Biden Enters ‘Baghdad Bob’ Territory on Inflation and Immigration

“…We all remember Saddam Hussein’s feckless pitchman, “Baghdad Bob.” The country’s information minister (real name: Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf) made frequent television appearances, repeating the mantra that everything was going according to plan. His most memorable appearance came amidst the rubble of his capital city, where he continued to spew delusional nonsense.

We expect such dissembling from dictatorships, which control the media and extinguish discordant voices. That’s what Vladimir Putin is doing right now, hoping to prevent the Russian public from learning his army was demolished by Ukrainian’s counteroffensives in Kharkiv (in the northeast) and Kherson (in the south). Controlling information is essential to regime security.

In democracies, such deceit is much harder to pull off. There are protections for free speech (greater in some democracies than others) and private ownership of newspapers, websites, TV, radio, and podcasts. Free speech and private ownership of media make it much harder for the government to control information, but not impossible. Take the story of Hunter Biden’s corruption and its links to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. They were detailed on Hunter’s laptop computer, which he left at a Delaware computer repair shop and then forfeited when he didn’t pay the bill. The information on that computer hard drive is devastating, but it was suppressed before the 2020 election by an ardently partisan media, which feared voters would link the pervasive insider deals to Joe Biden himself…”