Joy Pullmann of the Federalist places concerns about President Biden’s job performance in a larger context.
Joe Biden’s shameful performance at the White House Easter egg roll Sunday was another strong visual indicator that he is not really governing this country. And he’s not the only sham authority in this country — our nation is replete with them.
The term “Potemkin village” arose in Russia to describe empty buildings set up as propaganda, to give a false impression of industry and life. The fake villages were intended to hide the regime’s mass mismanagement and infliction of suffering upon its own people.
In 1949, The New York Times described Moscow as a “Potemkin village” because its apparent vitality and strength, artificially boosted to both provide the corrupt elites a comfortable place to live and foreign visitors a misleading portrayal of the nation, was “unrepresentative” of the typical Russian’s everyday life under Joseph Stalin. …
… The glorious Oxford English Dictionary gives examples of the term being used to describe everything from political situations to personal libraries. It dates the origin of the term to 1787, and today defines Potemkin as: “Sham, insubstantial; consisting of little or nothing behind an impressive facade.”
That is precisely what the U.S. federal government has been now for many years. …
… This is not just in the symbolic farce of regime actions such as placing a man who claims to be a woman in charge of what is supposed to be a health agency, and installing into the presidency a man whose incompetence is so dangerous to national security and international order he is prevented from speaking publicly by a fierce Easter bunny.
It is also in the utter farce of governmental authority at all, as seen in almost every major public issue, big and small. Consider the fact that the great United States appears unable to run a trustworthy election, nor even to broadly fix major election insecurities even after they are widely visible.
