, nondescript, barely worthy of coverage. His administration, too, is paradigmatically normal.
“Yascha Mounk of The Atlantic tweets, ‘It is so nice to have a boring President.” Alleged media watchdog Brian Stelter asked this week whether Biden is “making the news boring again,” adding, “The Biden White House is clearly a break from the chaos and incompetence of Trump world.'”
Both of those observations could’ve been written by those politically-predisposed Trump-haters months ago, and simply regurgitated after St. Joseph had been in office for a week.
Biden loves every minute of it, as Shapiro observed, referencing the revelation this week that Joe’s favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate chip. Don’t bother alerting the media: it alerted itself just before the “story” “broke.”
Shapiro contrasted Biden’s “normal” with that of Trump.
On a personal level, Biden is clearly more “normal” than Trump — although treating Biden, a career politician worth nearly $10 million, as the height of normality is rather stunning.
“The goal for the establishment media isn’t to point out merely that Biden is a sort of American Everyman. It’s to use that supposed normalcy to disguise the fact that his agenda is absolutely abnormal.
The dirty little secret of the Trump administration is that despite Trump’s personal abnormality, his agenda was well in line with past precedent, and with mainstream American opinions on everything from taxes to military policy.
Trump did not radically shift American policy,” Shapiro said. “Biden will.”
Shapiro then touched on Biden’s flurry of executive orders. The Barack Obama “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” method of conducting an extra-constitutional presidency.
And? Biden’s numbers, to date, have blown away those of Obama and Trump — combined.
“Within the first five days of his presidency, he issued 30 executive orders, compared with four for Trump, five for Barack Obama and zero for George W. Bush.
“Those executive orders included endorsement of radical reinterpretation of American history; killing the Keystone XL pipeline, along with its attendant estimated 11,000 American jobs; forcing the military to allow troops to undergo gender reassignment surgery…
“[A]nd forcing federally funded institutions to allow biological men who identify as transgender to compete alongside biological women, among others.
“He is reportedly pursuing an immigration plan directed toward reopening America’s borders. He has staffed his Cabinet by intersectional box-checking.
Pretty impressive for five days. Conservative Twitter guru Catturd™ previously summed up the first two days of America under the Biden regime, thusly.
But because the media runs with the “return to normalcy” narrative, we’re supposed to just bend over and accept the radical beginnings of the Biden presidency, argued Shapiro.
From “caving to the teachers’ unions that seek to keep schools closed indeterminately,” Shapiro wrote, to “reentering a long-dead [nuclear] deal with the Iranian theocracy,” to “firing government staffers with whom he disagrees,” and “lying openly about the vaccine distribution plan he inherited,” we are supposed to be grateful that Joe is “normal.”
This is not normal,” admonished Shapiro.
“Joe Biden may be a relatively normal guy,” Shapiro wrote, in closing, “But none of this is normal.” “And pretending it is,” he correctly observed, “represents just another way for the media to reject legitimate criticisms of an administration seeking radicalism right off the bat.”
And the sycophantic media? No doubt damn proud of themselves for what they’ve accomplished with “normal” Joe. As Shapiro noted, according to Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post, the media in the post-Trump era must now cover Democrats even more sycophantically than in the past.
They’re off to a fantastic start, as evidenced by the titles of the following two articles.
As I was about to publish, I ran across yet another example of “normal” Joe. As reported by Politico on Wednesday afternoon, “Joey from Scranton” is moving ahead with the establishment of a commission on Supreme Court “reform.”
Yeah, what a normal guy.