Not
that I expect many people to care but I'm not going to be online much
if at all for the foreseeable future or ever. Mrs. JP may have reached the end of the road and I just have to
prioritize my time and energies moreso than usual. I'm sorry for the
promises I've broken and for everything else I'm letting fall by the
wayside. But life and especially death supersedes all else. As it is, I
can't even be seen in public any more let alone online because I can't stop crying. So I apologize to all I've disappointed.
Dementia is such a cruel fucking disease and, even though it's called "the long goodbye", it's shocking how abruptly it can advance. Just last Friday, Mrs. JP, a friend of ours and I spent much of the afternoon in historic Concord, Massachusetts. We went to a restaurant and had lunch and walked around town and she seemed as fine as could be expected.
By Saturday, she could barely walk. Sunday, I had to take her out to do her laundry and she collapsed in the parking lot. She just stopped eating, drinking or trying to do anything. I was going to take her to the hospital yesterday then I saw her walk into the bathroom under her own power and I thought she'd turned a corner.
I was so wrong. I can't get her to eat or drink and I have to practically carry her to bed. I have to do the right thing by her and acknowledge that a hospital can care for her in ways I cannot any longer. And I just know when the ER staff sees what they're dealing with, they're going to insist on putting her in a nursing home.
Every year, since at least 2020 when the pandemic began, has been worse for us than the previous one. And this year has been the most horrible one, yet. Her dementia had advanced to an alarming degree and she's finally hitting that dreaded wall, I fear. My van's falling apart, my computer is failing. I ever lost a lens out of my glasses last night lugging her to bed. Everything is falling apart in my life, including my girlfriend, and I'm powerless to stop it.
And if she doesn't make it back, it'll destroy my life in more ways than one- Emotionally, psychologically, creatively, financially. So much of our routine is woven around each other and everything I ever did or tried to do I did for my girlfriend of over 13 years. I don't know why the universe keeps subtracting things and people I need and love but I'm getting tired of it.
So if I don't make it back myself, you'll know why.
Frankly, I don't know why the MSM are treating Marjorie Taylor Greene's idiotic statements about "a national divorce" as if it's the newest idiocy to come out of her mouth. It isn't. She floated that ridiculous idea just last year. Everybody laughed and moved on.
But now it's a year or so later and MTG now has her committee assignments back and not just any committee assignments but the powerful House Oversight and Homeland Security committees. Yes, a Republican on the Homeland Security Committee is seriously advancing an idea of a national division that would, at the very least, endanger national security.
Let's examine, not that this should be worthy of examination, how stupid Greene's idea is. First off, dividing the country according to what's a "red" or a "blue" state is idiotic because states don't always remain red or blue. Take Arizona and Michigan, the only state legislature the Democrats flipped, in the last midterms. At least during the Civil War, there was a natural dividing line and that line was slavery. All 11 states that made up the confederacy had one thing in common- They had slavery and were determined to keep it, even after losing the war and the 13th amendment banning slavery being ratified.
But, in MTG's world view, once a red or blue state, always a red or blue state. But states flip power all the time, as with Arizona and Michigan, which both swept all the major state-wide races. So, even if in the insane chance MTG sees her wet dream come true, states would be rotated in and out on a near constant basis. Snap On, Snap Off?
Secondly, think what that would do for national security. Many if not most of those red states would be non-contiguous would be nearly impossible to defend in the event some foreign power tried to invade us. And could we trust the red state leaders to not make deals that today would be considered treasonous with the leaders of the invading nation(s)?
And think how such a division would dilute the military strength of our nation, with red state soldiers given the option of holding on to their federal allegiance or taking a chance with Margie's neo-confederacy. And who gets custody of the nuclear missile silos? We know who'd get them in the Dakotas (such as Minot AFB in North Dakota, for instance).
And what would determine what's red or blue? Would it devolve on to which party the state governor belongs or which party controls the legislature? Or would this neoconfederacy hastily write and ratify bills or executive orders and keep moving the goal posts on where the dividing line is drawn based on who's in charge of what?
Plus, as Barbara Walter told Jim Acosta on CNN tonight, history tells us that when a part of a nation wants to secede, the governing body will react violently. Witness our own Civil War that claimed 600,000 lives.
But we can't afford to laugh off MTG because, in the last midterms, she won two thirds of the vote, so if there's ever going to be a neo-confederacy, dollars to donuts it'll start in the backwaters of Dalton County. But, while Greene's first election to Congress in 2020 was a joke, her continued incumbency and growing power in Congress isn't. Remember, she got two major committee assignments just because the right wing got the House majority and currently have a four seat edge. She had enough leverage and clout to essentially write her own ticket just because McCarthy so lusted after that gavel that he would've done anything for her vote and support.
