Tim Blair: Oily Joe’s cancer tale

He’s often distracted and confused, but you’d think US President Joe Biden would at least know something about his own physical health – except he plainly doesn’t, writes Tim Blair.

A spot of the old Covid is the least of Joe Biden’s problems. Last week the US President announced that he has cancer.

Apparently he caught it from oil, which would be a medical first.

As Biden tells it, he was exposed to the evil substance raining down from Delaware refineries when his mother dropped him off at grade school 70 years ago.

“The first frost, you knew what was happening,” Biden said last week in a speech about climate change.

“You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window.

US President Joe Biden coughs as he speaks to the travelling press on July 15 in Saudi Arabia. Picture: AFP

That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer.”

Note the present tense. As usual, Biden’s exhausted staff were forced to clarify matters. The President doesn’t have cancer, they explained. He’d previously had a few skin cancers removed, and it was those to which Biden referred.

Er, OK. But a 2021 medical report by White House physician Dr Kevin O’Connor mentioned Biden spending “a good deal of time in the sun in his youth” as the likely cause of those cancers. Nothing about oil.

More confusingly still, in April Biden told exactly the same story to blame oil for his asthma.

“This is the God’s truth,” he’d said. “You’d get in the car with a little frost on the window, turn on the windshield wiper. There’d be an oil slick. Not a joke.

“I have asthma and 80 per cent of the people who in fact we grew up with have asthma.”

Guess this explains why oncology wards are always full of wheezing motor mechanics. Who knew that instead of applying sunscreen, Australians should simply avoid all those lethal 10W-30 containers at the local servo?

If there’s any kind of point to Biden’s asthmatic carcinogen fantasies, it’s that oil is bad and the Great Green Transition is good.

“That’s the past,” he said last week in his oil cancer speech. “We’re going to get — we’re going to build a different future with one — one with clean energy, good-paying jobs.”

And one of the people who will guide the US to this utopia is Biden’s diversity hire, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, recently submitted to an interview with CNBC‘s Joe Kernen, who wondered how a fossil fuel-deprived US might cope with “what Europe is facing”.

“There are real possibilities that people might not have airconditioning during a heatwave, or in the winter that they may not have enough energy to heat their homes at this point,” Kernen said.

“When wind and solar won’t power the homes in Europe, how do we not use hydrocarbons to make sure that near-term these people aren’t either freezing or dying from the heat?”

In response, Buttigieg jabbered for a bit about hot weather in London and the Pacific Northwest before offering a telling admission. “This is what a transition looks like,” he said. “You can‘t flip a switch. You can’t do it overnight.”

So there you have it. Greens and teals and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek keep telling us that renewable energy is a pain-free path to economic and climate nirvana, but Buttigieg – one of the most powerful warmies on earth – knows that the green transition means dead people.

Or Democrat voters, as they are otherwise known. “He is going to move forward with every power available to him to make the change, and the shift, to clean energy,” White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy told CNN of Oily Joe’s green ­obsession.

“The president will make very clear, again, that this is an emergency.” An emergency is when your airconditioner won’t work during a heatwave or the heater dies when it’s snowing. It isn’t an emergency when global temperatures might be slightly warmer a few centuries down the track.

It might be a political emergency for Biden and his climate allies, however, if their policies push the US further in the direction of, say, Holland, Sri Lanka or Panama.

Speaking of Biden’s awesome powers, White House coronavirus ­response co-ordinator Ashish Jha last week provided an update on the US President’s condition following his Covid diagnosis.

“He slept well last night,” Jha told a press conference.

“He ate his breakfast and lunch. Fully. He actually showed me his plate.”

Most people stop doing that ­beyond the age of three, which gives you an idea of Biden’s current cognitive range.

Incidentally, take it as guaranteed that among responses to this piece – probably submitted after skimming the first three paragraphs – will be leftists shrieking about someone who hasn’t been in power since 2021. They are completely incapable of evaluating Biden on his own merits.

For example, last week someone presented Sydney Morning Herald columnist and Trump obsessive Peter FitzSimons with this Twitter challenge: “Without referencing Donald Trump, how would you rate Biden’s performance so far – and why?”

Fitzy’s reply: “6.5/10. Whatever his flaws and disappointments, President Biden is fundamentally decent, respects the US Constitution, and can be counted on NOT to urge the mob to storm the Capitol in November, should they lose the mid-terms.”

Transitioning to renewable energy might one day be realistic. One day. But for leftists, transitioning away from the Donald is impossible.