Republicans plan “Jan. 6 hearings” on age
Tired: Benghazi-Benghazi-Benghazi. “But her emails.”
Wired: Ageism.
“Joe Biden is better on his worst day than Donald Trump is on his best day,” Lawrence O’Donnell noted Monday night, referencing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s accomplishments in office and physical condition when he ran for a fourth presidential term.
There are serious stakes for these United States in this fall’s elections, particularly regarding who wins the White House. But Republicans are proving themselves no more serious today than they were in 2016, 2018, 2020 or 2022. They plan to campaign on ageism.
Paul Krugman wrote on Monday, Lincoln’s birthday:
But watching the frenzy over President Biden’s age, I am, for the first time, profoundly concerned about the nation’s future. It now seems entirely possible that within the next year, American democracy could be irretrievably altered.
And the final blow won’t be the rise of political extremism — that rise certainly created the preconditions for disaster, but it has been part of the landscape for some time now. No, what may turn this menace into catastrophe is the way the hand-wringing over Biden’s age has overshadowed the real stakes in the 2024 election. It reminds me, as it reminds everyone I know, of the 2016 furor over Hillary Clinton’s email server, which was a minor issue that may well have wound up swinging the election to Donald Trump.
Over the weekend, the same Trump who invited Russia to publish hacked Hillary Clinton emails in 2016 invited Russia to invade any NATO country he felt hadn’t paid enough for alliance defense (as though he was being personally cheated). Trump told a MAGA crowd in South Carolina that under a Trump presidency he would not defend that NATO country. He pledged, in essence, to violate U.S. law for which Trump has serially demonstrated his disdain. And for which Trump faces 91 felony counts in multiple jurisdictions.
Trump is “utterly deranged,” tweets Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer.
Republicans’ “cool hand”
Cool Hand Luke once said, “Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.” And nothing is what Republicans have to offer. So they hope hearings on Joe Biden’s age will do to him what Benghazi and “But her emails” hearings did to Hillary Clinton.
Axios tells us what we already know about the GOP’s fall strategy:
House Republicans are activating a weekslong, perhaps monthslong, plan to keep questions about President Biden’s mental state in the spotlight, Axios has learned.
The big picture: The GOP planning includes hearings and possibly even subpoenas for documents and recordings.
Why it matters: Sources close to House GOP leaders are blunt that they don’t think it even matters what they find. These sources think that any fight will make the White House look bad — and keep a huge Biden vulnerability in the headlines.
They plan to milk the Robert Hur report on Biden’s retention of documents for all the media coverage they’re worth. And to spotlight again and again Hur’s gratuitous smears against Biden’s age.
Next, we’re told, House Republicans plan to seek testimony from Hur — and would ask him both about how Biden’s storage of sensitive documents could have hurt national security, and about the president’s mental acuity in the interview.
If I was as conspiracy-minded as MAGA Republicans, I might believe they were complicit in Hur’s dropping those comments into his report for just this purpose. They knew the press would pounce or at the very least both-sides Trump’s and Biden’s ages. The New York Times and other news outlets are today as willing to help the GOP as they were to promote George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq invasion. It’s no wonder Krugman is worried.
Here are O’Donnell’s comments in full.
Update: O’Donnell was referencing Roosevelt’s accomplishments and physical condition in his third term when he ran for his fourth.
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