Some things never change…
NY Times, Round Table, 8 Feb 2023: Times Columnists Respond to the State Of the Union
I’ll just list the contributors and their headlines.
- Frank Bruni: Biden showed himself to be a happy warrior.
- Nicholas Kristof: A populist Biden gave perhaps the best speech of his presidency.
- Bret Stephens: Joe Biden shows his two faces.
- Michelle Cottle: Biden makes clear he’s still up for the fight.
- David French: “We will stand with you as long as it takes.”
- Michelle Goldberg: Biden was at his best.
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The Republican party is full of so many class acts.
Washington Post, Matt Viser and Amy B Wang, 8 Feb 2023: Marjorie Taylor Greene yells ‘liar’ during combative State of the Union
She later complained she couldn’t understand Biden because *Biden* was yelling.
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Washington Post, Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, 8 Feb 2023: Opinion | Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s strange ‘woke’ rant reveals a big GOP problem
I didn’t see this part; I was outside looking for the comet. Apparently Sanders, in the face of all the actual problems in the world, ranted about being “woke,” about “CRT,” and the word “Latinx.”
Biden, said Sanders, is “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”
To conservatives, everything must be black or white, no shades of gray, let alone any color.
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NY Times, Frank Bruni, 7 Feb 2023: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Queen of Having It Both Ways
She’s a brazen, shameless mascot, to boot. On Tuesday night, in televised remarks that began about half an hour after Biden’s ended, she referred at least three times, by my count, to Biden, his administration or their supporters as “crazy.” Not just wrongheaded — “crazy.”
“The choice is between normal and crazy,” she said, distinguishing Republicans from Democrats. This from a woman who worked for Trump, on behalf of a party whose leaders coddle the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and now talk about the Jan. 6 riot as if it were no more sinister than a fraternity party with a keg too many.
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Slate, Jim Newell, 8 Feb 2023: Republicans Are Angry at Joe Biden for Accurately Describing Plan to Sunset Social Security
Just look at the sneering faces of these three guys in the photo at the top of the article. Class acts, these guys.
The Hill, Alexander Bolton, 8 Feb 2023: Scott doubles down on sunsetting all federal programs after Biden’s jab
Where Scott proves Biden’s point.
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Meanwhile…
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 7 Feb 2023: Florida is officially a laboratory for fascism in the U.S., subtitled “There is a very specific reason why Gov. Ron DeSantis targeted African-American history for erasure”
Opening:
Ron DeSantis is not a “mini-Trump” or some other diminutive. He is much more dangerous. Donald Trump has no “ideology” beyond megalomania and a deep desire to be an American god king. By comparison, DeSantis is far more intelligent and devious; he is an ideological fascist and racial authoritarian.
Continuing:
The purpose of DeSantis’ thought crime laws is to intimidate and terrorize all teachers, educators, librarians, and others who are committed to education, critical thinking, and the truth in Florida (and beyond). In DeSantis’ Florida — and soon to be across “red state” America if he and the other fascist Republicans get their way — there will be censors who review books and other material for thought crimes and other “dangerous” ideas that are contrary to the interests of conservatives. These censors and party officials and their designated agents will also rewrite history – and reality itself – to fit the demands of the regime. The public will no longer be able to discern truth from lies and fantasies from facts and fiction. The subversion and destruction of reality, facts, and the truth are a precondition for, and one of the primary ways that fascist and other authoritarian regimes obtain and keep power.
DeSantis’ goal is to make America into a new Jim Crow Christofascist plutocracy.
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Huffpost via Yahoo!News, 6 Feb 2023: Lauren Boebert Appears To Pray For Joe Biden’s Death In Texas Sermon
(No doubt Boebert considers herself to be a Christian.)
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Media Matters, 7 Feb 2023: Daily Wire host claims demons are “always trans” subtitled “Michael Knowles: ‘They’re never super duper hyper-masculine chads. They’re never beautiful, truly gorgeous women'”
(Reality check: There are no demons.)
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Joe.My.God, 7 Feb 2023: Cultist Host Blames Turkey Earthquake On Sam Smith
Referring to the Grammy Awards the other night, a particular performance that has thrown conservatives into tizzies. (It’s a fantasy sequence, people; there is no Satan.)
Aligned with this: the photo in this article, Bannon: Sarah Sanders Is Not “Intellectually Capable”, with a sign on a shelf in the back saying “but there are NO coincidences.”
Yes there are. Almost everything in the world is coincidences. The predilection to see explanations and connection for everything in the world is the mind’s pattern-seeking engine working in overdrive, and the lack of education (which conservatives want to abolish) to understand why intuition and “common sense” are not reliable guides to understanding what is real.
These people are just not too bright; they are uneducated; they are deeply, deeply, superstitious.
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To end for now,
OnlySky, James A. Haught, 4 Feb 2023: There is no ‘divine plan’
Will discuss this in a future post, though it’s a very basic point, one a person either realizes at some early stage of their life (around adolescence) or learns to spend a lifetime rationalizing it away, in favor of their particular religion’s divine plan.
