Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, September 3, 2022

Hit Dogs Hollering

 Biden's speech the other night was - on substance - fairly anodyne. Conceding electoral losses is a function of democratic competition. Political violence designed to overturn those elections is un-American. He specifically calls out people like Lindsay Graham who were predicting violence if Trump was indicted.

A certain segment of Republican Twitter freaked out so hard that you could smell the flopsweat through the internet. They basically accused Biden of dividing the country by pointing out how Trump had divided the country. Biden very clearly divided the Republican Party between the "mainstream" and "MAGA" Republicans. He very clearly intended to force the GOP to reckon with their fealty to Trump in the wake of January 6th and the recent seizure of classified documents at Mar A Lago.

Legitimate criticism has been raised about the awful lighting scheme behind him. Less legitimately, I think, but still somewhat valid, about having Marines standing in the background.

Almost none of them will engage with the text of the speech as actually written. Biden wants America to truly reckon with what supporting Trump means in 2022. Whatever excuses one might make in 2016 for voting for him then, those evaporate in face of six years of brazen criminality, two impeachments. a failed autogolpe and finally the dreadful behavior surrounding reams of classified documents.

My guess - or perhaps my hope - is that the Biden team has another smoking gun, specifically around those documents. He has dared the MAGA crowd to tether themselves even closer to Trump before revealing exactly who he gave some of those documents to. If - say - Trump gave Saudi Arabia nuclear secrets, and the CIA/NSA/FBI have the receipts on that, then this speech is a masterpiece of political strategy. If Biden thinks that the existing evidence is enough to finally cause Republicans to break with the worst person to ever hold the presidency, I fear he may have overestimated where many Americans are.

Of course, in no way does that mean the text of that speech was wrong.  Still could've done without the glaring red lighting.

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