Month: November 2020

Only the Never Trumpers can say this out loud. Tim Miller on Nicolle Wallace’s show earlier today:

Miller: I think that people who watch this network and don’t watch Newsmax and OAN and Fox and read right wing media outlets, I don’t think realize how nuts this is. They’re talking about dump trucks with millions of votes being dropped off. I was watching Newsmax earlier today and every hour, 3 or 4 or 5 times, they are pressuring state legislators to not respect the vote and to try to overturn the vote in the electoral college.

Now this isn’t going to happen but there are tens of millions of viewers who are watching this that think this election is being stolen. The long term consequences of that are great. And the entire Republican Senate and House caucus is silent…

Wallace: … And let me tell you something, if the shoe were on the other foot, if Donald Trump had won with 6,7, 8 million votes in the popular vote, a decisive 300 plus electoral vote win, and Joe Biden had refused to concede, you know exactly what Republicans would have been doing. They would be trying to criminalize speech as slander.

I mean I cannot overstate the asymmetry of how each party fights. And this is a fight that needs to be fought on the Democrats part because letting this lie stand from Donald Trump and from the Republicans in congress means that Joe Biden will inherit a country in which millions of people will not think he is a legitimate president.

Miller: Yes, the asymmetry is real. People forget this but President Obama greeted Donald Trump two days I think after the election was called? Very quickly. And he tried to help with his transition.

The reason for this asymmetry, though Nicolle, is bottom up. I hate to say it but this is what Republican voters want. And Democratic voters just didn’t demand these sort of insane lies out of their candidates. And that’s what’s happening. These Republican officials are responding to what their voters want, that’s why Newsmax’s ratings are going up, that’s why Rand Paul gets 35, 000 retweets when he spreads absolutely crazy lies.

Democrats have to say they care about the Trump voters and just want to give them job security and health care and it’s ok, really, if they spit in our faces and call us names because they are salt of the earth working people who deserve respect and understanding. It’s very dicey to point out that the Trump voters are well … not very fine people who demand that they be told what they want to hear. These Never Trumpers can say it and I’m glad they do.

Speaking of asymmetry, I’m hearing quite a few people other than Donald Trump try to make the case that the Russia investigation was the Democrats’ version of Trump’s denial of the election results today. That is absurd. First of all, the Russia investigation was initiated by a bunch of Republican G-men, one of whom actually sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s election. In fact, if you asked most Democrats if they blamed James Comey or Vladimir Putin for Clinton’s loss, Comey would win by a mile. After all, he not only sabotaged Clinton he kept the Russia investigation secret during the election!

Virtually no one believed that the votes were changed or that Trump’s election was stolen. We were all very careful to use words like “interference” which is not the same thing at all. The concern was that Trump welcoming interference by a foreign power to help him win was just a teensy bit unethical and it was fair to wonder if some deal had been made to do it. Considering how he is trying to do end runs around the electoral college and use partisan legislators to usurp the will of the voters, I’d say that suspicion was well-founded. The man is a cheater — he’s doing it right now in front of our eyes. The fact that his loss was too big to pull it off doesn’t make him any less of a shameless, conniving fraudster.

So no, there is no symmetry on that either. It’s ridiculous. Democrats accepted the results of the election. They just wanted to know if the man who won owed a big favor to a foreign leader who doesn’t have the country’s best interests at heart. We’d have been fools not to follow that up.

Depressing but not surprising:

Greg Cruey thought he knew how to walk students through a presidential election. The social studies teacher has been working inside public-school classrooms for about two decades, guiding children through history-making 2008, as well as tumultuous 2016.

But 2020 shocked him.

Never before, Cruey said, has he seen such a high level of emotion from children — such blind devotion to their preferred candidate, most often Donald Trump. Nor has he seen anything like this level of mistrust, which he said is persisting among students weeks after the results of the election supposedly were finalized.

“I still get the kid that wants to know if it’s true that 100,000 dead people voted in Michigan, or if a computer stole our votes,” Cruey said. “The majority are uncomfortable or unhappy with the election. Many of them think there’s something fishy behind it.”

Teachers are always on the front lines of the fight against misinformation. But this election year poses extra challenges: For one thing, conspiracy theories — some of them promoted by the president — are running rampant on social media sites favored by young people.AD

For another, given that most schools are operating fully or partly online because of the coronavirus pandemic, teachers have fewer resources and less ability to reach the children they’re meant to be guiding through a world filled with misleading or false information.

