NOTE FROM NORM: Listen To Inigo Montoya

I like Joe Biden.  I could see Joe and me out on my boat having a beer or two sharing a few stories here and there as we wait on the next fish to grab our line.’

I would, of course, catch more fish and bigger fish, but that’s really not the point of this post.

Joe Biden is a likable fellow.  As President, even if you don’t agree with his policies, and I don’t agree with a growing number of them, he strikes me as a decent person trying to do the right thing. There’s nothing wrong with hoping that the men and women who occupy elective office in America are decent people trying to do the right thing.

However, being decent and trying to do the right thing isn’t a free pass for being decent and doing completely wrong things.

On Wednesday evening, before a joint session of Congress, President Biden’s speech may have been the first opportunity for many Americans to truly understand what kind of Presidency and vision for the future this President, and his party, have for America.

The President was not shy in sharing his vision:  The single largest expansion of the federal government since the Great Depression.

A vision so big that it will take, according to the President, more than ten years to fully implement his multi-trillion-dollar plan to integrate government into virtually every single facet of every American’s day-to-day life.

And absent the President and Democrats, who hold slim majorities in both houses of Congress, giving the Senate Parliamentarian unprecedented powers to define what is an appropriate path to maneuver around the GOP minority, it is a vision that should not pass.

More important, it is a vision that We, the People, must hope does not pass.

A year ago, the world slid into an economic hole the likes we hadn’t seen in most of our lifetimes.  The rapid spread of a global pandemic and its impact on the entirety of humanity was, to use the most overused word of 2020, unprecedented.

A year later, the economy of America, and much of the world, is rapidly turning around. In the United States, industry is returning to capacity, jobs are coming back, and the impact on the lives of every American will be remarkable.

The rapid spread of vaccines throughout the country as a result of historic investment through Operation Warp Speed, investments made in the economy and the American economy initiated by President Trump and passed in a bipartisan fashion in the House and the Senate, have all been the fuel for the economic fire that is beginning to sweep the country.

Yet, there in the U.S. House of Representatives, President Biden would want to have us believe that we are just entering the same hellfire we have gone through the past year.

The most overused word of 2021, already, by this President is “bipartisanship.”

A word by him so often, and yet has been given no evidence of being employed, that it requires me to paraphrase the immortal words of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “Mr. President, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Republican United States Senator, Tim Scott, delivered a respectful but scathing indictment of the President and Democrats’ remarkable deceit.  One in which they promise, repeatedly, to find common ground across the aisle, and before the promise of their words leave their lips, they are already breaking it.

“President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership…He promised to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans no matter how we voted.”

He went on to underscore that we are growing further apart, not closer together, despite the President’s assurances that he is committed to doing just the opposite.

“Our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes…We need policies and progress that bring us closer together. But three months in, the actions of the President and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”

The voices of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other leading voices pushing America’s economy and government further and further into a socialist quagmire have gained a foothold inside the Biden White House in a way that is breathtaking.

The agenda promoted by the President last night, one that would undermine the very underpinnings of an economic system that has made America the strongest, freest, and most powerful nation in the world, belongs to the socialists within the ranks of the Democratic Party.

Yet, if successful, it would be a platform that would lay heavy on the future of every American for decades to come.

My liberal friends will, of course, object to this representation and claim Republicans are unwilling to compromise, unwilling to work with the President or Democrats, unwilling to be bipartisan.

The narrative is as false as the promise of the President and Democrats to be committed to across the aisle solutions to the problems, and opportunities, facing America.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said it best in his comments before the President’s speech before a Congress’s joint session.

“With regard to the direction of the Biden administration so far, I think it can best be described as the “Biden bait and switch.” President Biden ran as a moderate, but I’m hard pressed to think of anything at all that he’s done — so far — that would indicate some degree of moderation.

The bait is always the title, like the massive COVID bill, but with only 1% for vaccines and 9% for health care. Or infrastructure, which is the bait, but the details involve more money for electric cars than for most projects that most of us consider infrastructure. And of course, a massive tax increase, undoing the 2017 tax bill, which produced the biggest, best economy in 50 years as recently as February of 2020. Or a bill styled as voting rights, which in fact is a carefully designed plan for the Democrats to take over all of American elections all across the country.

The President wants to redefine nearly every aspect of American life by redefining the truth.

Its impact on our future couldn’t be more severe.

It’s one thing to be on a boat with Joe Biden, returning to shore, and having him share a whopper of a fish story about the huge fish that got away or the one he threw back which was the biggest the world had ever seen. There’s no harm in a whopper of a fish tale.

Yet, coming before the American people, and sharing a whopper of a fish story about how bipartisan he is, wants to be and how his policies will create a more unified and strongest America the world has ever seen, is far more dangerous than a fish tale.

None of it is true.

As the fish tales grow more numerous, bigger, and more dangerous, the instructive words of Chief Brody from the movie “Jaws” may be the best advice all Americans have as they start to sink as a result of the President’s growing list of broken promises.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”