The President is so enfeebled

Remember 2019? Cast your mind back to that year, that oh, so recent time when everything was different. 2019 was not a perfect time, or a perfect world, but it was very different from this one of 2022. In 2019 the rights and freedoms we’d had for years – and shamefully taken for granted – were still broadly intact, or so it seemed. The idea that we might not be free to be with loved ones, to hold the hand of a dying parent, to earn a living, to leave our homes for more than an hour a day, that taking a holiday abroad would be, for a time, illegal, would surely have been unthinkable. As long as we could afford the necessary ticket, we had been free to travel the world. Surgical masks were a novelty, worn in places of work by medical professionals and by occasional visitors from Asia where altogether different cultural norms prevailed.

Across The Pond Donald Trump was in the White House. The US were energy independent then and hadn’t got involved in any new wars all the time he was in residence. European states even sneered when he warned against their reliance on Russian gas.

The list of things that were different about here, and the US, and the rest of West in 2019 could be so much longer, of course – almost endless, in fact – but I don’t have enough time.

So where are we now? Where to begin?

For one thing, by now there is a whole new definition of haves and have-nots. Society is split across the divide of the vaccinated and unvaccinated. A large majority of the population of the UK and of the rest of the West HAVE been vaccinated against a disease many now believe to have been made in a Chinese lab that had been funded by the US. It leaked from there, in 2019, to the wider world. The Have-Nots, who chose not to take the vaccine – who are increasingly glad they turned down the multiple offers of multiple jabs – but now metaphorically bruised and battered as a consequence of their resistance to the regime, are still vilified and called anti-vaxxers. Anyone questioning the vaccines and/or lockdown is still branded a conspiracy theorist.

Continued on Source: Perhaps Joe Biden’s decline is a metaphor for a new reality for the US, says Neil Oliver