If we learned one thing from last night’s State of the Union speech, it was that if Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and a few other MAGA assholes in Congress didn’t exist, the Democrats would have to invent them.
Remember Joe Wilson? He’s a GOP House member from South Carolina who yelled ‘liar’ at Barack Obama while the President was making a speech to Congress in 2009. The next day he issued an apology for his remarks: “I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility."
That was then, this is now. And now we have an ongoing battle within the GOP to see who can shout the loudest and be the most disgusting acolyte of what’s left of MAGA and Donald Trump.
And talking about Trump, yesterday the big-money PAC, Club for Growth, sent out invitation to its annual donor event and Trump wasn’t on the list. This is a group of moneyed conservatives who raised more than $50 million for the 2020 election and are promising to do the same thing again or more in 2024.
Trump sent out a fiery message, accusing the group of being a bunch of ‘political misfits, globalists and losers,’ and his entire comment only had one spelling mistake. The President of the Club responded by saying that “the GOP should be open to another candidate,” a message which I guess Boebert, Greene and the other GOP hecklers didn’t hear last night.
What was, for me, most interesting about last night was the ‘official’ GOP response to Joe’s speech, which was delivered by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was just sworn in as the Governor of Arkansas. Her father, Mike Huckabee, had been Governor from 1996 to 2007, but how he spiels himself silly on alt-right, Evangelical TV.
Which brings up an interesting point, btw. Which is that I have never understood how religious media which promotes political activism seems only to occupy a place on the political spectrum which is either Right or Far Right. You mean there aren’t religious individuals on the Left?
According to Pew, 59% of Americans who identified themselves as holding firm religious beliefs, also said they were ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ in their political views. That doesn’t represent a large enough audience if some liberal religious leader started to run a gig on TV? Anyway, back to Governor Sanders.
After starting off with the usual rant about how Joe has screwed everything up, Sanders delivered what right now must be seen as the GOP attack strategy as we move towards 2024. The post-MAGA/Trump program rests on securing the border to keep fentanyl and other opioids out of the United States, and making sure that schoolchildren aren’t indoctrinated by noxious, liberal beliefs, in particular CRT.
Now the fact that most of the illegal drugs coming into the country via the border with Mexico happen to be brought in by American citizens, oh well, oh well. As for Critical Race Theory, I know it’s discussed at Harvard and maybe Columbia University’s journalism school, but placing a book by James Baldwin on a high school reading list has been going on for more than 60 years.
Turning America’s educational facilities into political battlegrounds shows how far from reality the GOP need to go in order to find anything negative for the 2024 campaign. I don’t want to commit to the idea that Trump’s demand last week that school principals be elected will be the dumbest thing he will ever say, because he’s capable of coming up with something even dumber every week. But that comment will hold for this week.
My only regret about last night’s State of the Union speech was that the GOP didn’t give George Santos a front-frow seat. Or maybe he should have been seated with the Joint Chiefs, even though he has yet to tell us about the Medal of Honor he was awarded for his exceptional service during the Iraq War.
Think I’m kidding? I’m really not because such a claim would be in line with the reality of everything being said by the GOP in response to Joe’s speech. The biggest nonsense of all is the near-universal claim by the GOP that as long as Democrats are in power, a majority of Americans will never believe that things are going the right way.
Ready? Gallup hasn’t registered as high as a 40% positive view of the country’s direction even one time in the last 20 years.