Four takeaways from Biden’s speech in Philadelphia.
On Thursday, it was the Republicans’ turn to denounce the divisiveness of a president who was scorning them. The Republican National Committee cast Mr. Biden as “the divider-in-chief” who “epitomizes the current state of the Democrat Party: one of divisiveness, disgust, and hostility towards half the country.”
But at times, the Republican response felt like an extended taunt of “I know you are, but what am I?” Before Mr. Biden’s speech, the man who hopes to be House speaker next year, Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, also spoke in Pennsylvania, trying to pre-empt a presidential address previewed as an appeal for the soul of the nation by — with little factual basis — turning Mr. Biden’s themes against him.
“In the past two years, Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America,” Mr. McCarthy, the House minority leader, said, “on its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values. He has launched an assault on our democracy.”
There was no more experienced, more serious journalist on @CNN than White House correspondent @JohnJHarwood. So, of course, Harwood’s been let go by the network. Why? He was under the mistaken impression that speaking truth to power still matters at @CNN.pic.twitter.com/VrkwRwbPAJ
Parties’ Divergent Realities Challenge Biden’s Defense of Democracy
The Republicans’ reaction to Mr. Biden’s speech was remarkable. For years, they stood quietly by as Mr. Trump vilified and demonized anyone who disagreed with him — encouraging supporters to beat up protesters; demanding that his rivals be arrested; accusing critics of treason and even murder; calling opponents “fascists”; and retweeting a supporter saying “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” But they rose up as one on Thursday night and Friday to complain that Mr. Biden was the one being divisive.
Excellent @anneapplebaum column about last night's speech. Biden is gambling that the idea of America still lives and can prevail. I think he's right, his very election suggests he is right, and it's the gamble he was elected to take. https://t.co/Pvy2msU0Q4
Biden called Trumpism ‘semi-fascism.’ The term makes sense, historically.
President Biden has taken a firm stance on the modern-day threat of fascism: “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.” Biden made this key remark in a speech in Rockville, Md., while launching a push toward the midterm elections. While he stressed the violent nature of Trumpism and its threat to democracy, he was vague about the specifics of what he identified as half-baked American fascism. In fact, when he was later asked to clarify what he meant by fascism, he answered, “You know what I mean.”
Biden is not wrong, but historical definitions of fascism do actually matter. Over the past century, fascism has evolved, as leaders have reformulated its look. While explicit fascism faded from power after World War II, its illiberal ideas survived, often intertwined with various strands of populism. This historical perspective helps us understand how Biden’s term, “semi-fascism,” actually reflects the most recent iteration of a global fascist playbook that has sought to undermine democracy in the United States, Brazil, India and Hungary today.
Biden declared war on fascism and Republicans took it as a personal attack.
The pathetic semantic squabble in coverage of Biden’s democracy speech
Of course Biden wants people to vote for his party. It’s also true that he used his speech last night to tout his agenda, including in the run-up to his call to vote; indeed, the Times characterized the address as effectively “two back-to-back speeches,” one focused darkly on threats to democracy, the other optimistically on his administration’s progress. But, at least conceptually, these focuses cannot be neatly separated, just as calls to vote and the touting of an agenda can’t be separated from the broader work of defending democracy—encouraging voting and making the case that the votes should be for you is the basic stuff of democracy. And it’s all the stuff of politics, which is one reason journalists’ efforts to police the political nature of Biden’s speech last night were so misguided. Merriam-Webster—and I hate to be this tedious, but apparently it’s necessary—has a whole bunch of entries for politics , the broadest (and, I think, best) of which defines it as “the total complex of relations between people living in society.” Saving democracy is thus political, inherently so. So is the military. So is just about anything the president says, no matter who is picking up the tab. Arguing about whether last night’s speech was political would have been silly and pedantic at the best of times. At this fraught moment, it’s akin to watching your house catch fire and shouting, “Wait a minute! Is this a house?”