“In the virtual world, you’re basically speaking through a microphone into people’s homes, so you might have 20 kids but actually 60 people listening to you,” Cruey said. “You don’t really know what’s going on.”

The 60-year-old educator is in a sticky position.

He teaches middle-schoolers in West Virginia’s deep-red McDowell County, where some 80 percent of the votes went to Trump in the November election. He is an outlier, one of the few people in his neighborhood — 30 minutes away in another county that is just as red as McDowell — to keep Joe Biden signs on their lawns.AD

The students he teaches, and their parents, can easily figure out his political views. All they need do is check the Internet, where a clip of him interviewing and praising then-candidate Hillary Clinton in November 2015 still circulates. So Cruey has developed a strategy for dealing with those who discover his Democratic leanings.

“I tell kids on a regular basis there’s no one out there that fully represents me or my political views,” Cruey said. “And the same parents that know I have a Biden sign also know I’m a church musician, [and] that my wife and I work at a Christian camp in the summer. [So] they reserve judgment.”

As Trump continues to promote baseless claims of sweeping voter fraud and to contest the fact of his election loss, tens of millions of Americans have come to doubt President-elect Biden’s legitimacy, as well as the stability and fidelity of the nation’s democratic process. Opinion splits sharply along partisan lines: 70 percent of Republicans say the election was unfair, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, and 90 percent of Democrats say it was both fair and free.AD

Now, Trump’s campaign of misinformation is affecting the nation’s youngest, too.

Cruey teaches roughly 95 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in McDowell County Schools, which enrolls 2,600 and is offering a mix of in-person and online learning. Until recently, when he was forced to enter quarantine after a fellow employee tested positive for the coronavirus, Cruey reported to his classroom five days a week, where he led social studies and West Virginia studies for the 40 percent of the group that had chosen face-to-face instruction. The rest followed the lessons online.

For all three grades, according to state standards, Cruey is supposed to teach “who our leaders are and how we got them,” he said. So, in the weeks before the 2020 election, he offered lessons on the electoral college. He gave kids a “Campaign Issues Worksheet” that asked their views on subjects including red-flag gun laws (provisions by which courts can order someone’s firearms taken away temporarily if the person is deemed a danger to self or others) and whether police officers should wear body cameras. And he answered election questions — the most popular query was whether the rapper Kanye West was actually a candidate (yes).AD

It quickly emerged that the views in Cruey’s classroom mirrored the political breakdown of McDowell County, which sits at the southernmost edge of West Virginia and is home to roughly 18,000 people, 90 percent of whom are White. In Cruey’s classrooms, informal polls — “Who do you guys want to be president?” — revealed that about 85 percent of children preferred the Republican incumbent.

That didn’t surprise Cruey, who remembers teaching the 2016 election in McDowell. The first hint that this year would prove extra challenging came when a sixth-grader, who was learning from home, messaged mid-class: “What has Joe Biden done in 46 years to make him worth electing president?”

Cruey thought to himself: That’s not something an 11-year-old would say.

“I know the family, they’re very right-wing, so I know the parents are sitting there watching,” Cruey said. But what could he do? “The grown-ups who are stomping their feet and gritting their teeth as I teach — that’s their right.”

He kept going, moving on to the next topic and set of facts as quickly as he could: a battle-tested tactic for avoiding conflict that he’s developed over years of teaching.AD

But he was less successful Nov. 9, the Monday after the election.

He began that lesson by explaining the Associated Press’s long history of calling presidential elections. He showed the students a BBC article debunking the QAnon-promoted conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems election software caused President Trump’s defeat.

Forty minutes in, he shared a video of Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris and Biden giving their acceptance speeches. And that’s when Facebook messenger pinged.

“This parent sent me a message to say her child was not going to be listening to this stuff about Biden and Harris,” Cruey said. “Then she just disconnected her kid.”

I know I don’t have to tell any of you that this is all wrong. It’s going to take a lot of effort to unwind this level of brainwashing.

