No, Biden didn't just surrender to the Omicron variant

Of course, as noted above, the actual message of Biden’s remarks was roughly the opposite of this: The president said that the federal government has not been doing enough to combat the pandemic, it will now be doing more, and should its efforts prove inadequate in certain regions, state governments should alert the federal government to the problem, and it will pursue corrective measures.

Depressingly, an inordinate number of misleading quote tweets came from left-wing journalists and pundits. If a progressive news junkie was on Twitter Monday, odds are their feeds were clogged with commentary on the president’s supposed disavowal of responsibility for public-health policy and this extraordinary development’s implications for our sorrowful republic.

To be sure, the viral spread of the Omicron variant is a bit more important than that of misleading tweets. And the failure of individual journalists to seek the clip’s full context before sharing dire interpretations of its import is understandable. On Twitter, the incentive to rapidly comment on apparently scandalous, ideologically affirming video clips — without first performing any basic journalistic due diligence — is incredibly strong; I’ve fallen prey to it plenty of times. And RealMac’s clip of Biden didn’t cut him off in mid-sentence or anything; the president really did rehearse a somewhat absurd, conservative trope in claiming that “there is no federal solution” to the COVID pandemic.