What various top outlets seemed to actually mean by political— and some stated it outright —was partisan , referring to the idea that Biden was criticizing members of another party. To take a charitable view, this isn’t totally irrelevant as a concern, since there are rules governing campaigning using federal resources. (See: Trump hosting part of the 2020 Republican convention at the White House .) But it’s close to irrelevant in this case; there was much about the speech that was much more important than the setting. And partisan , like political , is a slippery term. That some members of the press used the two interchangeably last night is telling of a broader trope in political journalism: that politics is principally about the interrelation of political parties, not least in the electoral arena. The “total complex of relations” in a society, this is not.
In other words, the mistaken idea that everything is horse race and nothing else, including the fight against fascism.
https://t.co/Bw88gchPFa pic.twitter.com/Ub8ouBomHf
Republicans Have Only Themselves to Blame for Their Alaskan Defeat
For Trumpists, no system that results in a Republican loss can be considered legitimate.
Mary Peltola was declared the winner of Alaska’s special congressional election last night, defeating the former GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. A Democrat hasn’t held the seat in 49 years, and Peltola will be the first Alaska Native elected to Congress.
The election was the first in Alaska to utilize ranked-choice voting, a system adopted by the state’s voters in 2020. If no candidate reaches 50 percent support, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated and their votes go to the second-ranked candidate on their voters’ lists. This continues until one candidate has at least 50 percent. After the Republican candidate Nick Begich was eliminated in the second round of counting, Peltola ended up with about 52 percent of the vote. Ranked choice is more efficient than holding a runoff election, and its backers insist that it offers a better reflection of voters’ preferences.
But here’s the problem: The Republican candidate didn’t win, and Peltola’s remarkable victory instantly sparked complaints from Republicans that the election had been “rigged,” echoing former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric from July. Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas immediately tweeted, “Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.” Cotton elaborated in a second tweet that “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat ‘won.’” Separately, the political writer Josh Kraushaar argued that ranked-choice voting “is so inscrutable to your average voter that it will only fuel the conspiracy theories that have defined elections in recent years.”
Also, being pro-fish wins elections. Simple but powerful truth.
Debate the merits of RCV all you want, but this much is clear: Sarah Palin has no one to blame but herself for losing a Trump +10 seat. #AKAL
Don’t Reward Cowardice with Your Vote
As a practical matter, I expect that this line of criticism will come to nothing, because Republicans at the moment give every indication that they enjoy being cynically used by self-seeking amoralists who exploit everything and everyone — including the most vulnerable among us — in the service of their own banal and tedious small-ball ambitions, yet another way in which today’s Republicans have come to resemble yesterday’s Democrats.
Obviously, one does not enter into a relationship with the Republican Party in 2022 because one is seeking opportunities for the exercise of honor. But if you are in public life and you aren’t willing to pay a price for what you believe, then, really: What use are you to anybody?
Scripture advises us not to put our trust in princes. That goes double for cowards.
Lemon: The former President talked shit about everybody including other presidents, members of his own party, probably you, and now everybody— all of the sudden they got the vapors about one statement that Biden made.. pic.twitter.com/vP0FPr9iYK
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent/WaPo:
In GOP ads, ‘invasion’ language is everywhere
When Republicans are asked about midterm election campaign issues that make them squirm, they have a ready answer. Never mind abortion rights or Donald Trump’s legal travails, they say — we’re running on inflation. The GOP will win control of Congress on gas and grocery prices, and that’s what they’re laser-focused on.
But over the airwaves and online, another story is playing out: an absolute torrent of ads meant to frighten and anger voters about immigration.
A new report from the pro-immigration group America’s Voice seeks to document this ongoing phenomenon. One of its key conclusions: “Republicans have made their nativist narrative a top messaging priority.”
In the world of Republican campaign ads, very little has changed since the xenophobic Trump presidency, and some of what’s in these ads is truly repellent.
