Pun Salad

On Friday, Phil Klein did an excellent job debunking Joe Biden’s contention that a $3.5 trillion welfare-state expansion bill will “cost nothing.” Over the weekend, this nonsensical characterization of the widest-ranging and most expensive spending bill in American history metastasized among the liberal punditocracy.

Liberal pundits contend that the $3.5 trillion welfare-state expansion “costs perhaps zero” because it is “paid for.” Even if we concede that the reconciliation bill contains the kind of tax hikes that can offset short-term outlays, the expenditure does not change. Simply because you can afford a car (or in this case, your parents can afford to buy you one) doesn’t mean the car doesn’t cost anything. Helpful liberals tried to frame the difference in “gross” and “net” costs. But every penny of the bill is money taken from someone, either today or tomorrow — usually from a more useful part of the economy. (Or, likely, it will be lots more debt spending. That isn’t “zero,” either, even if our political parties act like it.)

‘Every element of my economic plan is overwhelmingly popular,” President Biden said last week. “But the problem is, with everything happening, not everybody knows what’s in that plan.” This is an eye-opening observation, to put it mildly.

First, notice how much work the prase with everything happening does—a breezy parenthetical euphemism presumably for the roll call of mayhem this highly experienced and competent president is now delivering: humiliation in Afghanistan, chaos at the border, a sharp escalation in the pandemic, confusion and misdirection over vaccine mandates, a stalling economic recovery.

It is as though Mrs. Lincoln had said of that fateful 1865 Ford’s Theatre production of “Our American Cousin,” “It was a very good play, but the problem is, with everything happening, not everybody knows what was in it.”

Then there’s the curious but potentially revealing juxtaposition of the claim that Mr. Biden’s plan is overwhelmingly popular with the claim that there is widespread ignorance about it. I’ll leave you to guess what might have been the response from a scornful media if Donald Trump had said something like this, but logically it does suggest the strong possibility that the reason the plan might be popular, as Mr. Biden claims, is precisely because people don’t know what’s in it.

A day before an ISIS attack killed 13 Marines in Kabul, President Joe Biden declared cybersecurity “the core national security challenge we are facing.” Cybersecurity is critical. But with the Taliban retaking Afghanistan after being routed by the U.S. military two decades ago, calling it the “core” national security challenge of our time was bizarre. Still, Biden’s August comments were an improvement from June, when the president declared climate change the greatest threat to American security.

You would think that the commander in chief responsible for one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in decades would choose his words more carefully. But that’s not how his party tends to operate these days. George Orwell warned of the dangers of imprecise political speech in his seminal essay “Politics and the English Language.” The problem, in Orwell’s telling, is that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Political speakers reach for muddled, vague language to sell the public on their indefensible policies. This is bad enough, but it presents a broader issue because “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Orwell’s diagnosis is as true in America today as it was when he wrote those words 75 years ago. And while both political parties are guilty of indulging in bad rhetoric that corrupts policy, Democrats are the more frequent and more serious offenders, largely because linguistic manipulation is central to so many progressive political ideas.

Biden outlined an incredibly specific and detailed set of criteria that dictate whether a person can get a booster shot. But he's not overly concerned about people who don't qualify jumping the line, because, well, government health officials will probably approve boosters for everyone else when they get around to it. That doesn't make very much sense: If the White House knows boosters are perfectly safe, and a good—though by no means strictly necessary—health measure for pretty much everybody, then it should really just open up the process right now.

It's fairly clear that the CDC's internal hesitance over booster shots was not grounded in any actual concern about the safety of booster shots. Health officials had concerns that were political rather than scientific: They were worried about increasing vaccine hesitancy, putting the country's vaccine supply to inefficient use, and also the unfairness of recommending boosters for Pfizer recipients only.

From Jan. 20-Sept. 24, 2021:

• Only 3.5% of total COVID-19 infections (1,976 of 57,203) have occurred among fully vaccinated individuals;
• Only 6.4% of initial hospitalizations (37 of 579) have occurred among fully vaccinated individuals;*
• Only 6.5% of deaths from COVID-19 (28 of 430) have occurred among fully vaccinated individuals.

(*The state records COVID hospitalizations for those who were hospitalized upon the initial report of their infection. If someone is hospitalized after the initial report of infection, that would not be included in the hospitalization statistics. The state has always reported COVID hospitalizations this way.)