A CARDIGAN FOR JOHN GILL.

Our President offered his parting remarks Wednesday night.

The White House has now released the cleaned up transcript.  Cameron Henderson of London's Telegraph files the closest thing to an objective report I have been able to find, although his lede is provocative.

Joe Biden warned of a new tech “oligarchy” that “threatens our entire democracy” in his farewell speech before he leaves the White House.

Speaking from the Oval Office, the outgoing US President criticised social media bosses who are “giving up on fact-checking” and burying Americans in an “avalanche of disinformation and misinformation”.

Mr Biden’s comments will be interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire owners of X and Facebook, who have scrapped fact-checkers on their platforms, claiming they hinder free speech.

Channelling President Dwight Eisenhower, Mr Biden warned of the “potential rise of a tech industrial complex” threatening to undermine US democracy.

That's rich, coming from a guy who awarded George Soros a Presidential Medal of Freedom and who received in-kind support from those social media types when they characterized information about his wayward son's business dealings as misinformation.  And he left out the third leg of President Eisenhower's military-industrial-academic triad, perhaps because the sort of hindering of free speech we see on campus is the kind he likes.  But then, the Pope Linuses of this world have always wanted the Unauthorized Voices to recant or be excommunicated, haven't they?

Particularly, if John Gill is playing the role of Pope Linus.  It didn't impress Andrew Stiles at Washington's Free Beacon.

A very sleepy President Joe Biden bid farewell to the nation on Wednesday in a low-energy Oval Office address. It was an utterly forgettable speech, written by the celebrity historian Jon Meacham and read from a teleprompter (with considerable difficulty) by an 82-year-old man who is clearly unfit to serve another four days in office, let alone the extra four years he felt he deserved.

Make of it what you will, dear reader, that the White House transcript did not clean up all the [inaudible] or the false starts.

Power Line's Scott Johnson was similarly less than impressed.

Behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Biden slurred and struggled his way through a reading of the text from the teleprompter. Without a live throng to cheer him on, the text elicited no shouting. The speechwriters vainly strove to endow the text with an eloquence that is beyond them and that rings false in Biden’s reading. The 17 minutes running time feels more like 17 hours.

When Biden turns to the real-life events of his presidency and transmutes them into famous victories, the effect is nauseating. It’s time for him to go. It’s past time for him to go. It would be better if he had never come.

Well, Donald Trump was his own worst enemy in 2020 and let us hope he learned a few lessons, lest the Democrats run another fakement in 2028.

According to Hot Air's Ed Morrissey, that speech was "sheer projection."

Joe Biden will leave office just as he entered it -- twenty pounds of bull**** in a ten-pound bag. Biden, or whoever is filling his Teleprompter these days, tried cosplaying FDR and LBJ for the last four years and proved disastrously inept. Now he's attempting to exit like Dwight D. Eisenhower, while being nothing like Ike in the least, let alone in Ike's honesty.

One point to note: I did not watch Biden's speech. I've had enough of televised elder abuse to last me a lifetime. Instead, I read the speech transcript at the New York Times, after noting that the White House still hasn't posted it as of 8 am this morning. Are they that embarrassed by it? Because they should be, just as they should be embarrassed to have participated in a cover-up of Biden's cognitive collapse for the last four years.

Most of this speech is nothing more or less than Biden's standard campaign speech. He credits himself with Saving Democracy!, as well as saving the economy, saving the whales, etc etc etc. This too we have heard ad nauseam for the last four years, and the last year in particular. It's his breathtaking hypocrisy and projection in this last missive -- or dear Lord, we hope the last -- that's worth any comment at all.

Sasha "Free Thinking through the Fourth Turning" Stone also hopes we're done with all that.

It’s time to say goodbye.

Farewell, Joe Biden, farewell, Democrats. Farewell, hysteria. Farewell to mandated preferred pronouns in everyone’s bio. Farewell to being forced to lie about whether or not masks work. Farewell to not being allowed to give people the benefit of the doubt. Farewell to being too afraid to ask questions about an experimental vaccine. Farewell to Critical Race and gender theory in elementary schools.

Farewell to the ruling oligarchy — yes, Joe. You were the frontman for it. You can’t fool me. I was part of it, too. It was like a daisy chain of paper dolls—Hollywood, all major corporate and cultural institutions, Big Pharma, and all of the ads they pumped into the veins of Americans that showcased the American utopia in all of its splendor. Just take this pill, and you, too, can be with us, in the happy place.

Farewell to a government censoring speech via social media. Farewell to the absence of masculinity. Farewell to worrying about every word that comes out of our mouths, what we drive, what we wear on Halloween, what we buy, what we eat, what we watch, what we desire.

Farewell to being made to hate ourselves and everything we know to be true but can’t say out loud. Farewell to being the oppressors or the oppressed defined only by the color of our skin. Farewell to hating our history, hating our country, hating our heroes. Farewell to virtue signaling our goodness.

We always had the freedom to mock that.  We could choose not to.  So let it be with George Will, who might be having second thoughts about voting for Democrats to punish Republicans.

Joe Biden’s failed presidency is ending with a blizzard of decisions that validate voters’ rejection of his vice president, who, when asked, could not think of a flaw in his record. He and she pretended, from opposite directions, to be what they are not.

He won his party’s 2020 nomination by defeating aggressively progressive senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Then, perhaps because aging had already rendered him pliable, some handlers convinced him he should be another Franklin D. Roosevelt. Governing as a synthetic New Dealer, he doomed his vice president, who ran as a synthetic centrist unable to outrun her authentic progressivism.

Two months into his presidency, the seeds of its ruin were sown with the American Rescue Plan, which pumped up demand for goods and services beyond the capacity of the economy to produce them. The predicted result, inflation, was exacerbated by the Inflation Reduction Act’s torrent of subsidies in the service of “industrial policy.”

Confession is good for the soul, even of Cub fans.

At best, James Joyner of the establishmentarian Outside the Beltway offers a lukewarm endorsement.

As with Eisenhower’s warning, the obvious question is, Why didn’t you do something about this while you’re President? But, in fairness, Biden did make some efforts on many of these related issues and was unable to get cooperation from Congress and the courts.

The reforms he wants for the Supreme Court and Presidential immunity would require amending the Constitution, a near-impossible task. But that fixing the system is unlikely to happen doesn’t mean it isn’t broken.

Perhaps something is broken, but perhaps what is broken is the governmental habit that pins too many hopes on the presidency and ignores the possibility that Congress really calls the shots.  "From that perspective, we can view the Carter presidency and the Biden presidency as a pair: the first preseasonal, the second postseasonal, and neither of them in a good way."