As is true with progressives, their bewitching counterpart, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, never disappoints in its eagerness to turn water into molasses via the magic of spin. It may look like water, it may pour like water and indeed taste like water, but our senses deceive us, they insist. And today, WSJ board member James Freeman offers our eyes an illusory, threefold trick.
First he goes on at some length decrying the Biden administration's $1.9 trillion covid package. "Old Democratic friends have been warning President Joe Biden not to inflict his supersized stimulus plan on a growing economy in no need of rescue," he writes, confusing "relief" with "stimulus." I may be about as ready to stop with this correction as I am in reminding journalists that objects in prepositional phrases take the accusative case.
The administration's plan is meant fundamentally, just as Joe Biden campaigned on, to "Build back better": to extend the child tax credit; to help open safer schools; to assist state and local governments pounded by pandemic costs and tax losses, resulting in services cut; to extend higher unemployment benefits for those workers not yet enjoying what the Journal declares a magnificent economy, as well as issue one-time "hurdle" checks, you might say. The relief package is often touted as economic aid, but the aid is for the other half, which the Journal conceals behind a black curtain.
Freeman also scoffs at candidate Biden and Kamala Harris' outspoken mistrust of the Trump administration's "ability … to oversee the approval of safe and effective vaccines…. They now find themselves having to persuade the public to have confidence in the resulting achievements." The second observation has nothing to do with the first; to say it does is mere sleight of hand. Anyone with a newspaper subscription would have mistrusted Trump to do anything fairly, honestly and competently, thus confidence in vaccine developments is but a pleasant surprise.
What Mr. Freeman really wants to giggle and tee-hee about, though, is Politico's reporting that "nearly three dozen House Democrats on Monday called on Biden to relinquish his sole authority to launch nuclear weapons." Yet Politico misstated the request: It should have written the sole authority, not "his." The request is a blanketed one, extending past Biden's tenure. This, even Freeman concedes. Nevertheless he cannot resist: "After Mr. Biden’s faulty diagnosis and treatment plan for the economy, now it seems that some members of his party don’t even want to trust him with nuclear weapons…. It might be hard for any president not to take this message personally."
Trump certainly would have, as would any childlike mind and snickering voice like Freeman's. But President Biden happens to be an adult. That's something the WSJ editorial board and other wizards of right-wing spin will persist in obfuscating, especially having become accustomed to Trump's toddler tantrums and infantile brooding.