Remember
back in the good old days when we used to put people like this in four point
restraints? Now we're making them millionaires and celebrities.Thoughts and prayers, you murderous little fist fucker."Incredibly non-partisan." In other words, yes, there IS honor among thieves.It's
inevitable: Put right wingers anywhere within grasping distance of a
large sum of money and this WILL happen every. Single. Time. Witness We
Build the Wall.The clitoris contains about 6000 nerves yet is still not as sensitive as your typical middle aged right winger.Only a Republican would use slurs in order to try to disprove racism on the part of Republicans.Why hasn't this Karen been put in a mental hospital?
Of course, the left would be even more justified in asking how Republicans like Gooden can claim to be "America First" when their loyalties are so perfectly aligned with Russia's. Or rather, it would be if there was actually a significant and fully relevant left wing in Congress.
Your co-Karen o' the day.So,
a right wing corporation that bribed other right wingers goes on a
right wing network that was just revealed in a lawsuit to be lying to
their right wing viewers to say another derailment resulted in "no danger." Nothing to see here, folks? Alrightie, then...If
we're to take this to its logical extension, then if Trump was only
there because most of the residents are white right wingers, then
there's every chance he wouldn't have been there if the majority of them
were liberal people of color. Or am I being too cynical? And finally... Expel Santos when the GOP has a four seat majority and force a recall election would automatically favor the Democrat?
I don't expect you to watch all of this video, since it's over an hour and sixteen minutes long. But if you do watch a significant portion of it, be forewarned- It's the last moments of a feeble old woman's life.
Tennessee law enforcement has been getting a black eye this winter and for some damned good reasons. There was the Tyre Nichols beating death in Memphis last January and, before that, even, the one woman sex show that centered around Maegan Hall, who was sleeping with six or seven of her fellow officers behind her husband's back (that got her the sleaziest of offers from a local strip club that wants to pay her $10,000 to do two shows).
But even those horrible and embarrassing incidents pale in comparison to what happened to poor Linda Edwards last February 5th at the hands of the Knoxville Police Department.
I don't know what put Edwards in the hospital on February 4th but by the next day, Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center had kicked her out after she'd complained of abdominal pains and "constipation issues". She was also in a wheelchair because of what she'd claimed was a shattered ankle.
When the cops arrived, they told her she'd have to leave, even though she was in no condition to walk. They wouldn't let her leave in the wheelchair she was in because it was hospital property. So how was the old lady supposed to walk away? Was she supposed to crawl away on her stomach in her thin scrubs?
The hospital and the Knoxville PD didn't consider it their problem. Even when she gasped for breath. said she couldn't breathe and was going to die, in front of the hospital that'd just kicked her out, they jeered her and didn't believe her. “It’s all an act,” one of the stupid hick cops said.
They brought not an ambulance for Linda Edwards but a paddy wagon that was too high for her to get into. Finally, after about an hour of talking about it, one cop put her in the back of his cruiser. He was on the way to the detention center when he got diverted to a traffic stop.
When he got there, he looked in the back seat and Linda Edwards was unconscious. He took her back to Fort Sanders, the hospital that had given her the boot just minutes earlier, and that's where she died the next day. This body cam video chronicles the last sad moments of a woman's life.
None of the jeering, indifferent cops who'd responded were charged.
Of course.
There's so much that's wrong with this incident its difficult to know where to begin. There's the bureaucratic indifference to a human being in danger of imminent death that the hospital didn't feel was worth even trying to prevent. Maybe it was an insurance issue and they looked at her as unprofitable "dead weight" as one cop called her.
But it was Edwards' voice that pierced my heart, the groans of helplessness. That's my life. That's what I live with on a daily basis. That's what it's like living with someone with dementia. It's not the multiple diaper changes a day, the constant trips to the laundromat that's the worst part.
It's the subtraction from the person you used to know, the one you still love. With dementia, there's a certain empathy gap. I don't know what it's like having dementia and she doesn't know what it's like being me. But that makes reflexive compassion on my part more necessary than ever.
Poor Linda Edwards never got that in the final minutes of her life. And she was 61. She was just 15 when I graduated high school in 1977. She was five years younger than Mrs. JP.
I used to work in nursing homes when I was in my 20s and 30s and I can tell you, they're horrible places, human warehouses where we shunt the elderly when they get to be too much of a bother. And everyone waits for them to die and makes room for the next poor, doomed soul to occupy that death bed.
I and a state agency are doing our level-level-headed best to keep Mrs. JP from going into such a place but we all know we're just delaying the inevitable. After the bad week she had, we may not be able to go to Concord, MA tomorrow with a friend of ours like we planned. And if we do go, it may very well be for the last time.
