Sowing Winds and Reaping Whirlwinds

The Left is being consumed by its own hatreds and hubris.

"For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. "

— Hosea 8:7

Joe Biden, first as a candidate and then in the White House, from the outset saw the COVID-19 pandemic mainly as a means of leveraging political support, from the manner in which the lockdowns allowed him to run a virtual campaign from his basement to equating Donald Trump with the COVID-19 virus.

Like many on the Left, Biden was overt in such cynicism. So were Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, and Jane Fonda—who claimed that COVID was a “never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” moment. Panic and lockdowns could help achieve single-payer health care, or a recalibrated capitalism, or the end of Donald Trump himself.

At the height of the last presidential campaign, Biden in September 2020 declared that Trump was responsible for the then-current 200,000 COVID deaths: “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.”

Biden felt no need to list details where Trump had lethally erred or had not “done his job.”

He did not explain how any president should be able to prevent all deaths from a plague. And in 2020, Biden certainly had no expectation that before his own first year as president was over the cumulative deaths from the pandemic would exceed 800,000. He would have found it surreal to even imagine that soon there would be far more deaths under his own tenure than during Trump’s presidency—despite being the beneficiary of ubiquitous vaccinations, new therapies, and antiviral drugs unavailable throughout most of 2020.

During the 2020 campaign, both Biden and vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris also had cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the Operation Warp Speed vaccines. They repeatedly implied that any forthcoming jabs would be tainted by Trump’s sponsorship.

Yet, later in office, both would publicly deplore any doubt similar to their own about vaccination safety or efficacy. Indeed, they equated remaining unvaxed to being unpatriotic. In addition, when Biden was inaugurated, he claimed that no Americans had been vaccinated. In fact, on some days under Trump more than a million people were receiving vaccinations.

Given that the new daily cases and COVID fatality rates had begun to decline shortly before Trump left office, and due to the growing ubiquity of the Warp Speed vaccinations, Biden gladly took ownership of the virus and boasted it would be essentially gone by July 4—due to his own rebranding of Trump’s vaccination programs.

Biden had assumed he could blame Trump for all 2020 COVID-19 deaths, while few would die from the pandemic in 2021, and that, again, he could take credit for the Warp Speed vaccination program.

But fate, not Biden, was the master of our COVID-19 destinies. Soon both the Delta and Omicron variants arrived, and we are now back to a Groundhog Day of possible lockdowns and mask mandates. Certainly, Biden would not wish a political rival to do to him what he did to Trump: question the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, blame Biden for more than 400,000 deaths on his watch, and claim the continuance of the pandemic was Biden’s fault alone.
Truth and Consequences

What’s the moral of Biden’s current troubles? From the Bible and the Greeks and throughout the Western tradition, there is a constant refrain of being wary of hubris, the lying and arrogance that are innate to it, and the divine power that ultimately levels things out.

Biden and the Left so despised Donald Trump that they lost all sense of moderation, of proportion, of logic itself. Thus, they find themselves in the current ridiculous situation of suffering the consequences of their own unhinged rhetoric and actions.

This madness was birthed in part because Trump’s newly calibrated populist Republican Party had the potential to permanently draw the working class away from Democrats. In part, they found Trump’s salesmanship and braggadocio repulsive and contrary to bicoastal manners. Partly his agenda had more success since any first term since Ronald Reagan. Add it up, and the result was toxic hatred and mindless rejection of the successful policies.

Biden’s undoing was claiming not just to be antithetical to Trump, but the antithesis of all that Trump did. His hatred blinded him to the reality that Trump’s record on Afghanistan, the border, COVID-19, the economy, foreign policy, energy, and regulation was in each instance either adequate or very good. To simply nullify all of it, and to claim Trump was an ungodly disaster, meant Biden’s own one-dimensional rejectionist policies had to be winning and successful. And when they were neither, he suffered not just the wages of failure, but of hypocrisy and...

Read More HERE