According to CNN, Joe Biden is “sharpening his mid-term message.”
At the White House on Wednesday, Ole Puddinhead delivered a speech that “reflected Biden’s preparations for intense midterm campaigning built around hammering Republicans.”
You know, the way “unity” candidates often do.
With his approval rating as bad as the low 30s in some polls and nearly every Democratic strategist warning that the political environment is dire—and many in the party still complaining that the White House’s political operation lacks enough planning or urgency—the President is short on other options. But advisers and others who’ve spoken directly with him tell CNN the polarized country gives him a chance to make a more effective contrast than in any prior midterm cycle, boosted by the material they’re counting on from expected primary wins by Trump loyalists and other far-right candidates in May and June—as well as the anticipated Republican opposition to Biden’s last attempt at a domestic policy push in the congressional reconciliation process underway.
While Biden’s midterm message is expected to focus heavily on the economy, he attempted to draw the same contrast between Democrats and Republicans on abortion rights in response to a reporter’s question on Wednesday.
After being asked about the draft opinion from the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v. Wade and would be the most consequential abortion decision in decades, Biden said that if the final opinion was issued along the lines of the leaked draft, it would imply nobody has rights unless granted by the federal government.
“This is about a lot more than abortion,” the President said.
“What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history, in recent American history,” he added.
It’s interesting to hear a Democrat—even a muddle-headed old head-case like the current president—accuse Republicans of believing something Democrats have espoused as a matter of practical politics for decades (if not longer).
First, to get the specific example out of the way, Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs v Jackson doesn’t imply anything about natural rights: it simply finds that the 14th amendment does not guarantee the right to an abortion. That’s a view even the late lamented Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg frequently and publicly questioned.
That’s a link to Newsweek, by the way, because I want to show that even left wing rags can’t pretend away Ginsburg’s discomfort with Roe. They acknowledge that she “was a frequent critic of Roe v. Wade, especially its framing and the speed in which it was pushed through.”
Now we get to the money quote: the bit about “the most extreme organization in American history, in recent American history.”
The Democratic Party launched a war to preserve slavery, developed the KKK, wrote and enacted and enforced the Jim Crow laws, and filibustered the Civil Rights Act. (The Democratic Senator who led the filibuster, Robert Byrd, only died 12 years ago.) It was a Democratic president that consigned Japanese Americans to internment camps. It was the Democratic Party cheering and providing political cover for the BLM and Antifa thugs who spent more than a year rioting across America, causing billions of dollars in damage and scores of deaths.
The MAGA “extremists” rioted for a few hours of a single day in January 2020. (And the only riot-related deaths were among MAGA supporters themselves, including an unarmed woman shot dead by a cop who the Democratic Party hailed as a hero.)
Democrats and the entire GLOB infrastructure talk endlessly about the dangerous extremism of Trump supporters, of the right, of populists—but where has that extremism actually played out in practice?
A leftist Bernie Bro went to a baseball diamond and attempted to assassinate multiple Republican members of Congress. He was literally shooting at them. Where’s the MAGA analog to that?
Republican Senator Rand Paul was brutally assaulted by his Democratic next door neighbor and the left cheered. Where’s the MAGA analog to that?
A Democratic California Congresswoman instructed her supporters to get in the faces of Republican government officials: “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that (Trump) Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.” Anyone got an example of a Republican member of Congress explicitly stirring up his or her supporters to personally harass Democratic officials?
A deranged leftist drove an SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha Wisconsin, killing three “Dancing Grannies” and injuring dozens of others, and another deranged leftist rushed to the scene, camera in hand, and wondered aloud whether “the revolution had started.” A deranged leftist lit himself on fire on the plaza in front of the Supreme Court and burned himself to death. A deranged celebrity leftist staged an elaborate hoax to make it appear as though he’d been assaulted by a couple of Trump supporters.
Can someone point me to the MAGA people driving trucks into holiday parades? Publicly immolating themselves over policy preferences? Staging crimes to frame Democrats?
But there’s ole Puddinhead, raging against the dread extremism of the “MAGA crowd.”
And CNN says this is just the president fine-tuning his political messaging for the mid-terms because he’s so unpopular he has few other options.
Few other options, they’re implying, to hammering Republicans as the most dangerous political extremists in American history.
They’ve actually got a point.
Ole Puddinhead is largely despised by the American electorate and the state of the union is somewhere between “hot mess” and “dumpster fire.” Both conditions are a consequence of his own incompetence and incoherence. So since he can’t run on personal charisma or his track record, hysterical fear-mongering is just about all the old fella’s got left.
It’ll be interesting to see how the not-at-all-extreme leftists of his own not-at-all-extreme party roll with his not-at-all-extreme messaging.
Interesting to see and probably a little bit violent.
But not extreme.