JOE TRUMAN GIVES THEM HELL

Last night, Joe Biden - transforming himself into Joe Truman - told us American democracy is under attack, in plain language, leaving no doubt about either the dire nature, or the source, of the threat. He named names - most importantly, Donald Trump. He took a political risk and spoke the hard truth: a significant number of citizens of the United States of America, concentrated in the rotted-out shell of the Republican Party, have become extremists who are engaged in anti-constitutional opposition to the system of government under which we have lived for the past 235 years.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election.”

If you doubt any of the above is not Absolute Truth, what alternative universe have you been visiting the past month?

“They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, brutally attacking law enforcement, not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger at the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.”

Two days ago, Trump told a NewsMax host that if elected again, he would pardon all those who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol to prevent a legitimately elected government from taking power. He also said he would issue an apology, making the January 6 defendants persecuted victims.

This drew not a peep from any elected Republican.

There has long been an asymmetry in American politics. The GOP, going back to McCarthyism - actually earlier, when one looks at how they campaigned against Franklin Roosevelt - has wielded falsehoods and paranoia to cast its political enemies as malevolent and nefarious threats to the nation - literal enemies of the state. For the past 76 years (at least) Republicans have depicted Democrats as an anti-American force - commies! radicals! subversives! - actively scheming to wreck the nation.

NOW they cry foul?

Noting that not every Republican is a MAGA Republican (a charitable position giving many benefits of the doubt these days) Biden stated clearly: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

He also pointed out: “They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence.”

Right-wing pundits and leaders, sobered by the message and compelled, for the first time in their lives, to deep introspection, disavowed their old ways, condemning the Republican Party’s creep into authoritarianism and leading the crowd of offended patriots to toss Donald Trump from his golden throne.

Ha!

And again, HA!

All this triggered the Trumpers like the bully getting beaten up by Ralphie in “A Christmas Story.”

Mercedes Schlapp, wife of Orban illiberal democracy-loving Matt Schlapp, exclaimed, “No Republican can feel safe in Biden’s America.”

Ask the 150 cops who were brutally assaulted by MAGAts at the US Capitol.

Onetime White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who helped the Bush-Cheney administration lie the United States into the Iraq war, slammed Biden as “the most divisive, over the top, rhetorically vile, bumbling, inarticulate president in history.”

What’s more divisive than inciting political violence after you lose an election and then purposefully doing nothing to stop it, because the violent assault on the Capitol benefits you?

The reactions of Trump’s actual semi-fascist supporters, the outrage and fainting spells, the threats of massive class-action slander suits against Biden, are coming from the same people who are running around yelling about “groomers” and “pedophiles” and calling anyone to the left of Susan Collins a “Marxist.”

Last week, right-wing pundit Mollie Hemingway harrumphed on Faux Snooze that Biden’s semi-F-word remark “is more hateful than the worst thing Donald Trump has ever said.”

Last year she enthusiastically tweeted out an article from the MAGAconservative Federalistt proclaiming Biden’s vaccine program a “fascist move.” F-word for thee, not for me.

With these morons, it’s always projection.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the January 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of fascism is ridiculous because “Democrats are the fascists.”

Back in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When a commenter asked how long it would be before “we get to hang” Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Greene replied: “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place.” In videos, she said Pelosi was “guilty of treason,” a “crime punishable by death.”

This year, Greene spoke at an openly fascist - actually pro-Hitler - political action conference.

They sought to paint Biden as a brutally dangerous tyrant.

“President Biden tonight gave the speech of a dictator in the style of a dictator in the visual of a dictator using the words of a dictator,” said Reinhard Heydrich lookalike Stephen Miller.

The “outrageous” speech was delivered before a “blood-red Nazi background,” said a scowling Tucker Carlson.

But they also built on the years of work they’ve done to paint Biden as rapidly aging and losing his grip on reality.

“If you look at the words and meaning of the awkward and angry Biden speech tonight, he threatened America, including with the possible use of military force. He must be insane, or suffering from late stage dementia!” Trump wrote on his failing “Truth” Social.

Capitol footrace winner Josh Hawley came up with “Joe Biden’s hate-filled and menacing rhetoric tonight was disgraceful. His behavior is increasingly erratic. And his threats against half the country – his fellow citizens – are dangerous.”

Bad-taste Italian-joke-in-the-flesh Rudy Guiliani said “The hateful and despicable attack on America given by Biden last night appeared to be given from a basement in Hell.”

