The one American who really should give thanks for his good fortune today is Joe Biden.
Lucky Joe. President without trying, popped his head out of his basement a few times, took lots of naps. The Chauncey Gardiner of presidents has been touched by a rainbow, and how the media rejoices!
“President-Elect Biden.” They can’t say it often enough when they ask hard-hitting questions about how terrible Donald Trump is.
Biden’s new team is “like the Avengers . . . the superheroes to come and save us all,” gushed Yamiche Alcindor of PBS.
They are “not going to be political,” declared NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. LOL.
On MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace waxed lyrical about Biden’s “empathy and humanity . . . [It] is all an implicit rebuke of Donald Trump’s foreign policy stewardship,” she said.
“Joy to the world, the Trumps are gone,” sang ABC’s Ana Navarro on “The View.” “Let us receive Joe Biden.”
Did you see his socks! Navy blue with dog prints. How marvelously . . . not Trump.
This is the only distinction Biden has: he’s not Trump.
But that is more than enough to win him adulation from the world, especially from China, which knows its salad days are back.
Like clockwork yesterday, one day after Biden unveiled his Definitely-Not-America-First foreign-policy and national-security team, China President Xi Jinping phoned to congratulate him.
Xi said he hoped “the two sides will uphold the spirit of . . . win-win cooperation.”
Oh yes, Biden knows all about “win-win cooperation” with China.
They win and then they win some more.
Biden was the Obama administration’s point man for Beijing during the period when millions of American jobs were shipped to China.
It began with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. That was the last time “win-win” was loaded with so much irony, when President Bill Clinton lauded the move as “a win-win result for both countries.”
After that, the trade deficit exploded. We couldn’t compete with the low wages, and the AFL-CIO estimated US manufacturing wages dropped between 46 percent and 86 percent.
Much of that wealth was transferred to multinational corporations who grew woke on the profits.
Now China will have even more fun screwing American workers, thanks to Biden’s $2 trillion version of the Green New Deal, worked out with Bernie Sanders this year.
Biden’s first presidential order of business on “Day One,” he says, is to rejoin the Paris climate accord, from which President Trump finally managed to extricate us only three weeks ago.
In a press conference Tuesday, Biden described climate change as an “existential threat” and an “urgent national-security issue.”
To fix it, he appointed John Kerry, the former secretary of state who got us into Paris in 2015, as “climate envoy.”
“For the first time ever, there will be a principal at the National Security Council who can make sure climate change is on the agenda in the Situation Room,” Biden said.
Kerry paid tribute to his new boss: “You are right to say Paris alone is not enough.”
And yet, since Trump pulled out of Paris, we actually have reduced our carbon footprint while increasing jobs and lowering energy prices.
The fracking boom in oil and gas production made us energy-independent last year, enhancing our national security because there is no longer an incentive to fight wars in the Middle East.
All that cheap energy is saving the average American family $3,000 a year and, because natural gas burns cleaner than coal, emissions are lower.
That is what you call a real “win-win,” not the Orwellian version offered by Xi.
The Paris agreement “was not designed to save the environment,” Trump told the G-20 summit in a speech Monday. “It was designed to kill the American economy.”
That, in a nutshell, is the Paris treaty. It requires America to impoverish itself by abandoning the fossil fuels that underpin our prosperity, even though renewable energy currently is incapable of filling the gap, on the dubious premise the planet’s temperature will drop as a result.
China is the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, nearly twice America’s output, and rising. But it gets special dispensation under the treaty to continue to build coal-fired power plants. Under Paris, China doesn’t even have to start reducing emissions until 2030.
Meanwhile, under the original Obama-era agreement, America is required to slash emissions by 26 to 28 percent in the next five years.
These Draconian energy restrictions have been estimated to cost America as much as 2.7 million jobs by 2025, according to National Economic Research Associates.
But Biden has promised to go further, entirely eliminating carbon emissions from the electric sector by 2035 and imposing strict gas-mileage standards to reach zero emissions by 2050.
In terms of American decline, the Paris climate treaty is this decade’s version of China’s entry into the WTO.
Xi, naturally, is a big fan, seeing it as another tool to hasten America’s decline.
On Monday he urged the G-20 to push for full implementation, claiming China would reach zero emissions by 2060. “China will honor its commitment,” he said.
That’s a con but you can bet Biden and Kerry will fall for it, like they did last time.
And don’t expect their media cheer squad to cry foul.
