Cal Thomas - Refutation and accountability

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, January 27th. Good morning to you! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Here’s commentator Cal Thomas on the importance of holding our leaders accountable.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: The art of deconstructing an argument by refutation and holding a person accountable for previous statements the person now contradicts was once an honored tradition. It has now mostly gone the way of other traditions in favor of sound bite statements formulated in political party meetings and used to confuse the public.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell unpacked this once great technique earlier this month in response to some of President Biden’s outlandish claims about his first year in office. To do that, McConnell contrasted Biden’s Inaugural Address with remarks he made at a recent news conference and in a speech in Atlanta about minority voting rights.

McConnell said the Biden on display at these events was not the Biden he has known, liked, and personally respected for decades.

McConnell began his senate floor speech by recalling Biden’s Inaugural Address promise to unite the nation. Instead, McConnell said, “that very same man delivered a deliberately divisive speech that was designed to pull our country further apart.”

One year ago, Biden said “we should not see ourselves as adversaries, but as neighbors.” Now, McConnell said, he calls “millions of Americans his domestic enemies.”

McConnell went on to recall that Biden has said disagreement must not lead to disunion. But then he “invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors. How profoundly unpresidential.”

The president acts as if he has a mandate for all the far-left policies he has been pushing. But McConnell noted Democrats have “the narrowest majorities in over a century.” An evenly divided senate and a bare Democratic majority in the House. McConnell said that hardly gives the president a “mandate to transform America or reshape society.”

The president did get a mandate to do one thing: bridge the political divide, lower the temperature and end “the perpetual era of crisis in our politics.” But as McConnell noted, he has done the opposite.

During his speech in Atlanta, the president again used the label “Jim Crow 2.0” to assert Republicans are attempting to make it more difficult for minorities to vote. But that’s not true. As McConnell noted, there are more ways for people to vote in Georgia than in Biden’s home state of Delaware.

We don’t hear about that from major media outlets. They’re not holding the president accountable for his promises. Instead, their stories sound like they’ve been taken straight from the Democratic Party’s talking points.

But it’s not working. Polls show Biden voters have buyer’s remorse. Unless he changes course in the next nine months, he can expect a midterm correction come November.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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