I grew up in a conservative household. And I’m sure that as a little kid I probably assumed the right wing talking points of my parents. But the counter culture was very strong and penetrated from a very early age and I was a liberal hippie from at least the age of 12 or so. I have a sneaking suspicion the same thing will happen with a lot of these kids. And there are many more entrance points to liberal and progressive culture than there used to be, from online gathering places like Twitch and TikTok to movement politics that appeal to young people like Black Lives Matter, climate change and gun safety. Not all of these red state kids will go that way (they didn’t back in the day either) but I would guess that quite a few will. The world has changed a lot since I was young, but rebelling against your parents is perennial.

If you missed Chris Krebs, the lifelong Republican and director of US cyber agency, who Trump fired, his assessment in unequivocal. one would think he’d be a good validator of the integrity of this election. Unfortunately, most of the right wingers will never hear him because he isn’t appearing on OAN, Newmax and Fox.

The Bulwark offers a helpful taxonomy of the new Trump Trutherism. These people are so … exhausting:

This belief that the election was stolen has become the new Trutherism, and it will be the basis of Trumpism (and perhaps a litmus test for the right) from this day onward.

So a quick Taxonomy of the phenomenon is in order. There is some overlap and the lines, as usual in the age of Trump, are often blurred.

I. Insanity.

This includes the pure, undiluted bat shit crazy theories about hidden servers, and communist-Hugo Chavez-from-the-grave, vote-switching machines, and deep state plots. In other words Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani stuff.

(Make sure you read Mike Dunford’s piece in this morning’s Bulwark: on the latest ‘Kraken” lawsuit filing. It’s even dumber and crazier than you suspected. “This complaint reads like it was drafted at the afterparty for a three-day QAnon convention.”)

II. Stupidity/Gullibility.

Some of the election denialism is pure idiocracy, which we have written about here and here. But some folks are simply ignorant about the way elections are run and votes are counted. (Are you offended? I’d refer you the doctrine that “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”)

So you get stupid stuff like this, which is easily refuted here and here.

And this:

III. Cowardice

Hello, darkness, our old friend. As usual, one of the reasons that Trump thinks he can get away with his firehose of falsehoods is that he knows that most Republicans will cravenly remain in a fetal crouch.

The vast, vast majority of elected Republicans know that Joe Biden was elected. They know that there was no systematic fraud or massive mysterious dumps. They know all this, and could affirm the integrity of our democratic process, but they don’t want to make the Truthers mad.

Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, for example, is not a stupid man. He simply lacks a spine. He fits well in the modern GOP.

IV. Mendacity/Cynicism

If Rudy and Sidney are somewhat lonely in defining the deranged end of the spectrum, the other end is crowded by many of the usual figures of Republican mendacity: Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, Rush Limbaugh, Maria Bartiromo, Mark Levin, Matt Schlapp, and the publications associated with Ben Domenech.

These folks are neither crazy or dumb. But they are willing to play along to con the rubes and set themselves up for what comes next. They may not be Truthers themselves, but they are willing to wink at it, and even traffic in it. Like this, which seems to assume the stupidity of the base:

Relying on gullibility has become a business model for some of the media on the right . Via the NYT: “The King of Trump TV Thinks You’re Dumb Enough to Buy It.”

All successful TV programmers have some mercenary in them, of course, but even by those standards, Mr. Ruddy is extreme. He has turned Newsmax into a pure vehicle for Trumpism, attacking Fox News from the right for including occasional dissenting voices. And when Trumpism turned this month from an electoral strategy into a hallucinatory attempt to overturn the election, Mr. Ruddy saw opportunity: Newsmax, available on cable in most American households and streaming online, became the home of alternate reality.

So, where does Trump himself fall on this scale? Does he believe the insane conspiracy theories of hidden servers and communist plots? Or is he counting on his base to be stupid/gullible enough to buy his whining?

Is he genuinely nuts or is this all just a ploy to avoid being seen as a loser? Or are his attacks on the election a marketing gambit to launch his Next Big Grift as he tries to monetize his grievances and perhaps launch a comeback bid.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post were out over the holiday with deep dives into the post-election moves by Donald Trump and various players around the country as the president refuses to concede and one lawsuit after another is rejected by the courts. They are harrowing tales of a president (whom one source in the Post describes as “Mad King George, muttering ‘I won, I won, I won'”) and a group of lower-level Republicans and judges around the country who stepped into the breach to stop him from overturning the election results.

