The Biden team dosen’t think so
People pay hard-earned money to attend sideshows. Moviegoers paid money last year to see Bradley Cooper wind up a carnival geek hired to bite the heads off live chickens. (No chickens were harmed in the filming of Nightmare Alley.)
The Biden team once was reluctant to draw any more attention to America’s Most Radical “bit players” across the aisle. But with the GOP taking control of the House in January, Politico reports the White House thinks it is time to throw a spotlight on the rising stars of the Republican freak show. Among them, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
“We could not sit by and fail to challenge that, because their party was negligent,” an unnamed “Biden ally” tells Politico. “He talked with historians and advisers about it. Pretending these threats didn’t exist would only help them grow.”
The Republicans’ narrow midterms win in the House has put prominent conservatives atop major committees poised to launch an onslaught of GOP-led investigations into the administration. The third presidential candidacy of Donald Trump has also provided the White House with fodder to warn about MAGA Republican figures taking on positions of prominence. And with Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, allowing both Greene and Trump back on the platform, that microphone will only continue to get louder, though the former president has signaled he is sticking to his own social media site, Truth Social.
That stance has been especially true after Trump’s dinner with the rapper Ye, formally known as Kanye West, and white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
The White House may (if Politico is to be believed) make Greene, Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), and other extremists back in positions of power the face of the GOP.
“As President Biden has said about ultra MAGA officials’ dangerous conspiracy theories, gaslighting, and violent rhetoric, we need to ‘be honest with each other and with ourselves’ that ‘too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.’ And ‘we, the people, must say this is not who we are,’” said White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates in a statement.
There are still better angels in America. These are not them (below).
You think they’re kidding? Biden’s Independence Hall speech was a big clue that he does not think so. With Republicans’ narrow House majority in January, Biden will have a needle to thread in 2023 and 2024. He has signaled his belief that he can work across the aisle with the saner of the bunch. As for the MAGA faction whose clout will grow next year, if Biden can “cut ’em out” (as Frankie Laine put it) for branding as extremists, by weakening their influence he may be doing both Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and himself a favor.
“When the president first started using the term ‘MAGA Republican’ back in May, a lot of pundits, a lot of people thought it wouldn’t work,” White House senior adviser Anita Dunn said recently on Meet the Press. “But it was a very effective strategy for raising for the American people the hazards of going down that path with democracy denial, with the threats of political violence to achieve political ends.”
It is left to Democrats to evoke the country’s better angels in defense against its darker impulses. I recently read a March 1965 speech by President Lyndon Johnson in defense of “the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.” LBJ had set himself the task of enacting the Voting Rights Act. Passed with Republican help, decades later the law is under assault by Republicans:
This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: “All men are created equal”—”government by consent of the governed”—”give me liberty or give me death.” Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories. In their name Americans have fought and died for two centuries, and tonight around the world they stand there as guardians of our liberty, risking their lives.
Those words are a promise to every citizen that he shall share in the dignity of man. This dignity cannot be found in a man’s possessions; it cannot be found in his power, or in his position. It really rests on his right to be treated as a man equal in opportunity to all others. It says that he shall share in freedom, he shall choose his leaders, educate his children, and provide for his family according to his ability and his merits as a human being.
Don’t count on hearing anything resembling that from the GOP anytime soon.