At last calm and confidence have returned to our beleaguered republic: The Hill reported Wednesday that His Fraudulency President-select Joe Biden is doing a terrific job, as a comfortable margin of Americans have determined: “Six in 10 voters approve of the job Joe Biden is doing as president-elect, a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds. Sixty percent of registered voters in the Dec. 10-14 survey said they approve of Biden’s job as President-elect. By contrast, 40 percent of respondents disapprove.” The man isn’t even in office yet, but the proud, independent, adversarial press just can’t wait to go back to being obsequious sycophants for the Leftist in power.
After all, the poll itself is ridiculous on its face. 60% of Americans approve of the job that Biden is doing as president-elect? And what job is that? Holding a few press conferences, taking a few questions from bootlickers and ignoring tougher questions? Appointing some of the exponents of the multiply-failed establishment foreign policy, so that they can fail again and gather a few more plaudits from the self-congratulatory establishment media for doing so?
The President-elect is just waiting for time to pass, and preparing for his administration. No matter how smashing his appointments (Biden’s aren’t) and how Confucian his pronouncements (Biden’s aren’t, but there is a certain Chinese influence), he hasn’t been in office for even a single day yet, and has no achievements whatsoever on which he can be evaluated.
So what was The Hill trying to do by running this poll and trumpeting their man as the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful president-elect we’ve ever known in our lives? Whatever was going on in their conformist, statist little minds, the implications of the poll are obvious: Joe Biden will be hailed as the most magnificent of presidents no matter what he does. The same “journalists” who went after Trump like pit bulls at every conference, demanding he explain jokes and offhand remarks as if they were policy statements, account for assertions they considered false, and issue mea culpas for having destroyed America, will now fawn over Old Joe as if he were the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Barack Hussein Obama rolled into one, only more so.
Joe doesn’t have to do a thing to get this treatment. In fact, it will be better if he doesn’t do a thing. Many comparisons have been made between the Left’s increasingly open desire for totalitarian control and George Orwell’s novel 1984. One overlooked parallel, however, is that Joe Biden is a perfect fit for the role of Big Brother, the shadowy leader of the all-encompassing state. Big Brother may not even exist; he is simply “the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world.” When the failed dissident protagonist Winston Smith asks Party member O’Brien if Big Brother exists, O’Brien answers: “Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party.” Winston persists: “Does he exist in the same way as I exist?” O’Brien snaps back: “You do not exist.”
And here we are. Joe Biden is, for the moment, the guise in which the Party, the massive political/media/globalist internationalist establishment, chooses to exhibit itself to the world. That could change, and change suddenly and rapidly, but for the moment the comforting visage of our moral superiors is Affable Old Joe. He doesn’t have to do a single thing to maintain this role, as his media-shy, sparsely attended, basement-dwelling presidential campaign demonstrated. Even if he were to disappear out of sight for months, or for good, we might not realize it right off: The Hill and its colleagues could all continue to pump out regular puff pieces about what a fantastic job he is doing, and how lucky we all are to be rid of Emmanuel Goldstein, aka Donald Trump, who will nevertheless likely continue to be the focus of their Two Minutes Hate sessions for a long time to come.
In this scenario, you, like Winston, do not exist. You may dislike Joe’s statist proposals and think he has signally failed as president-elect, with all his appointments of failed Obama retreads. Nonetheless, the polls will continue to show that an overwhelming majority thinks that Joe is doing a wonderful job. The goal of such polls is not to reflect public opinion accurately. The goal is to make sure you love Big Brother.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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