Fake electors errand boy Ron Johnson told Hugh Hewitt, “I mean, just the setting is frightening. It’s just dark.”

Ben Shapiro, who has to be admired for his unceasing 24/7/365 efforts to offer himself as living refutation of the ancient anti-Semitic slur that all Jews are really smart, said: “This is parodically bad imagistics for a president. It’s as though a bunch of meme-addled morons decided to reify a Dark Biden image in the hopes that it would somehow make him look powerful and cool, rather than demagogic and demonic.” Did he think inventing high-falutin’-sounding words that don’t actually exist would make him sound like the Talmudic scholar he’ll never be?

The MAGAt mindset requires its adherents to cry victimhood at every turn. It is a well-established, versatile formula that provides a blueprint for quick post-event reactions. While those mainstream media outlets that actually carried the speech (lookin’ at you CBS, who didn’t) were wringing their hands over the “political” nature of the speech, Conservatism Inc. had already moved on to predicting mayhem and bloodshed at the hands of the “demagogic and demonic” Joe Biden.

A few days ago, Donald Trump issued a statement on his struggling TRUTH Social platform: “Why are people so mean?” This in the middle of a conservative crusade to depict liberals and Democrats as nasty folks.

Trump’s remark captured the absurdity of this campaign. The loser who routinely assails political foes and critics as “losers;” the misogynist whose history of denigrating women is unparalleled in American public life'; the fat, ugly old man with the unbelievable hair and the mouth that is synonymous with an anus, who rose to the top of the GOP garbage pile by disparaging the physical appearances of his opponents, who railed against Muslims and “shithole countries,” who called for locking up his political rival, who worships revenge and lives on spite, who denounced journalists as “the enemy of the people,” who relishes conjuring up ugly and dismissive nicknames for his political adversaries, whose entire political project is built upon denigration and vilification...

THIS GUY complains about people being mean?

The Republican refusal to disavow actual fascists has been going on for a long time.

In early 1995, Idaho wingnut congress critter Helen Chenoweth, elected in Newt Gingrich’s “wave” in 1994 with support from the John Birch Society and anti-government militia extremists, held a hearing in Idaho in which she voiced concerns about “black helicopters” believed by the Right of that time to be the sign of an imminent UN takeover of the United States, that featured a militia activist who declared some lawmakers might have to be killed in the coming civil war.

This was in the midst of the campaign by the GOP-supported National Rifle Association against law enforcement agents as “jack- booted government thugs” who wear “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms,” while running a bulletin board on which NRA members posted bomb-making instructions and cited the need to prepare for armed conflict against the government. The “party of law and order” in action.

When, after the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 that killed 168 people, in which bomber Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols were each linked to anti-government militias, the Clinton administration and the FBI moved to monitor the militias more closely.

“Mainstream conservative” Republican Senate leader and to-be presidential candidate Bob Dole and Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich both publicly opposed this action.

Gingrich expressed sympathy for those expressing virulent anti-government positions.

Representative Steve Stockman, a Texas Republican, wrote an article for Guns & Ammo endorsing a favorite conspiracy theory of the militia crowd: that the Clinton administration had orchestrated the 1993 raid of the Brach Davidian compound in Waco, Texas where 76 members of the cult were killed, to bolster public support for gun control. Alex Jones had yet to even think of starting InfoWars.

Trump didn’t change a thing when he took over the White People’s Party.

“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: Either they win or they were cheated. You can’t love your country only when you win.”

“There are far more Americans, far more Americans from every background and belief, who reject the extreme MAGA ideology than those that accept it. And folks, it’s within our power, it’s in our hands, yours and mine, to stop the assault on American democracy.”

We have reached a watershed in American politics where the president of the United States felt he had to tell us directly that our system of government is under attack.

What happens next is, in every way, up to us.

UPDATE: And just in case you were wondering which side the corporate meeedeeeyah are on, the Washington Post reports this:

“While President Biden warned the nation about threats to democracy in a prime-time address on Thursday, ABC was airing a game show, “Press Your Luck.” As Biden spelled out his objections to former president Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans,” NBC was broadcasting a rerun of “Law and Order.” CBS skipped the speech to show a rerun of “Young Sheldon.”

“People involved in negotiations over Thursday’s address said the networks deemed Biden’s remarks as “political” in nature and therefore decided not to televise it. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions, cited the speech’s criticism of Trump — who may run in the Republican presidential primaries in 2024 — and its timing two months before the midterm elections.”

Motherfucking pinstriped corporate whores that they are.

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