Fresh off her upset victory in the Alaska House special, Democrat Mary Peltola is back on TV with a general election ad. The topic: abortion, and the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade. "The federal government has no business taking away our freedoms." pic.twitter.com/Te5P1RYdTt
Here’s why the Trump GOP’s crazy quotient is expanding .
If it appears the volume of deception coming from MAGA Republicans is increasing, that’s because it is. Two academics from New York University set about documenting the proliferation of rubbish in a study they described this week for The Post’s Monkey Cage feature. They found that 36 percent of the news that Republican congressional candidates shared on social media came from unreliable sources on an average day from January to July, up from 8 percent for the same period in 2020. (The news shared by Democratic candidates from unreliable sources rose to 2 percent from 1 percent.)
The most ominous finding is where the crescendo of crazy is coming from. Incumbent Republican members of Congress were relatively truthful: Only 6 percent of the news they shared came from unreliable sources. Among Republican challengers, fully 45 percent came from unreliable outlets.
Trump admits to funding the people who violently attacked the capitol in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the election. Also, he wants to pardon them and wants America to apologize to them. https://t.co/YPaaQ03lXg
Brian Kemp’s Running Mate Is a Fake Elector
A Pizzagate believer. An Oath Keeper. Self-proclaimed prophets who talk to God and say Nancy Pelosi drinks baby blood. The 'brains' behind Trump's Big Lie My guide to Doug Mastriano World -- a rogue's gallery like Pennsylvania has never seen before https://t.co/TvfD2qJrtZ
Did Republicans Pick Trump Because Democrats Were Mean to Romney?
No. No, they didn’t.
It’s natural for Republicans who feel affection toward Romney to object more strongly to his depiction as a heartless plutocrat — a theme first developed by his Republican primary opponents — than to the portrayals of Al Gore as a liar and John Kerry as a coward and flip-flopper. The only unusual thing about Romney’s treatment is the affection felt for him by a species of conservatives. (Romney’s post-defeat reincarnation as a Trump critic has given him a retrospective sheen, making him the subject of unusually strong nostalgia for conservatives queasy at their party’s current state.)
For another thing, the imagined sequence by which Republicans turned to the brutish Trump only after watching poor Romney get his head dunked in the toilet ignores Trump’s rise in the party. He captured the fervor of the Republican base with his conspiratorial attacks on Barack Obama in 2011 — before Romney won the nomination. Indeed, by February 2012, Trump’s appeal had already reached a point where Romney felt obliged to publicly court the notorious birther:
Trump traded American foreign policy for dirt on his political opponents, instigated an insurrection, and stole classified documents with American security secrets, but thank God he never gave a speech with red lighting in the background
Gil Barndollar and Jason Dempsey/Atlantic:
Don’t Believe the Generals
Afghanistan was a lost war long before last year’s final withdrawal.
Retired Generals Frank McKenzie and Joseph Votel, the last two commanders of U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan, recently made the case that America should have stayed indefinitely, arguing that the pullout was a mistake and that America could have defended its interests—and kept the Taliban at bay—with a small residual force of a few thousand soldiers. And in The Atlantic, the retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus, who commanded the war in Afghanistan after presiding over the surge that helped bring temporary stability to Iraq, wrote that more than a decade ago “we had finally established the right big ideas and overarching strategy.” But the problem, he maintained, was that America did not have the stomach for a “sustained, generational commitment.”
A sustained, generational commitment? The United States spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan and sacrificed the lives of 2,461 servicepeople over those two decades. And in that time, the top brass mostly got their way. President Barack Obama caved to his generals, agreeing to a substantial troop surge in a war he was trying to end. President Donald Trump did the same on a smaller scale, entering office on a promise to end the war but eventually agreeing to a “mini-surge” and deferring a full withdrawal to his successor.
In Pennsylvania, “among all new registrants since June 24, Dems have a 30% advantage, compared to a 4% percent advantage pre-Dobbs.”https://t.co/nadKxW1O1L