Wednesday, November 10, 2021

The Last Believer In Götterdämmerung

It appears that on the local, state, and congressional levels, the results of last week's elections effectively ended the fantasy that there could be a rapid enactment of a Great Reset that would make the 2022 midterms irrelevant -- or if indeed the voters did exact revenge at the ballot box, it would be something past the end of the world and also irrelevant. I've been calling this the Götterdämmerung strategy, and naturally, it isn't adult thinking, And the November 2 elections did focus the minds of many adults. According to the Washington Post,

Progressives gave up a lot of ground when they agreed to vote for the $1.2 trillion bill to improve the nation's infrastructure in exchange for a later vote on their top priorities.

Now, some of them are pretty pessimistic about the chances of getting their top priorities included in the larger, roughly $2 trillion social spending bill the leadership and moderates promised would follow. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was only able to push through the infrastructure package after Democrats took a drubbing in last week's off-year elections and President Biden personally stepped in to lobby members.

Privately, aides to some Congressional Progressive Caucus member [sic] described their members as being downcast about passing the reconciliation bill in its current form.

"We're incredibly pessimistic and it's hard to project strength and fortitude as each caucus we are all a part of individually ran us all over on Friday night," a staffer for a progressive caucus member told The Early.

What we're seeing from such reports is that people like the progressive caucus have been forced to recognize that the policy objectives of the Götterdämmerung strategy can't be achieved prior to the 2022 midterms as they had hoped.

But so far, the ones who've gotten this message have been those directly affected by short-term politics in local, state, and congressional elections. President Biden isn't up for election in 2022. I don't believe he's cognitively deficient -- at least from the specific effects of aging -- but he does appear so far to be stubbornly unaware of the potential effect of last week's elections on his own effectively Götterdämmerung agenda, now or after 2022.

For instance, he's still looking at closing another oil pipeline:

At a time when gas prices are soaring and people are demanding answers from the Administration about what they are going to do to help out the problem, the idea that they would be looking into the question of shutting down another pipeline is pure madness. As we noted, this isn’t shutting down a prospective pipeline — this would be shutting down a pipeline that provides more than half the propane used for heating in northern Michigan. Line 5 has been operating since the 1950s and is a major energy supplier to Michigan and the region. It delivers oil from western Canada across Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, and Michigan, and into Ontario.

Biden has already implemented policies that increase fuel costs, which are inflationary, as well as enacting vaccine mandates that will affect the supply chain by firing truckers, as the industry points out. He's able to enact these via executive orders and doesn't need legislative approval, which would be increasingly difficult to obtain in the current environment, especially with Sen Manchin's influence.

The problem for Biden is that the Götterdämmerung agenda is deliberately meant to reduce fossil fuel consumption without, however, replacing the fossil energy with equivalent renewable sources. Thus it simply increases energy prices overall, which increases the price of everything and lowers living standards across the board.

The electorate isn't stupid and fully recognizes this. For observers, the question is simply whether Biden is doing this because he doesn't know what he's doing, or he's doing it because he likes hurting people. Frankly, based on what we're learning about the big guy, I lean toward the latter. A factor that exacerbates this is that Biden, weak of character and even dissipated himself, is at the mercy of his unelected and ideologically driven handlers. But apparently even these are beginning to show some concern:

There must have been some sort of emergency meeting last night at the White House, because Biden administration officials have simultaneously shifted into spin overdrive as news about inflation, energy prices and supply chain issues continue to worsen.

. . . Don’t worry, according to this administration, it’s all been invented by the media (that largely helped carry Biden into office on their shoulders).

On one hand, the economic news can't help but get worse. On the other, too much evidence is continuing to build up, in my view, that Biden isn't suffering from dementia, but other determining character issues must inevitably come out, for instance in the simmering Ashley diary story.

Let's go, Brandon!