Bret Stephens is the worst NY Times columnist in history

Joe Biden has been in office for less than eight months, but according to our Mr. Stephens, the Times’ chief “conservative” columnist, we have “another failed presidency at hand.”  That’s not from a sentence his column today; it’s the goddamned headline.

How does our man at the top of the paper’s tower of conservative pundits support this line of unadulterated bullcrap?  Why, he sets up a strawman and proceeds to knock him down!  Isn’t that such a clever trick! 

Let’s take a look at how this genius accuses a president of failing before he’s even completed his first year in office.  Here’s Bret, setting up the strawman of Joe Biden’s America:

“We are a country that could not keep a demagogue from the White House; could not stop an insurrectionist mob from storming the Capitol; could not win (or at least avoid losing) a war against a morally and technologically retrograde enemy; cannot conquer a disease for which there are safe and effective vaccines; and cannot bring itself to trust the government, the news media, the scientific establishment, the police or any other institution meant to operate for the common good.”

“Joe Biden was supposed to be the man of the hour: a calming presence exuding decency, moderation and trust,” Stephens tells us.  “Instead, Biden has become the emblem of the hour: headstrong but shaky, ambitious but inept.”

That’s Stephens description of Biden after four years of Trump, believe it or not.  Biden is the “emblem” of what Stephens calls a country “fading into paranoid senility.”  Zing!  That Bret Stephens is one original political philosopher!  Why, Fox News hasn’t been yelling the “S” word 72 times a day since Biden announced he was running back in 2018.  

Real original take, Bret.  What bong has Stephens been sucking on for the four years, the way he tries to recycle bogus right-wing crap in the pages of the Times without coming right out and saying it, and this after four years of the dumbest most incompetent SOB who ever drew a breath in the Oval Office.

As for his list of failures of our “fading” United States:  we couldn’t keep a demagogue from the White House…except Joe Biden beat that demagogue by 7 million votes in 2020, and Trump was removed from the White House on January 20 of this year.  But I guess Bret must have missed that little detail, he was so busy cataloging “another failed presidency.”

We couldn’t stop an insurrectionist mob from storming the Capitol… except the last time I looked, that mob was incited by the demagogue whose rule Stephens claims to lament, and the storming happened while the demagogue was still president and in charge of the Department of Justice, FBI, Homeland Security.  But let’s blame Joe Biden for his failure to stop something that happened 16 days before he took office. 

We couldn’t win a war against a morally and technologically retrograde enemy…except it hardly bears mentioning that the war we didn’t win was started 20 years ago and prosecuted for multiple bogus reasons by multiple presidents of both political parties including the demagogue…and yet Stephens wants to hang it around Biden’s neck by complaining elsewhere in the column at length about how he ended it.  Yet another really original take. Wow. 

We couldn’t “conquer” a disease for which there are safe and effective vaccines…except that quite apart from the fact that it’s a little hard to “conquer” a goddamned world-wide pandemic, it was Stephens’ favorite demagogue who set us up to fail by spending an entire year making the whole thing about himself, and let’s not even get started on how his party has politicized everything from wearing masks to getting vaccinated to goddamned social distancing.  

We can’t bring ourselves to “trust” the government, news media, scientific establishment…sound familiar?  It’s a little more like an indictment of the last 40 years of the Republican Party, and yet…and yet…but let’s put all of our lack of “trust” on a president who has been in office only seven months.

That Stephens ends his little lamentation about all the things this nation can’t get right with the words “common good” is particularly galling, given the fact that Republicans have spent nearly a century trashing the very concept of a common good as an acceptable goal.  Social Security, anyone?  Medicare?  Medicaid?  Obamacare?  Anybody notice a trend here? 

But fear not!  Mr. Conservative Op Ed has a solution!  “There’s a way back from this cliff’s edge,” Stephens assures us. “It begins with Biden finding a way to acknowledge publicly the gravity of his administration’s blunders.”

Blunders?  After four years of corrupt cabinet secretaries, impeachable attempts to subvert the rule of law, the single biggest fuck-up of a national response to a disaster in the history of the nation, a plethora of disastrous stuff like separating kids from their parents at the border…and then losing them…topped off by an attempt to subvert the results of an election with a violent mob, and Bret Stephens wants to talk about Joe Biden’s “blunders” seven months into his administration.  Jesus. 

Stephens has the gall to talk about Joe Biden as if the reign of the demagogue never happened.  “The last few months have told us something worrying about this president,” Stephens concludes.  “He’s proud, inflexible, and thinks he’s much smarter than he really is.”

Really, Bret?  Are you sure you’re not talking about another “failed presidency” in a column you “failed” to write but should have written during your time behind the keyboard over the last four years?