The Post’s narrative takes us down the White House rabbit hole to show just how demented Trump has been ever since election night, when it became clear that his strategy to take advantage of the “red mirage” wasn’t working. You may recall that Republicans had successfully kept certain swing states from counting mail-in ballots until the day of the election, the idea being that an early lead from in-person votes might give the impression that Trump had “won” at least 270 Electoral College votes and could declare victory on election night. This stupid plan was thwarted by the Fox News decision desk calling Arizona for Joe Biden, not that it stopped Trump from emerging at 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 4, to declare victory anyway.

His behavior ever since has been predictably daft, disseminating obscure voter-fraud conspiracy theories, empowering his maniacal personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani (whom the Post says Trump considers a “peer”) and generally behaving like a spoiled, petulant child who simply cannot admit that he lost. Even after four long years of debasing our government and political culture, this would almost be a sad denouement — if he weren’t also brainwashing tens of millions of Americans to believe that the election was rigged and cannot be trusted. Unless he wins, of course.

The New York Times reported on the state and local Republican officials who withstood tremendous pressure to usurp the will of the voters and overturn the results for Donald Trump. Some of the stories are real profiles in courage, such as the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, whom Trump called an “enemy of the people” in his rambling Thanksgiving Day press conference and who now has to have bodyguards due to all the threats against his family. But it didn’t stop with the big names: There was an effort to get GOP officials all over the country to raise doubts about the election results and take actions to overturn them.

I guess it never occurred to any of the geniuses on the Trump team that asking these people to say the election was sabotaged would mean indicting themselves as incompetent stewards of the process. Most of them were not willing to destroy their own professional reputations for Trump’s quixotic need to soothe his battered psyche. Sadly, it will not be surprising if many of them lose their jobs anyway. It’s fair to assume they will be seen by some of their constituents as turncoats for allowing the massive fraud that (according to this insane narrative) cost Trump millions of votes in at least half a dozen different states.

The Times also lauds the judges at both the state and federal level who have dismissed one bumbling, amateurish lawsuit after another. Really, no one should have ever expected them to do otherwise. The fact that many of us actually felt anxious about that shows how low the bar is these days.

Despite protestations from plenty of establishment voices, none of this is a sign that the “guardrails” worked. It’s clear from both articles that the only thing keeping Donald Trump and the Republican Party from overturning this election through propaganda and backdoor political power plays is the fact that too many swing states were not close enough for their strategy to work. Nobody should be relieved by this outcome. It’s only remarkable because the election wasn’t that close. And this unfortunately gives Trump a platform to be a martyr.

One of the most unattractive aspects of Donald Trump’s personality is the incessant whining that everything is “unfair” and that he’s a victim of conspiracies and plots and endless nefarious attempts to take him down. It has always surprised me that his unwillingness to take any responsibility for the fact that his presidency is a dumpster fire — or for literally anything else — doesn’t bother the members of his base who wear T-shirts that say “F**k your feelings” and take such pleasure in making the “snowflake libs” cry.

For all their macho posturing, right-wingers forever cast themselves as victims. Going back to the antebellum South and the subsequent “lost cause” of the Confederacy, and then forward to the modern conservative movement that insists liberals will grab their guns, force them to abandon their religion and destroy their “culture,” they’re constantly whining that they don’t get any respect.

Once again, Trump speaks to this massive set of insecurities. But standard conservative victimhood is changing into something else with Trump’s crusade to delegitimize the election and convince tens of millions of people there is a conspiracy to disenfranchise them.

Yale professor Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarian regimes, appeared on CNN this weekend and explained just how pernicious this latest round of victimization really is:

You’re telling people, basically Trump voters, whose votes were counted, that they are the victims and in doing so you are reversing the basic truth of American history, which is that the people who are at real risk of being disenfranchised are African Americans. You are reversing that story and that in itself is not only tragic, and unfair, but it is also dangerous.

When you teach people who have power that they are victims, you are risking people who have power to go outside the system the next time. That they will expect that their own party will and should cheat the next time.

Trump has made it clear that he believes the vote was stolen from him in cities with large Black populations — Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Atlanta. Basically, he’s set up a counter-narrative that his white voters have been disenfranchised by Black people. His eager accomplices in the Republican Party are already taking advantage of this grotesque inversion of reality for their own ends:

You can imagine this happening in Republican states all over the country. This epic whiner will serve as a martyr to the cause of white disenfranchisement, which will inspire the MAGA legions to demand that their leaders summon the will to win by any means necessary. This isn’t the end of this destructive pattern.

