POORLY PREDICATED, BADLY ARTICULATED.

Yes, I'm making fun of the stilted language common on political panels, where it would be bad form to accuse somebody of using talking points in support of tight priors that cannot long survive an encounter with reality.  That Dementia Joe becomes a foil for more direct mockery is a bonus.

"MAKE NO MISTAKE! If you try anything to raise the cost of frisizhnjubs I will veto it." pic.twitter.com/DaJIvDiRy2

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 8, 2023

That mumbling is close enough to "prescription drugs" to just cut the old guy some slack for the inarticulate enunciation.  The threat, though, is precisely a talking point in support of a foolish tight prior.  Among the "legislative accomplishments" the doddering ficus and his Morale Conditioners love to point to, as if they've done any good, is a law capping the retail price of a dose of insulin at $35, and the veto threat is aimed at any Congressional attempt to repeal the law.

But a retail price of $35 by force of law is no different from a streetcar fare of a nickel (or perhaps, as was the case with the Pernambuco Tramway, five centavos) and sooner or later the opportunity cost of a dose of insulin will exceed $35, which will have to be made up somehow, or else there will be no more insulin on offer.

It's telling, I suppose, that more people made fun of the "frisizhnjubs" than they did of the economic ignorance that a president, or any other secular or sacred official, can dictate what the cost of anything is.  In Official Washington, though, the fantasy is the policy.  "While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day."  Never mind the woke fantasies, dear reader, contemplate the belief that the president can command the price of prescription drugs, er, frisizhnjubs, to stay stable.

I confess to skipping the speech to see the approval of a provincial permit to build a proper mine shaft on Oak Island, and then to tune up some switch motors with a disappointing hockey game for background entertainment.  But people did watch the speech to catch misleading claims, notable claims lacking crucial context, and incomplete claims behind the rhetoric.  So it always is in Official Washington.  "Lots of partisan fanfare, some surface-level appeals to bipartisanship, and a whole lot of misleading spin."  Poorly predicated, badly articulated, and at the end of the day, the switch motors were working down cellar.