It took the arrival of a Chinese dictator for San Francisco to finally clean the filth off the streets — at least temporarily.
Sure, they had to erect cages around the sidewalks to keep them clear until President Xi Jinping leaves California, but better to be seen as a prison than a pigpen.
It’s all theater, of course.
The Chinese and other Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders know that after the facelift, San Francisco will revert to a feces-encrusted slum, as the zombies are released from wherever they have been hidden.
Everyone has seen the videos of addicts bent double in suspended animation or zonked out on the ground among the used needles and human excrement.
TikTok algorithms make sure those videos are seen.
Ahead of Xi’s visit, Chinese media outlets had great sport trashing San Francisco as “garbage city,” “ruined city,” “fallen city” and a “total failure.”
Apart from being an avoidable tragedy, America’s deadly drug crisis makes us an international laughingstock, the marker of a civilization on the fast track to hell.
You would think the American president might be embarrassed about that fact. But, far from it, Joe Biden thinks it’s funny, too.
At a glittering fundraiser in downtown San Francisco Tuesday night, Biden began his speech by thanking Mayor London Breed for “welcoming us to your city. It kind of sparkles right now.”
The White House press office transcript indicates that “laughter and applause” greeted his droll observation.
Yes, the papering over of San Francisco’s squalor is a source of mirth for the high-dollar Biden donors who live there — or at least in California.
Real estate magnate Clint Reilly and his wife, Janet, who own the Biden fanzine The San Francisco Examiner, former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Mayor Willie Brown, Kamala Harris’ old squeeze, reportedly paid as much as $200,000 apiece for the pleasure of seeing Biden speak that night.
Biden’s undeclared shadow rival for the presidential nomination, Gov. Gavin Newsom, was there, too, equally unashamed about the ease with which the city had been cleaned up for foreign VIPs, but never for the poor schmucks who can’t escape to gated estates and chauffeured limousines.
“I know folks say, ‘Oh, they’re just cleaning up this place because all these fancy leaders are coming into town’,” Newsom told reporters when asked to explain the astonishing overnight transformation. “That’s true because it’s true.”
That’s the thing about today’s Democrats. They really don’t care about the normal things that used to motivate politicians in the past, like clean streets, low crime, a healthy economy.
Duping the electorate
The rest of Biden’s speech Tuesday night reflects this belief that voters can be manipulated and gaslit into voting against their best interests, if you just scare them enough.
A mixture of resentment that everyone underestimates him and cockiness about his prospects, Biden’s remarks foreshadowed his campaign pitch for 2024.
He began by boasting about the “incredible night” Democrats had at the polls last week, “despite all the predictions, except ours.”
The ostentatious Catholic spoke of abortion as if it were a magic talisman and falsely accused Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin of having been “in the process of banning abortion — attempting to” before he was foiled.
“The American people voted to protect our fundamental freedoms like the right to choose, they voted to protect our democracy, they voted against extremism of our opponents, and they voted for the progress we’ve been making. They voted again and again.”
Democratic wins in Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, he said, were a “continuation of what we saw in 2020, when we were told we weren’t going to win, and again in 2022, when we were supposed to get wiped out.”
He then boasted about Bidenomics, falsely claiming that CPI stats out that day showed “inflation continues to go down in the country.”
Cue applause and calls of “Thank You Joe” from the well-heeled crowd.
But even with fake CPI inputs like a laughable 34% alleged drop in health insurance costs, what he said wasn’t true.
The CPI inflation rate was 3.2% in October, exactly what it was in September.
At best you can say inflation is still killing you but no worse than last month, and it’s up almost 18% since Biden came to office.
The markets bought the story, anyway, and happy headlines buoyed Biden into the APEC meeting. That’s Bidenomics for you, manipulating the economic narrative by changing how it’s measured.
Villifying Trump
But most of Biden’s speech was devoted to demonizing Donald Trump, something he attacks with relish: “Our very democracy is at stake because the same man who proclaimed himself to be a ‘proud election denier,’ the same man promising to pardon those who were insurrectionists who were convicted on Jan. 6; the same man who said it was time, and I quote, for ‘termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution’ . . . The same man is running on a platform to end democracy as we know it, and he’s not even hiding the ball.”
Republicans need to be realistic about what Democrats are doing, and how it is succeeding.
Their formula is simple: scare voters on abortion, Trump and “MAGA extremists,” then reassure them with fairy tales about Joe’s great stewardship of the economy, and his sure-footed foreign policy achievements.
Democrats own the narrative-shaping mechanisms now, via traditional media and Big Tech censorship, so truth doesn’t matter.
He might be old, and he “occasionally trips over things,” as his former flak Jen Psaki puts it, but he’s better than the alternative, is their pitch.
It should not be hard to beat an unpopular, addled old crook who is running this great country into the ground with his economic redistribution and open border policies, and who has destabilized the world in just three years.
That Biden even has a ghost of a chance is a reflection on the incompetence of his opponents who can’t even find the spine to jettison a lackluster RNC chair who keeps losing elections.
This week Ronna McDaniel did the media rounds trying to justify last week’s disappointments.
Her solution is that candidates need to go on TV and talk more about abortion.
Really? Democrats want nothing more than to turn the 2024 election into another abortion referendum.
If they can’t beat Joe Biden in a landslide, Republicans deserve Vivek Ramaswamy’s insult of a “party of losers.”