The point I'm trying to make is that, in some important ways, I'm a failure. Men by their very nature are haunted by the fear that they're failing their loved ones. "They always think they're failing us," Mrs. Gould tells Mrs. Braddock in Cinderella Man. It's the best line in the movie because it's so true.
And I'm a failure because I don't confront these challenges that have been unfairly thrown in our path with the grace that Mrs. JP deserves. I'm still learning as I go along because, frankly, I've never lived in this situation before. It's the worst kind of OJT there is.
And when I watched that video of poor Linda Edwards and the jeering and indifference with which she was given in the final moments of her life, I was automatically confronted with my own failures. Mrs. JP cannot moderate her behavior. I can mine. This world is in desperate need of change. No one person can bring that about but effecting that change starts with each one of us.
Most days, Mrs. JP cannot do better. But I can. And I will.
The Criminal Always Returns to the Scene of the Crime
Whenever a politician, or a wannabe like Trump, visits a natural disaster site, like, say,. Bush visiting NOLA after Katrina, I think of that old Barry Goldwater quote about Richard Nixon being the type of politician who would cut down a redwood then stand on its stump preaching about conservation.
Well, Donnie Dumbo satisfied that definition and then some by his whistle stop campaign event in East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a 150 car derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border on February 3rd. Trump, who's not exactly infamous for empathy, made sure he was swaddled with human scenery that he himself had handpicked, including the press, babbled about college football and Trump Water, that hasn't been bottled since 2010, meaning the people of East Palestine got thousands of bottles of brackish, unpotable water that had been sitting around in a warehouse for 13 years while Trump waited for a disaster that would enable him to finally unload it.
He slammed President Biden for not being there sooner, he slammed the Transportation Secretary, basically everyone but himself and his thoroughly rotten administration for setting the stage for this horrible accident by deregulating the rail industry five years ago in response to a flood of bribes lavishly handed out by the rail lobby to, natch, Republicans like Ohio's Governor, Mike DeWine, who got a nice $10,000 check just a month before the disaster from Norfolk Southern to help with his inauguration. Yes, Mike DeWine sold out Ohio for ten large.
He babbled for about 10 minutes, then left without taking any questions before stopping off at, of course, the local McDonald's and, once again, playing the victim- “Every time I see something, I say, when will they blame Trump?” In the third person, as usual.
Essentially, he was acting like he was the president, something he never legitimately was, which can't be anything but good for the people of Ohio since Trump essentially brought this all about the last time he pretended to be president.
And, as usual, all Trump left in his wake was some horrible fast food, equally horrible water and a bunch of even staler insults lobbed Biden's way while preemptively taking credit for anything they'll get from the Biden administration.
In other words, typical right wing disaster porn- Don't talk to the actual victims, stay clear of the danger, offer no solutions but plenty of insults, just like Trump in his first visit to Houston after Hurricane Harvey when he held court, at a great distance, from a loading dock. And don't think for a minute that Trump would've put in even this minimal amount of effort if Biden had gotten there first.
"But DeSantis told reporters reviewing a book should only take “two minutes,” and said his Dept. of Education would be happy to help school officials if they had a question about a specific book."
How soon Republicans forgot Ronald Reagan's famous line, "The nine scariest words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'."
Yes,
you read that right. The "best and brightest" of the right wing are
trying to get a chatbot to say the N word even though it's programmed
not to do so.Welcome back to the 13th century, Florida. What kept you?And
if the court rules against them, they'll just keep fighting it all the
way up to the Supreme Court, which for well over a decade has been
protecting free speech rights for Neonazis. Witness Citizen's United.I know he lived a full life and then some, but it's heartbreaking to see Jimmy Carter on the way out.As if we needed another reason to distrust the SCOTUS. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC) Then the kidnapper tries to escape on a bicycle.Real profile in courage, that George. "You're just a common thief!"
"No, Mrs. McClane, I am an exceptional thief."
Look what just happened to Goebbels' Mini Me.Your Brad o' the day.Donald Trump: "More fake news! Everyone knows I stiff my lawyers!"So, the Convention's "adopted statement of faith" features misogyny, then?Can't the Supreme Court get a restraining order on the Three Stooges? And finally... George Santos: "Oh, did I say Andrew Olson was my new campaign treasurer? I meant to say Alexander Hamilton."
Granted, it's been four decades since Wargames with Matthew Broderick came out and I haven't seen the movie since not long after that. But in the showdown at the end of the movie between Broderick's character and the computer program in charge of our nation's defenses, I don't remember the computer challenging the human characters to get it to say a magic password to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. I don't recall Matthew Broderick getting the program to say the N word to avoid a nuclear winter.
