Peas in a pod
In case you were wondering if all this dictator talk is just liberal hysteria, I give you exhibit A:
Need we say more?
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Still the same phonies
I could only watch so much of Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s whacked response to President Biden’s SOTU address Thursday night. The reviews are in:
“What the hell am I watching right now?” an unnamed Trump adviser told Rolling Stone.
“It’s one of our biggest disasters ever,” another unnamed Republican strategist told the Daily Beast.
Look, we know these people are shameless phonies, hypocrites and worse. They’ve given RINO a whole new meaning. They are embarrassments as Americans.
Now, the Britt outtakes.
I met Jess Piper briefly at Netroots-Chicago last summer. Here’s her anaylsis of Stepford Katie’s delivery.
Haven’t lived half a century in the South not to recognize that practiced “church testimony” delivery.
Update: A key, tear-stained tale presented by Britt has been throughly revealed as deliberately misleading.
This guy tells all:
Post by @motlet02View on Threads
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A personality cult in search of a personality
You know what No Labels is. Digby’s been shouting it. But they are stuck with no serious candidate yet still hope to keep the spoiler train roling. Without the spoiling.
Roll tape leaked to The New Republic:
The contents of the call offered nothing to dispel this fear. The call consisted of No Labels party members from numerous states, each reporting on what members in their states and regions were thinking and feeling. While many of these local leaders said there’s a lot of enthusiasm for a No Labels run, some of them reported that members are wary of functioning as a spoiler.
For instance, a No Labels leader in Idaho said that while members are all for run, they believe the ticket should “only” be offered to a candidate who has a “reasonable path to succeed and not be a spoiler.” A leader in Iowa said the candidate must be “strong” and have “the ability to win.”
They don’t know what they want but they want it now. Somehow.
What was striking about this call was how deeply a lot of these party members have bought into No Labels’ hype. One leader after another repeated, almost robotically, the idea that a No Labels candidacy would be a true act of heroism that could only rescue the country from the alleged horrors of having to choose between Biden and Trump.
I don’t know what they’re smoking, but it’s not your grandfather’s weed.
Biden, of course, has at times governed in a bipartisan way—which No Labels says it prizes. And there’s a vast asymmetry at play here, in which Trump poses a severe threat to our democracy and our country, and one major party is his willing accomplice in this regard, even as Biden and Democrats pose no such threat.
But No Labels simply refuses to accept this basic state of affairs. And there was no sense on the call that party members have seriously grappled with what it means that one side poses that dire threat while the other does not, or whether that creates an obligation for No Labels to be particularly cautious in proceeding. Instead, there was a lot of self-congratulatory talk about the group’s own bravery.
And you thought MAGA was the only political cult loose in the land. What do you call a personality cult in search of a personality?
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Watch the following if you have time. It is utterly inspiring. We used to talk a lot about ecology but I feel as if it’s slipped down the list of priorities as we face other environmental challenges. This story is such a perfect lesson in how we humans screw everything up and how nature, left alone, can heal itself.
They all robotically acceded to Trump’s order to install his hand-picked sycophant and his daughter-in-law so they will help pay his legal bills. And they’ll take millions in small donations from brainwashed Americans who can’t afford it. I’d feel sorry for them if they didn’t support that orange fascist which is inexcusable.
The Republican National Committee on Friday selected new leaders who were handpicked by former President Donald J. Trump, a move expected to tighten the expected nominee’s hold on the party’s machinery ahead of the general election.
The committee unanimously elected Michael Whatley, who led the North Carolina Republican Party and was the R.N.C.’s general counsel, as its chair and Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, as co-chair.
Both Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump were endorsed by Mr. Trump last month after Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, privately told the former president she planned to leave the position. Ms. McDaniel was for months the focus of intense pressure from inside and outside the Trump campaign to step down over the committee’s lackluster fund-raising and criticism over Republicans’ performance in 2022.
Many of Mr. Trump’s allies also criticized Ms. McDaniel, whom Mr. Trump originally picked for the position, for being insufficiently supportive of the former president. They cited her neutrality during the Republican primary and her resistance to his push to call off a series of debates that he refused to participate in.
The new leaders will take the reins of the national party at a critical juncture for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and their elevation is part of his larger effort to effectively merge the R.N.C. with his campaign.
After Mr. Trump dominated the primaries on Super Tuesday, his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, exited the Republican race, effectively handing him the party’s nomination. Mr. Trump is now focused on the general election, and his campaign is expected to begin raising money in concert with the party, allowing him to raise far larger sums and to tap into the existing party apparatus.
During Friday’s meeting, the R.N.C. voted to officially recognize him as the party’s presidential candidate, even though he has not yet locked up the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination.
In a speech after his election, Mr. Whatley vowed that the committee would “be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump,” flip control of the Senate and expand Republicans’ slim majority in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Whatley also said his priorities as chair would be “getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.” He pledged to build on the committee’s efforts to recruit and deploy poll watchers, workers and judges to serve as “real-time monitors” as votes are being cast as well as counted.
Mr. Trump — who continues to make false claims about voter fraud as he faces criminal charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — has told allies that he believes the R.N.C. needed to spend more money on “election integrity” efforts.
Mr. Whatley has backed Mr. Trump’s false election claims and has asserted, without basis, that Republican efforts in North Carolina prevented Democrats from cheating Mr. Trump out of victory there in 2020. In a statement, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee criticized Mr. Whatley as a “fringe election denier.”
On Friday, he said that the committee would “work relentlessly in every state to ensure that it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.” Mr. Trump has frequently and falsely contended on the campaign trail that Democrats pervasively cheat during elections.
He still plays the January 6th choir before his rallies. And he’s played the J6 footage too. But nothing beats this particular moment and while I know the general public maybe not be aware of the astonishing, symbolism of what he did that day, there is no excuse for the media to cover this race without keeping this in the back of their minds when they play the shallow horse race game and pile on Joe Biden over trivialities. They live in the country too and they know what this man is. They are abdicating their duty to inform.
Biden likes the political fray. It’s his life.
JV Last says we shouldn’t be surprised by Biden’s performance last night because he’s actually good at this stuff. And he is. But for some reason people always forget that until he does it again. Anyway, Last has an interesting observation about the campaign that I think is correct:
But I’m not here to sell t-shirts. I’m here to point out one of the fundamental asymmetries that was on display last night and how it’s going to drive this campaign.
Donald Trump is a dominance politician. His mode of operation is to bully and intimidate. He is bad at making deals. (Shocking, I know.) He is personally offended by people who do not prostrate themselves to him. He has no interest in legislating and no policy goals he seeks to achieve. His theory of the 2024 election is that he will drive the turnout of his base—primarily rural white men without college degrees who do not often vote—to such a degree that their numbers swamp an average Democratic turnout and the turnout of frequent-voting independents.
Trump is interested in capitulation, not persuasion.
What you saw from Biden last night was the polar opposite in both temperament and strategy.
Biden is a back-slapper. He works well with his political opponents. He likes people—even people who aren’t on his side. He’s good at compromise and has real-world bills he wants to pass.
Biden is a politician and a persuader. That is fundamentally who he is and this fact informs his strategy. Biden is not banking on turning out 110 percent of Democratic voting benchmarks. He is not looking to bring in low-propensity voters who normally have little interest in politics.
His goal is to let Trump take care of Democratic turnout while he peels off 10 percent of self-identifies Republican voters (up from 8 percent in 2020) and then wins the double-doubter independents decisively.
Which is what he took aim at last night. On policy, he did this by hitting Ukraine, Roe, and immigration—three areas in which he’s where the majority is on policy. But he also did it with his mien. Did you catch how feisty Biden was? He enjoyed it when Republicans booed him—and I mean that he enjoyed it in the way that a guy who thinks there’s supposed to be give-and-take likes to spar.
But maybe the most telling moment of the entire evening was Biden’s reaction to MTG’s wardrobe choice as he made his way through the chamber
MTG confronted Biden in full MAGA regalia and imagined that she was doing something disrespectful and transgressive—that she was going to show him that she was unafraid of his socialist crime family or whatever.
And Biden loved it! He was clearly tickled, like he thought that this Jewish Space Laser CrossFit lady wasn’t an enemy to be crushed, but just a wacky part of life’s rich pageant.
Last night was a clear view into the choice this campaign will present voters: An angry strong man who dominates and fights or a happy politician who persuades, cajoles, and compromises. Which of them will be the best steward of a strong American economy?
That is a campaign Joe Biden can win.
I don’t know if Last is right about Biden’s strategy but he is certainly right about who Biden is although Biden is going to have to cut through a lot of bullshit punditry. The right predictably said Biden was angry and divisive, apparently not realizing that they were undercutting their own characterization of him as a doddering dementia patient. And there were members of the media (Gloria Borger, I’m looking at you) who said that he was “too angry.” But I think most people watching the speech saw a fired up Joe Biden who was, as Last says, a confident politician in full control who was enjoying the fray. Some people might call that a “happy warrior” and right now that’s just what the doctor ordered.
If this is her kitchen I feel sorry for her family. It looks like a demo home in a housing tract that they haven’t bothered to style yet.
A GOP strategist told The Daily Beast that Britt’s delivery quickly became a gossip item Thursday night among operatives connected to Donald Trump—something that could have potential implications for her consideration as a vice presidential pick on the 2024 ticket.
“Everyone’s fucking losing it,” this Republican said, requesting anonymity to discuss private conversations. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”
“No one was surprised that [Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell’s handpicked senator resonated so poorly with the base,” said a source close to Trump, who requested anonymity for similar reasons. (Britt is a favorite of McConnell, which has made Trumpworld suspicious.)
“But her performance was the stuff of nightmares and people were surprised by that,” they continued.
This Republican said it is still unknown how the performance will affect Britt’s VP stock, but noted that Trump definitely watched the coverage of it and it “isn’t going to help.”
Several popular social media influencers in the MAGA camp also panned the speech; the account Catturd tweeted Britt was “awful” to his 2.4 million followers.
[…]
Britt went for a dramatic performance with her State of the Union rebuttal, casting Biden as a failed president and arguing that the GOP was the best option for regular working families.
But the senator’s delivery turned out to be so dramatic that it ended up being distracting at best and disingenuous at worst.
Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator, posted on X Friday morning that Britt had genuine appeal in coming across like “the moms at the school drop off” and praised the kitchen setting.
“But the delivery was parody-level terrible, and I promise that didn’t sway any of those suburban moms we’re trying to reach,” Stuckey wrote.
The good news for Bobby Jindahl and Marco Rubio is that they can rest easy knowing they are no longer the winners of the worst State of the Union responses of all time. We have a new champion.
Biden’s speech was just what the doctor ordered
Everyone was expecting a historic train wreck of a State of the Union last night and they got it. But it wasn’t the one they thought it would be. Biden’s address was powerful and dynamic and no doubt put a lot of timorous Democrats’ worries to rest (at least for a day or so.) It was Trump’s highly touted response that failed dramatically.
Biden came out swinging and knocked the Republicans so far back on their heels that they had to completely abandon the image of him they’ve been building since 2020 — that he’s so old and feeble that he can’t even feed himself — and instead whimper like a bunch of little old ladies that he offensively aggressive. And they whined mightily that Biden was too “political” apparently forgetting that in his last State of the Union speech, Donald Trump bestowed the Medal of Freedom on far-right, hate radio star Rush Limbaugh calling him “a special man, beloved by millions of Americans” and thanking him for “decades of devotion to our country.”
Biden gave a barn burner of a speech that wasn’t boring, which is highly unusual for any president but especially unusual for a president many people have been convinced has one foot in the grave. As it turned out, what actually died last night was Trump’s Truth Social media platform on which Trump had flamboyantly promised to do “play by play” of Biden’s address. The site went down for many people all over the country before Biden even reached the podium leaving us with only these important insights:
We were all waiting on tenterhooks for over an hour to read what he had to say about Biden’s choice of socks until the site came back up to reveal that Trump had pretty much just been ranting about Biden coughing and warning people not to shake his hand because it has germs. And he also lied and lied and lied about his own record, obviously unnerved by Biden’s very pointed criticism, especially in the very strong opening section of the speech, when the audience is biggest and most attentive, in which Biden strongly contrasted his record against his predecessor.
Starting off with foreign policy he made a compelling case for support for Ukraine and went after Trump (without ever using his name) for his Putin toadying, particularly the asinine comment that he’d tell him “do whatever the hell you want” to any NATO country that doesn’t “pay its bills.” He said , “a former American President actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.” Republicans all sat glumly silent, obviously terrified to cross their Dear Leader, as he railed on Truth Social, “he said I bowed down to the Russian Leader. He gave them everything, including Ukraine. I took away Nord Stream 2, he gave it to them! He was a Puppet for Putin and Xi, and virtually every other Leader!” It appears that criticism hit a nerve, maybe because it’s true.
The president admonished the Republicans to their faces for January 6th as well saying “my predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win.” Speaker Mike Johnson, sitting behind the president on the podium looked as if someone had just rubbed a grapefruit in his face.
And he took on the conservative Supreme Court Justices, some of whom were sitting in front of him as he excoriated the assaults on reproductive rights. He reminded them of the passage in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade which said “women are not without electoral or political power” and then added, “you’re about to find out.” He asked the Republicans in the chamber, “My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” and he blamed Donald Trump,right upfront, pointing out that Trump brags about overturning Roe.
And much to my happy surprise, he went after Trump for his greatest failure, and one of our country’s worst tragedies, which for some reason people have flushed down the memory hole — the horrible response to the pandemic and the carnage he left in his wake:
“Remember the fear. Record job losses. Remember the spike in crime. And the murder rate. A raging virus that would take more than 1 million American lives and leave millions of loved ones behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness. A president, my predecessor, who failed the most basic duty. Any President owes the American people the duty to care. That is unforgivable.”