My Salon column.

Bookmark this one folks for the day Hiatt forgets who these people really are and “pivots” to Village wisdom that says both sides do it:

Let’s say you’re a Republican senator who claims to support democracy and U.S. leadership in the world.

Let’s imagine, too, that you’ve spent four years excusing and supporting a president who fawned over North Korea’s odious dictator, encouraged China’s ruling tyrant to build his concentration camps, took the word of Russia’s strongman over U.S. intelligence agencies and celebrated the Saudi despot who orchestrated the dismemberment of a dissident journalist.

And let’s posit that, on top of all that, you’ve been a profile in cowardice as your president tried to nullify a democratic election here at home.

Now the president-elect appoints a team of seasoned, moderate foreign policy experts who support democracy and American leadership in the world.

How do you respond?

Like this, maybe? “I’m sure I will have my differences with President-elect Joe Biden and his team over the coming years. But we share many fundamental principles. His nominees are beyond well-qualified.AD

“For the good of our country, I wish them every success.”

In our dreams.

The jockeying for the post-Trump future of the Republican Party has started, says Post columnist Max Boot. (Video: Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome/Photo: Johnathan Newton/Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)

Here is the way Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) actually greeted the new team: “Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.”

I suppose this sour, graceless tweet shouldn’t surprise us. It shouldn’t surprise us to see Rubio, along with Tom Cotton (Ark.), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and other Republican senators, disparaging the incoming Biden team. They are now in the opposition, after all. In an ideal world, constructive criticism from the opposition might help keep an administration sharp and focused. In a USA Today op-ed following the tweet, Rubio said his main concern is the new team will be too soft on China.

But there is something particularly galling about this instant pivot to attack mode from senators who couldn’t even bring themselves to acknowledge the results of the election — who have stood by or cheered as President Trump has attempted to overturn those results.

Rubio obviously knows that Trump lost clearly and convincingly, in the electoral college as well as the popular vote. Rubio has been silent as the president claims, with no basis, that the election was stolen. He applauded as Trump attempted to make that case in court, where his lawyers were turned away again and again because they had no evidence.

And when Trump then pressed state and local officials — the secretary of state in Georgia, legislators in Pennsylvania, the Board of State Canvassers in Michigan — to nullify the results, Rubio offered no objection.

If Trump’s coup attempt has failed, it is because his defeat was so decisive — and because those state and local officials had the integrity and courage to resist Trump’s pressure.

But here’s the essential point: Almost no Republicans on the national stage had the integrity or courage to offer backup for these local officials. Almost none of them gave the public any reason to hope that if Trump’s effort to steal the election state by state had gained traction, they would have stood against it.

It wouldn’t have been difficult. Rubio only had to say, “My fellow Americans, this election was not rigged or stolen. There was no communist conspiracy to alter the results. We should be proud that, in the face of a pandemic, we turned out to vote in record numbers, and our votes were counted conscientiously and honestly by thousands of fair-minded Americans across the country.”

Instead, he followed the standard evasive Republican script, legitimizing Trump’s conspiracy theories without parroting them word for word. “Democrats have contested & gone to court after many elections,” he tweeted. “Like any candidate, President Trump is well within his legal rights to request recounts, contest unlawful votes and if he has clear evidence of widespread misconduct or irregularities take them to court.”

After such a near-miss of a constitutional crisis, you might hope Rubio would opt for a few days of quiet self-reflection — or at least abashed silence.

You might hope that he would reach out with an offer of cooperation to Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken — a man with a long record of bipartisanship and commitment to human rights and free speech, values Rubio claims to champion.

You might hope Rubio would at least wait until the current president had the decency to concede before pronouncing the next one a failure.

But no. Rubio is already suiting up for the politics of destruction, already certain that this new team will preside over America’s decline.

It’s enough to make you despair that he may be right, though not for the reasons he would have us believe.

Fired election cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs appeared Sunday night on “60 Minutes” to publicly dispel the “nonsense” flowing from the Trump campaign team about voting machine manipulation.

