Monday, March 11, 2024

SOTU vs STFU

 SOTU

I enjoyed President Biden’s State of the Union address last week. It was good to see him get all fired up again. Content aside, he should have put to rest any doubts about his stamina and vitality. He sure didn’t look like a doddering, senile old man, as he’s painted to be by the Right-Wing Echo Chamber and even some mainstream media. And he certainly didn’t look like he needed a mental acuity test, like some of the corrupt opposition suggest.

Of course, Republicans can’t admit that so now they say he was hopped up on goofballs and pick-em-up pills. Jesus. They might as well put “Heads I win, Tails you lose,” right there on their bumper stickers. It may as well be their motto. Whatever a Dem does is not good enough and even when it is, they invent another reason why it’s not.

Plus, given the newly revealed, hyper-pharmaceutical culture of the previous administration, it’s probably just more deflection and projection of their own issues.

To all the yayhoos drawing ominous conclusions about his occasional stutters or stumbles, I’d like to see YOU try to read from a script for 69 minutes straight, on national television, with the occasional dipshit yelling at you from the peanut gallery. It’s not easy to do for the heartiest of people. These “critics” are like the armchair quarterbacks who think they could lead the team down the field at crunch time, but in reality, would lose containment just stepping onto a field in front of 65,000 people. Try it sometime, before throwing stones, Gomer.

Content considered, I thought there was a lot to like. I don’t know how he’s going to actually do most of the things he said he’s going to do, but that’s a problem for another term, one in which I’m sure he hopes can work with a Democratic Congress. Otherwise, he’ll be looking at Four More Years of doing little of substance. In which case, sometimes just keeping the wheels on is the best you can hope for.

STFU

I also caught the MTG sideshow, wherein she apparently thought she was on a reconstituted version of You Bet Your Life, where her task was to make President Biden say the magic words “Laken Riley,” and then when he did, it was like she was waiting for the giant duck to come down out of the rafters. Yes, he said the name (of a woman who was killed by an undocumented alien, one of the microscopically few, statistically, who have killed someone in this country). You know the deal… tens of thousands a year killed by domestically bred Americans and they don’t give it a second thought. But this is the outrage. We can add THAT to the Republican Platform, right after More Tax Cuts for the Rich… the Right to be Murdered by an American! Accept nothing less!

So did MTG win something for her Big Get? Were they playing GOP BINGO back there? I don’t get the big deal. Once again, we have a Republican acting like the dog who finally caught the car she’s been chasing and yapping at and has no idea what to do next. I’m sure that she’s just had a whole pile of free time open up now that she can’t go on Fox and yell about how “Biden won’t say the name.”

I have no clue how a vacant pea-brained self-promoter like her gets elected to national office. What happened, did they airdrop lead paint all over her district 30 years ago? Not that they would stoop to using someone’s pain and tragedy to score political points, like some common Democrat, would they?

I didn’t bother to stay up and watch the GOP response, but I understand it was a trip. “The Stepford Fundamentalist,” if you would. So the speech was full of fabrications, misrepresentations, and stories that happened a long, long time ago, in a place far, far away.

So Sen. Britt has been taking her lumps about that, and as well she should. However, let’s not put the blame solely on her and her doll’s eyes.

Do you think there’s any chance the Powers That Be would let some first freshman senator write and present their party’s nationally televised rebuttal to the President, all by herself? I know she didn’t sit there in her perfect kitchen, which probably hasn’t seen a white person wash a dish in it since it was built, and scratch out that speech in a spiral notebook? Or even on a Chromebook? Not without the supervision of the party bosses, she didn’t. In fact, I’d bet they had a whole team working on that thing.

They KNEW it was essentially fact-free. They KNEW their big story took place in another decade, with an entirely different cast of characters running things. And they put it in there anyway, because they don’t care if a story is true, as long as it works. I’m sure they were counting on the audience for that speech, the MAGA faithful, to embrace whatever fairy tale they spin out. And they will because they’ve been conditioned to filter out any sources of contradictory information and believe only what their own people tell them. Fox “News” has them well-trained and obedient.

An Irrelevant Thought

I love it when Sweetpea buys her margarita mix in 8-oz cans…

…I get to walk around and pretend I’m Andre the Giant.

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