Paint It Black

 

Bill Scher looks at the dystopian picture of America under President Biden being painted by Republicans, and calls b.s.  Some excerpts:

The Republican presidential candidates are on the same page regarding Joe Biden: He’s a disaster on inflation, immigration, and crime.  [snip]

There’s one problem with this Republican portrayal of a Democratic president presiding over chaos: None of it is true.  

Inflation was at a 40-year high. During 2022, the inflation rate started at 7.5 percent, peaked in June at 9.1 percent, and ended the year at 6.5 percent, a mark that hadn’t been cleared since June 1982.  

But 2023 is a different story. The inflation rate for May is down to 4 percent, less than half of the June 2022 peak. But even back in March, when it fell to 5 percent, the “40-year high” talking point was obsolete. In July 2008, during the George W. Bush administration, inflation was 5.6 percent. And in October and November 1990, during the George H. W. Bush administration, it was 6.3 percent.  

Has southern border security collapsed? Hardly. Unlawful entries have dropped by 70 percent in the last few weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security, after Biden implemented a new border management policy.  

Now, that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Border crossings spiked just before Biden ended “Title 42,” the public health emergency rules that Trump enacted in 2020, using the COVID-19 pandemic to expedite the removal of asylum-seekers. So, the recent, steep drop is from a higher-than-usual amount.  

Nevertheless, many skeptics of Biden’s plan (which I detailed last month) assumed that the end of Title 42 would prompt a surge of migrants. The opposite happened.  [snip]

What about fentanyl coming over the southern border? It’s true that trafficking of the synthetic opioid has increased, as have fatal overdoses. But that didn’t start with Biden. On Trump’s watch, annual fentanyl overdoses nearly tripled, from 19,500 in 2016 to 56,894 in 2020. Since then, they have doubled.  

But while Biden hasn’t been able to reverse the trajectory of overdoses, don’t blame his border policies. Biden’s administration has intercepted more fentanyl than Trump’s ever did. In fiscal year 2020, 4,800 pounds of fentanyl was seized. That metric more than tripled in fiscal year 2022, reaching 14,700 pounds. And Biden is beating that pace in the current fiscal year, having already seized 17,200 pounds, with a record 3,300 pounds in April alone.  [snip]

Republicans may talk up crime, and there are no shortages of alarming anecdotes, but there is no Biden crime wave. “Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022,” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher, writing in The Atlantic, a trend that could lead to “one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.” That follows a 4 percent drop in homicides in 2022 from the prior year, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis of data from 35 cities. In fact, over the past five years, the worst month for homicides was July 2020—when Trump was president.  

Another set of promising data comes from the Violent Crime Survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which looked at data from 70 cities. During the first quarter of 2023, homicides, rapes, and robberies dropped about 8 percent from the first quarter of 2022... 

The dystopia Republicans would have you believe exists today would almost certainly come to pass in an authoritarian, tax- cuts- for- the- rich Medicaid- cuts- for- the- poor, abortion- banning, guns everywhere Republican police state under the Malignant Loser or any number of their other Presidential contenders.  Remember their glory days, 2017-2020?  

We have a party interested in, and competent at governing, as opposed to the post- truth performance politics of the Christofascist Republican/ Seditionist/ Shooters party.  

Scher concludes:

We can’t know what these metrics will be in the run-up to Election Day. But in the meantime, reporters and voters should not allow Republican candidates to paint a dystopian picture of America without being forced to address the numbers that don’t fit their narrative.  

Given what we've seen so far, that's the weakest link. But we have to keep the pressure on to make sure the truth has it's shoes on before the lies travel too far down the road.