His agency saw no evidence of system hacking or compromise “on, before, or after Nov. 3,” he told Scott Pelly of CBS.

With 95 percent of 2020 ballots on paper (up from 82% in 2016), there is an auditable paper trail in place to reveal any manipulation of machine counts.

“That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote,” Krebs said. Hand recounts in Georgia confirmed machine tallies there.

“And that tells you what?” Pelly asked.

“That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count side.”

If there was some foreign algorithm flipping votes, it did not work. Most likely, it did not exist, Krebs said. Claims by Rudy Giuliani and the president’s legal paper tigers are “farcical.”

Allegations of votes counted in Germany? Venezuelan software? Communist money?

“The proof is in the ballots,” Krebs responds. “The recounts are consistent with the initial count, and to me that’s further evidence, that’s confirmation, that the systems used in the 2020 election performed as expected, and the American people should have 100% confidence in their vote.”

For months after Ohio went for Bush in 2004, allegations flew that the election had been stolen there. People cited statistical anomalies found in studies and totals diverging from exit polls. Rumors flew of voting machines vulnerable to hacking. But that’s different from proving they were hacked. The distributed nature of America’s election system makes manipulation both difficult to pull off and to conceal. Too many people need to be involved.

Get back to me, I said, when you have a live perp who confesses and had the means, motive, and opportunity to do it. I’m still waiting.

With Donald Trump now focused on how he exits the White House some way that does not lead to the Big House, Democrats turn to what a Joe Biden administration might do to improve people’s lives.

“To me the most important thing that Biden is up against is understanding the economy and this America through the eyes of young people,” Paola Ramos told MSNBC’s “AM Joy.” Millennials and Gen Z voters, especially people of color, are suffering the most under the Trump pandemic, Ramos believes. Racism, social justice and COVID-19 are foremost on their minds. More so than the economy, she insists. Policies alone will not convince them to invest themselves in an America they see failing them.

This is a “spiritual question” for Anand Giridharadas. “Does someone like Joe Biden, who radiates personal decency, and who is made personal decency the lodestar of the campaign … is he willing to fight for structural decency?” he asks, echoing concerns Ramos expressed. “Because. unfortunately, personal decency doesn’t actually get rid of anybody’s medical debt, doesn’t actually get anybody relief from the many overlapping sources of pain.”

Newly elected Republicans sound the same as old elected Republicans such as former Sen. Roy Blunt, observes James Downie of the Washington Post. Blunt arose during a period when Republicans trashed an economy left in decent shape by a Democrat. Now Biden has to clean up after another Republican who trashed an improving economy.

But this Capitol two-step is not progress of the kind either Ramos or Giridharadas seek. It will not itself end minority rule under Republicans whose legislative imperative is plunder. Nor will it address inequalities built into the system. The country needs transformational, structural change more than just another cycle of economic repair.

Too many Democrats have blamed Mitch McConnell for too long for failing in that, says Giridharadas. Biden needs to demonstrate he gets that not only by being decent himself but by fighting for structural decency. Even Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York gets Democrats’ need to go big, beyond the milquetoast policies of its recent past. But he’ll need a majority in the Senate to do it, Schumer hedges, and he’s right. But Democrats get no credit for talking big in the abstract and delivering small in reality.

Talk is cheap. So are show votes. Fighting like they mean it even if they fail will gain Democrats more street cred than big talk backed by excuses.

And there’s nothing wrong with that:

When he was running for president, Joseph R. Biden Jr. said it was time for a pet to be put back in the White House.

First it was announced that Champ and Major, the German shepherds belonging to the president-elect and future first lady Jill Biden, would roam the White House. And now, after an absence of more than a decade, a cat is set to also join the ranks of presidential pets, Jane Pauley of “CBS Sunday Morning” reported on Twitter on Friday.

In an interview with Fox 5 in Washington, D.C., Dr. Biden hinted that if her husband won the presidency, she would not mind getting a cat.

“I’d love to get a cat,” she said. “I love having animals around the house.”

The cat’s breed and name were not immediately available. Representatives for Mr. Biden did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Dog twitter was not amused by this news, decrying the decision as Biden trying to be all things to all people. They are wrong. Just saying.

It was announced earlier today that Biden hurt his ankle playing with Major and twitter erupted with tweets that it was Major’s way of saying that he was not amused one bit with this decision.

My reply: