SOTU+

 

No comment on Senator Katie Britt’s (R-AL) melodramatic, bizarre, scary-on-many-levels response to President Biden’s State of the Union Speech: embarrassed Republicans have been panning it enough. Okay, well, since she harped on the border crisis (and lied about it, MAGAly), let’s note that she was one of the bipartisan group of senators that hammered out a bill addressing the crisis more significantly than any previous attempts. And then, as demanded by Trump, under indictment, out on bail, voted against it. It’s doubtful she’ll take this advice from one of her constituents.

The president’s speech put the lie to Trumpofoxians’ perseverating claims that he’s sleepy, weak, and/or befuddled. So much so that they’re suggesting – seriously! – that he must have been given drugs to hype him up. Except that Ronny Jackson’s no longer there. 

President Biden presented a progressive vision for America, in which there’s less poverty and more opportunity. His subsequent budget proposal provides for that and lots more, by raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. And it’d lower the national debt by $3 trillion over ten years. There followed, of course, screams to low Hell from Republicans’ ultra-wealthy paymasters. With Rs controlling the House, it’s DOA. 

There were, as usual, energetic standings and pejorative sittings. No Republicans rose to applaud Mr. Biden’s call for an end to political violence. That, and other regressive accouterments of autocracy, including encouraging riots like J6, are what, in their support of Trump (under indictment, out on bail) they desire.

Joe all but dared them to interrupt, which they did, disrespecting the office and themselves. He responded with delight, while Holy Moses Mike sat shaking his head at everything; reinforcing his and his party’s devotion to Trump (under indictment, out on bail) and their bankrollers; forsaking average Americans, including their own supporters, too Foxotrumpified to realize it.

That Trump, under indictment and out on bail, fawns over dictators and would emulate them, has been evident since day one. Underscoring it, he invited Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s autocratic “president” (not Turkey’s, as Trump, out on bail, once asserted) to Mar-a-Lago, where he heaped servile praise on him: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán,” said Trump, under indictment, out on bail. “He’s fantastic… because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss...” Like Putin, Orbán is lionized by democracy-fearing MAGA Republicans and their media. Given the opportunity, Trump, UIOOB, will strive to out-autocrat both.

Less certain, but suspicious, is the possibility that the $92 million bond he finally posted while appealing the E. Jean Carroll verdict, was backed by Russian – i.e., Putin’s -- money. It came from the Chubb Group, now operating out of Russia. True or not, it’d be nice to know the terms of the bond. Likewise, the explanation for his sudden flip-flopped love of TikTok, in which a pal’s hedge fund has a $33 billion stake. Trump, under indictment, out on bail, strapped for cash, seems to have a price for anything. What do top secret documents go for, nowadays? 

To support him at all, to overlook his promises to weaponize government against all enemies, domestic and domestic, to rationalize his immature, petty nastiness and lies, people must not just acquiesce to it, but desire it. With their electoral choices, today’s Republican Party confirms the premise.

For governor, North Carolina Republicans just nominated Mark Robinson, a conspiracist, homophobic, Holocaust denier, school-shooting mocker, who says the purpose of the Affordable Care Act is to “enslave everybody.” Out on bail, Trump called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Presumably because he’s black.

The presence in Congress of MTG, Gosar, Gaetz, Boebert, et al., further proves the point. They’re there because they’re what their voters prefer (grammar lesson): people performing base-pleasing, kangaroid “investigations” rather than legislators committed to working on solving problems.

It all comes down to Trump, UIOOB, the proof positive, the tone-setter. At his rambling rallies, when he’s not stumbling over words, incoherent, and mixing up names, he’s taken to mocking President Biden’s stuttering. Were any attendees repulsed? Did they question whether it befits a would-be President of The United States of America? Of course not. They laughed and cheered. It’s who they are and what they came for. It’s what that party has become. Mean and demeaning. Lies and empty promises.

Speaking of lies, Special Counsel Robert Hur, whose final report of his Biden investigation luridly included implications of a failing memory, conveniently left out Biden’s actual transcribed words, showing the opposite. MAGA-normal is blatant lying, confident the truth will be smothered on Fox “news” and both-sided by mainstream reporters.

Perhaps there remain actual conservatives who, repudiating his despotic intentions, lies, and fear- and hate-mongering, will reject Trump, under indictment, out on bail; taking an America-honoring, KAG stand against MAGA’s embrace of totalitarianism. There’s at least one.

