Aug 26, 2021 3 min read

The Biden administration has endured some healthy criticism lately, much of it deserved. To be worthy of our attention, though, that criticism must be based on facts. What Dave Ball gives us in his latest article in the Observer-Reporter (Aug. 23), is anything but facts. Instead, it’s a blustery diatribe, ignorant of basic economics and full of statistics without attribution, pulled from no credible sources but rather from his imagination, the internet or his posterior. How anyone can live in such a dark, conspiratorial fantasyland is beyond me.

The situation at the U.S. southern border is a mess now and has been for years, but Ball finds a need for hyperbole to make his point. “This year 2 million illegal aliens will enter this country virtually unchallenged,” he writes. “They are being shipped off to locations that the government refuses to disclose.”

Truth is, the number of aliens apprehended at the border for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, was 1.1 million, according to the Homeland Security Administration. But the majority of those caught were returned to Mexico. Of the near-record 188,829 crossings reported in June alone, 105,000 were deported.

Ball is apparently unaware of the theory of supply and demand. “Cars are 30 to 40% more costly than several months ago,” he writes, blaming this on the Biden administration. According to whom?

That the cost of vehicles, particularly used cars and trucks, has risen is undeniable, but that rise has little to do with inflation and nothing to do with Biden. A worldwide shortage of microchips, along with the disruptions in supply chains as a result of the global pandemic is the reason why production of new vehicles declined 25% from the same period last year, and could reach as high as 40%, according to Cox Automotive. Meanwhile, reports Edmunds.com, Inc., the price of used cars increased 27% over the same period, while new-car prices increased 5.4%. As long as demand remains so high while supply is low, prices are expected to continue to rise, but not at the exaggerated figures that Ball imagines.

“The Centers for Disease Control was once an agency charged with fighting exotic contagious diseases like yellow fever,” he writes. (News flash: COVID-19 is an exotic infectious disease.) “They have unconstitutionally assumed the power to shut down our economy and enslaved our population,” he continues. Can we really equate a plea to wear masks with human bondage?

I’ll skip over the mythical “Antifa thugs running wild in Los Angeles” and “the greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history” (Biden following through on President Trump’s regrettable surrender agreement with the Taliban) to get to his final point: “Biden wants to repeal your voice and your vote.”

It is not Biden and the Democrats who are proposing and passing legislation to restrict voting access but rather Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country.

And as far as restricting dissent, neither Biden nor any president has control of Google, Facebook, Twitter and You Tube; these are independent corporations, not government entities, and have a right to operate, within the law, as they choose. A healthy amount of dissent seems to percolate through all these sites, and there is no shortage of fervent criticism of Biden and his administration on television, on radio and in this very newspaper.

The sad thing is that some of it – like Ball’s article – is not based on facts or reality.

Parker Burroughs

Washington