As surely as day follows night, a presidential visit follows any major disaster in the United States, so it’s no surprise that US president Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden plan, as reported at Politico, to personally “survey storm damage” from Hurricanes Fiona and Ian, and “meet with officials,”  in Puerto Rico and Florida.

That’s always how it goes, and it’s always a bad idea.

I understand WHY it happens. It doesn’t happen because a president thinks a disaster area is a great place to campaign for re-election or for his party’s candidates. It happens because a president’s opponents will paint him as callous, uncaring, and out of touch if he doesn’t get on a plane and go through the motions of comforting the afflicted.

But presidential visits to disaster areas don’t comfort the afflicted, they afflict the afflicted.

How many planes full of urgently needed cargo and people will be delayed by the security measures around Air Force One’s arrival, presence, and departure?

How many cops and other first responders will spend their time providing motorcade security and so forth when they could have been helping displaced and distressed Puerto Ricans and Floridians get back on their feet? How badly will essential traffic get delayed by the presidential circus?

Whatever you think about federal disaster aid, it’s also worth considering how many destroyed homes could be replaced with the money spent to fly in a political sight-seer and his entourage.

Joe Biden doesn’t need to personally “survey the damage.” Plenty of other people are doing that right now, and producing reports on it for him to read.

If he needs to “meet with officials,” he has numerous telephone/Internet conferencing options at his disposal — options that don’t require those officials to deal with a real emergency AND a presidential visit emergency when they owe their full attention to the real emergency.

Unlike many, I don’t normally associate politicians with words like “leadership” and “courage.” But if Joe Biden wanted to put those qualities on display, he’d issue a statement along these lines:

“I won’t be visiting Puerto Rico and Florida this week. They’re busy.  They’ve got work to do. Anything I could do for them would best be done from the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. I’m going to stay out of their way, wish them well, and help from here. If that’s bad politics, so be it.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its eighth month, the European Union scrambles for energy to heat its homes and power its industry in the coming winter, the US and China continue to rattle sabers at each other over Taiwan, and smaller actual and potential conflicts rage around the world, it seems like a good time to take stock of two old, busted, worn-out terms: “American hegemony” and “unipolar world.”

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, the Russian Federation’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov  condemned both: “[A]t some point, having declared victory in the Cold War, Washington elevated itself almost to the position of the messenger of the Lord God on Earth, who has no obligations, but only the ‘sacred’ right to act with impunity.”

Washington, Lavrov declared, is trying to “stop the march of history” against “sovereign states ready to defend their national interests … resulting in the creation of an equal, socially-oriented, multipolar architecture.”

While Lavrov and the government he represents clearly have a hand in the empire business themselves, he’s not wrong in pointing out the US regime’s hubris, which stretches back to well before the end of the Cold War.

In fact, notions of a “unipolar world” and “American hegemony” were always delusional. While the US came out of World War 2 in better shape than other world powers and ruthlessly exploited its advantageous position to extend political and military tentacles toward every corner of the earth. But it never achieved those two goals despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars and the endings of millions of lives in the pursuit.

With the Russian empire trying in vain to stave off final collapse, the US empire clearly in terminal decline, the EU threatening to come apart at the seams, and any near-future Chinese imperial ambitions likely to fail, the future of humanity might best be served by discarding the notion of empire itself. A 200-year-old poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley points in the right direction:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.

That’s how all empires end, though usually only after stealing and wasting untold quantities of  blood and treasure from both their opponents and their subjects.

Governments — especially states with the ambition to expand their rule across mutually agreed turf lines, which all of them become at some point — are the pedestal upon which empires stand and the component parts of which empires are built. They are not our benefactors. We are their victims.

So long as we continue to tolerate political government, we deny ourselves peace and prosperity.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Arrests at the southern border will set new records this year,” Joe Walsh reports at Forbes. “Border Patrol apprehended 1.998 million people at the U.S.-Mexico border from October to August, already blowing past the 1.659 million arrested in all of fiscal year 2021, which was the agency’s busiest year on record.”

Republicans have noticed, but their response is, well, a bit odd.

US Senator John Thune (R-SD) blames Joe Biden’s “de facto open border policies.”

US Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) blames Biden’s “amnesty agenda and open border policies” not only for “record-breaking illegal [sic] immigration” but for a supposed “fentanyl crisis.”

In what universe does “more arrests than ever before” translate to “open border policies?” And how does the seizure of “9,962 thousand pounds” (I don’t know if that’s a typo or if Scott really means 9.9 million pounds) of fentanyl translate to an “unchecked deluge of drugs pouring into the United States?”

Our mutual friend Bob doesn’t drink, and I can prove it — see that trash can full of empty bourbon bottles on his back porch? Airtight case! High-quality deductive sleuthing on my part. You’re welcome.

Look, I get it: Republicans are miffed that after trying to out-Democrat the Democrats on immigration authoritarianism for 20 years,  finally nominating life-long Democrat Donald Trump as a “Republican” for president in 2016 to get the job done, they STILL lag Barack Obama and Joe Biden on pretty much every “immigration enforcement” metric.

But the immigration and fentanyl “crises” aren’t due to insufficiently vigorous enforcement.  People are going to travel, and use drugs, no matter how much effort the state puts into trying to  stop them and no matter how many are arrested.

The notional “fentanyl crisis” comes down to fentanyl being more powerful than other opioids and therefore easier to smuggle — because smaller quantities are needed — past US drug enforcers.

Scott’s solution isn’t to endorse ending the disastrous war on drugs. Instead, he’s introduced no fewer than three bills to step up the very “drug enforcement” that makes fentanyl an attractive alternative to traditional, less dangerous, opioids.

Our choice isn’t between “secure borders” and a “drug-free America” on one hand, or “open borders” and a “fentanyl crisis” on the other.

Our choice is between open borders and legal drug use on one hand, or open borders and illegal drug use, plus an expensive and overbearing police state on the other.

Politicians — Republican and Democrat alike — clearly prefer the latter.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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