Punxsutawney Phil has made his call — six more weeks of winter! Of course, this was in Pennsylvania, so maybe we can fudge a little bit here in Eastern Illinois. This day is rooted in the Pennsylvania Dutch country’s German population. Since 1887, Phil has predicted 20 springs and 104 winters, but has been right only 40% of the time.
But our subject this day is not the rodent nor the superstitions of long ago Pennsylvanians. In 1993, a movie called Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, was released and has since become one of the modern classics. This movie’s plot cannot be briefly explained, but for those who have never seen it, the following gives a hint of the problems the “hero” encountered. It chronicled the day of Murray, a cynical weatherman from Pittsburgh, who traveled to Punxsutawney to report on Phil’s prediction. Having predicted a blizzard to miss the area, Phil Connors (Murray’s role), is forced to stay in the small town when the storm hits after all.
The next day, Connors woke up to February 2 again, and he then replayed his activities of the “previous” day. This continued to happen again and again, with the weatherman trying all sorts of ways to escape to endless loop of Groundhog Day. Eventually, after many iterations of the day, the movie has a happy ending with Connors and his girl realizing they are in love.
How does this inform us today about the political scene? With a little adaptation, we see the same things happening that have happened before as Joe Biden settles into his role of President. Only the things that have occurred took place before, during the administration of Barack Obama, in which Biden was Vice-President.
If there were a time warp, some might think we were back in the days before Donald Trump as President, as many of those in Obama’s administration now find themselves in the Biden camp. Just a few of the familiar faces include Jen Psaki, now Biden’s spokesperson who was in Obama’s State Department. John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State in his second term, is now Biden’s head of climate policy, a Cabinet-level position.
Those are just two of the most visible, for many others are now serving in the new administration after being in the previous Democratic one. A short list includes Ron Klain, Tom Vilsack, Janet Yellen, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Avril Haines, Lloyd Austin, Alejandro Mayrokas, Samantha Power, Antony Blinken, Susan Rice (the serial liar about Benghazi) — about 60%, according to one estimate, of Biden’s appointments have connections to Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office.
You could be excused for thinking of being in a time warp if you see familiar faces in Washington, D. C., a kind of Groundhog Day repetition of jobs and job fillers.
But that is not all. In his first two weeks as top gun, Biden has also reached into the past and brought about policies that had been jettisoned under former President Trump. Obama tried to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump revived it, and now it is dead again, along with a minimum of 11,000 jobs and perhaps 26,000 positions in related businesses. Fracking was a no-no under Obama, but flourished under Trump, but Biden has now put a freeze on that policy, at least on federal land. Two states hit hardest will be Pennsylvania and New Mexico. Our political Groundhog Day is repeating itself.
Add to those days of yore being brought back are the Paris Accords, a climate agreement that Trump left but is now brought back by Biden. On inauguration day, five executive orders were signed which reversed the previous administration’s attempts to restrict illegal immigration and control illegals within the United States, a returning to Obama’s encouraging of a country without borders.
Also changed was the census counting illegal aliens for the apportionment of the House of Representatives, which Trump claimed should not be done as illegals had no right to such representation. Biden also rescinded the 1776 Commission, a Commission intended to get back to teaching true American History, in order to return to a politically correct but factually false look at the past.
Also restored is the Obama era policy about transgenderism in the military. And Biden has abandoned the “Mexico City Policy”, which prohibited the use of American aid for abortions in other nations. Again, this redoes the Obama ideas about using taxpayer money for the abortion industry.
Construction of the wall on our southern border was canceled by one of Biden’s executive orders, reversing the policy and practice of the Trump White House, reverting back to the open borders of the Obama years.
And we are now again to rejoin the World Health Organization after Trump pulled us out, returning us to the previous administration’s financial support for the now-discredited policies the WHO took concerning the Chinese virus.
We are not done with our adapted political Groundhog Day. Biden has promised many more executive orders intended to wipe out the gains of the Trump years. There are at least as many more in the works as has already been done; in fact, Biden has already signed more such orders in his first two weeks than the previous five Presidents did in their first 100 days, combined. The President who pledged not to govern as a “dictator” through executive orders is going to continue to do so, bringing us back again to the Obama years, years of stifling regulations, stagnation in the economy and lower employment numbers.
It took a long time for the cynical weatherman in Groundhog Day to break the cycle of repeating what happened and what went wrong. Pray and work that our present political culture does not take years to right itself. To be caught in this time warp, the endless loop of failed policies and failed personnel is to invite the whirlwind of national failure.