You may have noticed of late that headlines scream about someone throwing someone else under the bus.
It’s a colorful metaphor which means avoiding blame by identifying someone else as the culprit and distancing oneself from said person, a common albeit reprehensible act that has come to be labeled as throwing someone under the bus.
People who trace the history of such things see a link to a 1960s philosophical thought experiment in which people debate throwing an innocent fat man from a trolley and under the wheels to stop its runaway travel and save remaining lives.
Today’s throwing people under the bus is more a political exercise as the weak, often cognitively dysfunctional leadership looks to avoid responsibility for unpleasant developments.
In a curious turn of late, sometimes the person thrown under said bus emerges with enough strength to return the favor.
Consider the ongoing inflation we are experiencing, 8.6 percent in May which is the highest since 1981. The monthly numbers were announced Friday. The whispers among the investing community had been to expect a lower number.
Peak inflation was their working hypothesis, although that’s not necessarily a good thing. Say inflation had checked in at 7 percent, that would have been much lower than the previous month, which could have been identified as a “peak.”
But should you be comfortable with 7-percent inflation, which cuts in half your purchasing power every 10 years?
You are not supposed to consider such things of course. You would have been told inflation had peaked and you should have been all warm and fuzzy, just the like the morons were when Obama prattled on about hope and change.
I can hope bad things happen to you and if they do, say you go from being healthy to sick, then both hope and change have come to pass, but neither is very desirable from your perspective.
But back to our metaphorical bus. The creatures of the Biden regime got the word days early on the inflation report and began leaking to expect bad news.
This was happening even as in the previous week Biden and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took turns throwing each other under the bus.
Yellen, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose low interest rates and buying of government debt also contributed to inflation, finally got around to admitting publicly that she got it wrong in predicting no inflation threat from such programs, as well as those $2,000-a-head stimulus bribes (payments).
But in excerpts from an advance copy of a Yellen book due out this fall, Yellen threw Clueless Joe under the Greyhound by saying she’d argued to have his $1.9 trillion stimulus plan cut by a third.
Meanwhile, Biden emerged from a meeting with current Fed Chair Jerome Powell and squarely put the blame for inflation on the Fed, which was running down the inflation tracks under Yellen, too,
This is a slight wrinkle for Clueless Biden, who most often blames Russia’s Putin for inflation and anything else going bad in these United States.
That whole Putin premise is ridiculous. Even economic neophytes knew that the Federal Reserve, with decades of keeping interest rates historically low, while at the same time allowing record growth in the money supply, were setting the stage for big price inflation.
All it needed was a spark to set afire all that tinder. That spark was the over-reaction to COVID-19, which simultaneously hampered supply lines, crimped manufacturing, then artificially goosed demand with the stimulus handouts.
Biden is giving Putin a break from duty under the bus. He even took a swipe at the formerly deified Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy, criticizing the golden boy for failing to heed warnings of a Russian invasion.
“There was no doubt,” said the clueless one at a fund-raising event. “And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it.”
Don’t worry about Zelenskyy, those tire marks acquired under the bus will rub off quickly.
If only we could anticipate such a quick end to inflation, no matter whom one wants to throw under the bus in blame for it.
Sam Ross Jr's site 