Pop Goes The Country

 

I didn’t watch President Biden’s State of the Union Speech. Unlike the majority of Americans who, according to a recent poll, think he hasn’t accomplished much, I’m aware of his many and impressive achievements, which have had an enormous, positive effect on economic growth, job creation, and the future of infrastructure and energy. I’m also aware of how Foxotrumpification infiltrates Foxified brains with falsehoods, removing truth-seeking neurons like brain-eating amoebae. 

I don’t miss seeing standing Os on the left and hand-sitting and the now-normal rude heckling on the right. I’ve read about disgusting rudeness from MTG and other believers, though; loved, no doubt, by MAGAs. I didn’t watch Sarah Huckabee’s response, either; but, as she tops the list of her party’s most shameless and facile liars --a very high bar – I admire the choice.

Speaking of lies: the balloon. We can speculate what China gleaned from hovering one over sealed missile silos for a few hours, but we know for sure what they did learn. They learned how easy it is to poke the eye of our already-blind partisan politics. They know the R party will embrace any opportunity to charge our president with treason. (At the last minute, they canceled plans to censure Joe for his handling of the incident. Are they eschewing looking ridiculous? Why now? It works so well for them.)

Chinese leaders learned which members of that party they can rely on to fan the flames of division. And they know if there’s ever another R president, they have a decent chance of killing American civilians by floating a few more, to be shot down with tough-guy immediacy over whatever land they may be hovering. The rest of it – several balloons unnoticed by the Trump administration, improved surveillance in Biden’s, the jamming of the balloon’s communications rendering it impotent till it became a safe and recoverable target, the potential information gained by finding it in one piece – that’s all been said.

So we float on. Beginning with the R House-members wearing AR15 lapel pins. Nothing more needs saying. It speaks for its disgusting self; who and where they are. Like MTG accompanying a balloon on her way to the SOTU. 

Speaking of disgusting, it’s now undeniable how dangerously regressive Trump’s federal judges are: specifically, the Trump-stuffed Fifth Circuit’s overturning of a law preventing convicted wife-beaters from purchasing guns. Since most people aren’t standing while reading, it’s probably safe to present their reasoning: Because women were essentially chattel in 1789, and since there were no laws against wife-beating, the court ruled based on the so-called Bruen test (gun laws must reflect regulations in place at the time of the Constitution’s framing). “Through that lens, we conclude that (the law’s) ban on possession of firearms is an ‘outlier’ that our ancestors would never have accepted.” Trumpic jurisprudence. Amazing.

Fully depleted of smackable gobs, we can only wish they’d follow their logic to view gun regulations as applying only to muskets. Be unsurprised when SCOTUS upholds the ruling, or when they decide that nothing, not just weapons, can be regulated if it didn’t exist when the Founders strode Philadelphia’s horse paths.

Another fibment fed by rightwing screamers: they’re coming for your gas stoves! Here’s what’s true: emissions from gas stoves can be harmful to some people with some pulmonary diseases, and precautions should be considered. And here’s what’s not true: plans to outlaw them. What’s also true: being untrue is a requisite for the screams of right-wing screamers. What’s also not true: it’ll stop anytime soon. Truthless Ted Cruz has promised to create the ”Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act.” If shortened to the “Free Range Act,” though, some liberals might get on board.

For performative Republican legislation, nothing beats the Republicans’ Condemnation of the Horrors of Socialism Act. Passed with the help of several weak-kneed Democrats, it was a cynical circus, an attempt to “gotcha” Democrats who refused to fall for it. A brave few stood up to say no one is advocating for pure socialism in the US, asking if they plan to defund America’s socialist programs, such as police, military, highways, dams, schools, the postal service, help for the needy. Rick Scott would add Medicare and Social Security.

It’s like Jim Jordan's show of requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to open his committee meetings. In a just world, he and his colleagues who voted to overturn the election and who still consider the insurrectionists patriots would be struck dumb as they pledged, heart-handed. (Of course, the dumb has already happened.) 

We can’t finish without noting Trump’s announcement that he could end Russia’s criminal war against Ukraine in twenty-four hours. Totally believable. Being a self-serving scammer, uninterested in saving lives now, he’s not sharing his plan. Totally on-brand.

So let’s urge President Biden to send him as a special envoy, on a twenty-four-hour trip (not counting travel time) to Kyiv or Moscow or wherever, promising fulsome praise, cash (his lifelong raison d’etre), and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize if he pulls it off; boosting his presidential campaign, even if he’s running it from prison. If Joe does and Trump does, I’ll never write another bad word about him. That’s a promise.