He did not care. He was worried about “his numbers” going up.
That opening salvo was impressive and Biden didn’t lose any steam for the rest of the speech as he laid out the differences between his agenda and his opponent’s, talked about his accomplishments and plans for the future. He announced a new plan for humanitarian aid to Gaza and while he reiterated his support for Israel he also said, “To the leadership of Israel I say this. Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority. As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution.” If you want to know the prospects for any Republican president agreeing with that, all you have to do is look at the sour look on every one of their faces as they sat on their hands when he said that.
It wasn’t all aggressive rhetoric, he also went off script and confidently jousted with the Republicans on various topics (although he unfortunately used the ugly term “illegals” in a back and forth with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.) He even managed to trap the GOP in the same trap he laid last year on cutting Social Security, this time on corporate tax cuts:
It was one of his best speeches and delivered with a vigor that puts Donald Trump’s recent rambling low energy rallies to shame.
If you were a person who only saw the headlines of the major papers or watched Fox News over the past year or so, you didn’t recognize the president last night, that “elderly man with good intentions and a bad memory” as Special Prosecutor Robert Hur so snidely put it. It was Joe Biden, the same guy that 81 million people voted for three and half years ago. He’s fine. Now maybe we can start talking about something other than his age?
Salon
Here’s the ad the Biden campaign just dropped:
More Reaction To Biden’s SOTU
Simon “Mr. Hopium” Rosenberg is usually upbeat about Democrats’ prospects, but after last night, he’s more upbeat than usual:
The core arguments Republicans make against Biden furthered evaporated last night. The economy is strong not weak. Inflation is down not rising. Crime and murder rates are plummeting not raging. All forms of domestic energy production are setting records and we are more energy independent today than in decades – there is no war on energy. Democrats are trying to bring order to the border, Republicans want to keep it chaotic. The “Biden crime family” narrative turns out to be a Russian operation laundered by traitorous Republicans. And now we saw a President strong, vigorous, powerful not old and frail. They have nothing. They have no argument. There is no reason to elect them. All that is left for them now is the madness of the orange man, more degraded, extreme and dangerous, a serial criminal and betrayer of the country, an historic embarrassment for America, and for the once proud party of Lincoln and Reagan.
Anand Giridharadas at The Ink sees signs that Democrats are beginning to get it when it comes to pitching their aspirations for the country. Drop the abstractions and get real:
He focused relentlessly on costs and quality of life. This is perhaps a hint of a bigger shift in the making for Democrats. You’re seeing a party that is realizing that people sometimes find big, sweeping policy ambition abstract-sounding and expensive-sounding, especially when they are stressed, even when those policies would drastically improve their lives. It’s just political reality. Smart Democrats are learning to move away from promoting policies in terms of giant new programs and instead to promote them as improvements to basic quality of life, reductions in cost, medicine for your stress. This is human-scale policy making, built on an anthropological understanding of the pain points in people’s lives, and framed through relieving those pain points rather than selling big programs.
More importantly, Biden positioned himself as a defender of freedom, using the word over a dozen times, sometimes in warning:
Many of you in this Chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom.
My God, what freedoms will you take away next?
“Saving Democracy So That We Can Do Cool Shit”
Republicans think of freedom in terms of “freedom from.” Democrats are reclaiming that universal value, and finally championing “freedom for.” Democracy can be an abstraction as well, if not tied into people’s everyday lives. Biden tied the two together, Giridharadas continues:
More than before, he answered the question of: saving democracy for WHAT?
Don’t get me wrong: saving democracy is important. Some of my best friends work to save democracy. But for some Americans, it can feel abstract and secondary to more pressing concerns. Last night, Biden broke the tradeoff between democracy-first and kitchen-table-first approaches. He integrated them into a story of Saving Democracy So That We Can Do Cool Shit — create things, build things, solve diseases, manufacture again, and so on. Democracy is an end in itself. It’s also a really great means.
A quarter of the way through the 21st century, Republicans’ idea of progress is anti-progress. They are determined to roll the clock back to the middle of the 20th. Giridharadas reminds Democrats of the importance of painting the beautiful tomorrow. Biden gets that.
The president wove a biography of the American soul. He identified three enduring American traits. One: the longing, the thirst, for liberation, to be free and ever freer. Two: the love of underdogs and comeback kids. Three: the hunger to build, to create, the move forward, to do stuff. He braided these deep American tendencies into a story of a country whose freedom is imperiled, but has shown that it can bounce back from darkness, reinvent itself, choose light, and now has a chance to save and more fully realize democracy, not just for its own sake, but to do stuff, create, invent, make.
MAGA Republicans are retromingents. I always liked that description.
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