The Great Unease

by Jim Buckley

President Joe Biden.

Why Do So Many Feel so Uneasy?

The economy is “humming” we are told. The stock market is up. Unemployment hovers around the “full employment” level. Inflation looks tamed.

So, why the worry?

Why the underlying unease among so many?

Why do so many believe the country is “heading in the wrong direction?”

It may be the kind of question that defies logic, such as: Why are there no curious journalists? Why did entire brigades of reporters and editors lay down their pens and pencils in obeyance to the “progressive” cause?

I don’t know.

Maybe you do.

Same with this uneasy feeling of dread.

It permeates the culture.

Even our newest residents – let’s call them the Biden invitees – feel it. When a couple of New York City’s finest try to move a small group of them, the invitees explode into an irrational rage, kicking, punching, and jumping on the police officers.

Why?

A couple days ago, someone posted on “Next Door” that they were leaving California for Utah and tried to say good-bye to their friends and now former neighbors. Within minutes, the nasty snarks began. “Must be a conservative.” “Probably Mormon, good riddance…”

You could taste the contempt.

Why?

In this column (two weeks ago) I noted that many Republicans were afraid of publicly expressing an alternate opinion about an entire series of things: the transgender fad, chaos at the southern border, Drag Queen Story Hour aimed at elementary school children, personal pronouns being mandated by law, etcetera.

I wondered why this is happening, why so many are so afraid of speaking up. My answer was, “Because their so-called friends and even neighbors will come down on them like rhinos at a salt lick…”

And the responses to that harmless move to Utah reference illustrates just that.

There is a lot of anger out there, and it’s not coming from this side of the neighborhood.

The angry rage emanates from what we once called the “far left” but which now constitutes the bulk of the Democrat Party.

Why?

They’ve got nearly everything. The White House. The Senate. Hollywood. The Deep State. Academia. The Legal System. Heck, they’ve got a pot of 91 indictments simmering in the cooker waiting to be served to their hated opponent.

Why the not-so-pent-up rage?

Perhaps because they don’t have everything. After all, the House of Representatives isn’t theirs and it is supposed to be.

They are angry too that you’re pushing back against their cultural assault, and they know that what they are/were doing was/is right.

They really know they are right about transgender-affirming care for kids, abortion, family, education, religion (praise to Satan!), law enforcement, Covid, you name it.

And that you are terribly, uncorrectably, deplorably wrong.

Oh, and evil.

You (and I) are destroying democracy and will apparently vote for a would-be dictator who’ll trash the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and negate 250-plus years of the march of “progress.”

What They Don’t Know

What is most infuriating is how much that far-left crowd doesn’t know.

Their media, for example, never addressed the hordes of “asylum seekers” who’ve been rushing the U.S./Mexico border every day for the past three years.

All they know now – thanks to their media outlets – is that “Republicans” are against fixing what they’ve only recently discovered is a problem at the southern border.

There is no joy in Mudville, at least none that I can see.

Dinner in a run-of-the-mill restaurant (white tablecloth, maybe not) runs $150 for two. A glass of run-of-the-mill wine fetches $19. You pay your babysitter $20 or $25 an hour; if you don’t, he or she can-could-will sue you and win. And you’ll pay a hefty fine.

But guess who won’t pay a fine, or any price at all?

Mobs of looters who descend upon retail stores en masse and, like a swarm of locusts (or cockroaches) rip anything and everything off the shelves and walls, stuff their stolen booty into plastic garbage bags, and haughtily stroll out of stores as if everything they are carrying is owed to them.

They are neither arrested nor punished.

Carjacking has gone suburban. Creeps in cars follow unsuspecting moms-dads-grandmas and pounce as the mom-dad-grandma parks. They pull the driver out, maybe kick him-her, jump into the vehicle and speed away.

The car they leave behind is nearly out of gas, and oh yes, it was stolen.

They are rarely caught, even more rarely punished.

Four of the aforementioned invitees beat up two uniformed police officers (with the help of passers-by and others), are arrested, but let go hours later.

They’ll suffer no consequences if they’re ever seen again.

That makes us uneasy.

Hunter Biden also makes us uneasy.

How is it that as Vice President, Joe Biden could/would allow his crackhead son (and his crackhead son’s business partner), neither of whom knew anything about energy, to sit on the board of an energy company in Ukraine (Burisma) and be paid $1 million a year, all the while the Vice President is/was in charge of overseeing compliance between Ukraine and the U.S.?

At the very least, the sitting vice-president would believe such a conflict of interest would seem… unseemly, right?

Nope.

Nothing to see here.

Especially nothing to see here when the new president – Donald Trump – asks Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky if he could-would “look into what’s going on with the Bidens and Burisma.”

Oh, no. That’s an impeachable offense.

And the entire Washington establishment, the Democrat Party, and virtually every mainstream media commentator agrees.

That makes us uneasy.

There is/was nothing to see here because that kind of thing apparently goes on all the time in Washington, D.C. and, as far as I know, in every town, city, county, and state where elected officials exist.

Fani Willis is elected District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, promising to “get” the former president and once elected, pays her unqualified lover nearly $700,000 of taxpayer money to help her prosecute/persecute Mr. Trump.

Unqualified sons and daughters of mayors, assembly members, council members, senators, any (and ostensibly every) elected official in any capacity take government-approved positions at high salaries, and then assign no-show jobs to their relatives, friends, acquaintances, and to anyone who could throw a favor back at them.

To the victor go the spoils.

The meritocracy of civil service?

Fuggedaboudit.

Federal employees – who can never be fired – devour tax revenue as it arrives in the Capitol. High salaries buttressed regularly by inflation-protected pay levels (“What, us worry about the inflation our government caused?”), extended vacation pay, perks piled upon perks, and 98% of them voting Democrat.

They know what side their bread is buttered on.

That worries me.

What makes me uneasy too is that the Biden team has the ability and the will to manipulate economic news.

I fully expect the Federal Reserve Board to begin to lower interest rates in, say, June, July at the latest.

Just in time to influence the November election.

Falling interest rates are great for the stock market.

Both the unemployment and economic numbers can and probably will be “adjusted” to reflect that good times are here again.

They’ll be “readjusted” after the election.

And that would be truly awful.

Which makes me uneasy.

We know, deep down, that those employment-unemployment numbers aren’t real. If anything, they’re constructed out of borrowed money. Too many people believe that the economy, in a word, sucks.

But the smiling talking heads on TV will tell you everything’s coming up roses.

Steel yourself against the negative barrage that is about to be unloaded upon the “enemies of democracy” – you and all the rest of the deplorables – between now and November.

And don’t worry.

You – like the Man of La Mancha – will be marching into hell for a heavenly cause.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.