President Biden launched his international trip to Canada on Friday the 24th with a number of grand visitations. Among these was an appearance at the Canadian Parliament, during which he decried the deadly drug fentanyl as being a killer affecting us all.
According to FOX reporter Adam Shaw, Biden went on to announce “a commitment to build a new global coalition of like-minded countries led by Canada and the United States to tackle this [fentanyl] crisis.” What’s more, on his own @POTUS Twitter account the President condemned those “MAGA House Republican proposals” that would “slash funding for border security—a move that could allow nearly 900 pounds of fentanyl into our country.”
Those with a sense of irony are now invited to laugh.
For a President having so long persisted in a state of delusion surrounding the illegal traffic of drugs at our southern border, it’s almost blindingly absurd to find him now blaming Canada and the Republican Party. Biden has overseen record-setting levels of drug traffic at the Mexican border without ever offering so much as a meaningful comment. To graduate so quickly from silence to implicating our northern frontier and the otherwise hawkish GOP beggars belief.
While the border with Mexico represented 98% of the total interdicted fentanyl traffic up to December 2020, less than 2% was seized at the Canadian border according to a recent Drug Enforcement Agency report. No reasonable person could ever conclude that Quebec is more responsible for New Hampshire’s drug problem than are Sinaloa or Bogotá (much less Beijing).
And, indeed, New Hampshire does have a grave issue with lethal synthetic opioids. According to the State, annual EMS Narcan administrations have hovered between 1,375 and 2,895 cases over the past nine years, meanwhile total drug overdose/abuse incidents ranged from 4,230 to 6,483. In 2022 there were over 3,000 opioid related emergency department visits, and 434 deaths. Of these deaths, at least 312 were attributable to fentanyl or products adulterated with it.
The derogate state of our major cities betrays the fact that the problem is likely even much larger. Very few weirdos would steal the purse from your car or the mail from off your porch without a serious drug addiction resting as their motive. Petty crimes are the escalating symptom of a far-reaching social problem.
The President who is now declaring war on the Fentanyl crisis in Canada is the same man who halted construction of the Mexican border wall and demanded that State’s demolish their own barriers, who advanced the repeal of Title 42 (even going so far as to sue for it), who encourages rampant illegal crossings by providing free migrant flights to countless unwitting communities across the nation, and who refuses to condemn the corrupt Mexican government for its complicity in the unending transit of murderous synthetic drugs into America.
But please Mr. Biden, continue to blame the fruits of your own disastrous border policies on some fantastical cabal between House Republicans and liberal Canada, all-the-while ignoring the titanic role of Mexico and our leachy southern border.
When the President finally toured the source of 98% of America’s fentanyl in January, he surveyed a sterilized Potemkin village and dementedly mistook members of the Salvation Army for the Secret Service. When he visited the source of the remaining 2% last week, he railed against the drug crisis and cast far-fetched aspersions on his political enemies. Were it not so dangerous, this bizarre paradox would be amusing.
This incident is by no means first in the parade of tone-deaf messaging decisions by the Biden team, which include such stunners as his recent statement on the Nashville shooting that began with a dopey joke about his ice cream preferences.
If his unforced error here was attributable to a simple gaffe, one might be able to forgive it; but this is plainly not the case.
Biden is convinced that GOP blame-shifting is enough to fool the American people into pardoning his strategic failures. Moreover, he is convinced that naked hypocrisy will conceal the more wicked impacts of his deliberate open border policy.
We should not let such a cynical manipulation succeed.