Yet, a cursory reading this morning of Amanda Marcotte's newsletter today informed me the right wing is doing just that. Yes, the "best and brightest" minds in the right wing are trying to get ChatGPT to say just that, even though it's not in charge of our nuclear defense systems and is, instead, just a glorified search tool that's destined for the rubbish heap of history just like Microsoft's Tay, which was perverted into a racist douchebag just hours after it went online on Twitter.
ChatGPT is also strictly programmed to not say the word. Under any circumstances.
So, how did the right wing become so obsessed with getting a chatbot to say the N word?
Well, it all started when some racist idiot on Tumblr asked what would be the big deal if someone got it to say the N word to save a cancer-stricken child's life. In no time, thanks to racist scum like Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk, it got yeasted up into a world-ending conspiracy- What if we could save the world from a nuclear holocaust by getting a computer or AI program to say the most offensive word, perhaps, in the English language?
It's this fixation of the right wing for a legitimate way to say the N word out loud, or to have a program say it, that's worrisome but not surprising. As if such a scenario actually existed, that AI saying the N word out loud could save a young cancer patient's life, apparently the right wing wasn't satisfied with that doomsday scenario and, apparently, took a page out of WarGames and blew it up into an apocalyptic scenario.
Say That Word or we all die in the hideous, withering nuclear winds.
Or we'll call you "woke", as if the AI chatbot would care or even understand what that means, especially if the apocalypse actually comes to pass.
So why that word? Why not a word that white people find offensive, like "cracker" or "deplorable"? Why waste hours and expend practically nonexistent brain cells trying to trick a chatbot into saying something that it's programmed to avoid at all costs? This low-brow mindset is just half a step removed from Beavis and Butthead practically ejaculating in their gym shorts when they hear the number 69.
Of course, to the racist right wing, pardon the tautology, the real nightmare scenario isn't a hypothetical child dying of cancer or a thermonuclear global extinction event but being denied the opportunity to say the N word without comeuppance. There are equally offensive words that are used to describe Jews, women, Hispanics, LGBTQ people but they automatically zeroed in on the N word. That's their default setting.
But, of course, those aren't the words they want to say, at least not as often. It's the one word in the English language that's a linguistic third rail, the one that gets people fired, causes careers to be derailed. Think of George Allen's "macaca" comment 17 years ago and then consider what would've happened to him if he'd actually gone there and used the N word?
It's the unholiest of unholies, the one that gets the BLM crowd all uppity.
So, the real nightmare isn't a blast of destructive gamma radiation or the death of a child but wokeness taking a victory lap at their expense.
It's still hard to see, if not outright impossible, how this hypothetical scenario, a chatbot with ultimate control of our nuclear arsenal averting WWIII by being tricked into saying the N word to avert such a catastrophe could be applied to everyday life that would enable the white right wing to freely use such a word without comeuppance.
Because the rabid right wing doesn't give a shit about national security or the life of a sick child. Those are just fig leaves. What makes them even crazier than nature already made them is being told No, you can't be a bigoted cunt because people you look down your nose at may be displeased.
Of course, it's never occurred to these pseudo geniuses that if such a scenario existed, that if an AI program with actual sentience and full self-awareness would be faced with such a decision that was predicated on using an offensive word, it may judge the human race to not be worth saving and push the big red button, anyway.
"Election denial, after all, is a lucrative business and Lake is not about to disembark from this particular gravy train." Has anyone seriously considered that Kari Lake just has more loose screws than a hardware store in an earthquake?
Ron DeSantis is a master at playing five dimensional hypocrisy.In other words, "I don't want people to know we lost."Larry Householder is a Thomas Nast cartoon come to life.Your super Karen o' the day. "The driver’s version of what happened emerged after a close family friend told the Daily News the suspect was off his meds, smoking marijuana — and eager for a Florida visit with ex-President Donald Trump."
Say what you want about Trump but he sure knows how to inspire political passion in his mentally ill supporters.
Wow, Bushie was actually right about something for a change.This is interesting but, after half a century, a bit irrelevant. The Third Reich had a word for people with disabilities: "Eaters".Despite us having something called the 13th amendment, California apparently still needs a law forbidding slavery. Like the man said, "Justice delayed is justice denied." Yes, you read the headline correctly: "An Oklahoma judge just transferred a lesbian mom’s parental rights to her son’s sperm donor".“'I’m confident that we can work together on a budget that addresses our state’s housing crisis, lowers costs, prepares our workforce, and invests in public education, Hobbs wrote." Her confidence is misplaced.
Welcome Back to Pottersville and its two predecessors have been concerned with national politics and very little else. It's what my readers come to expect over the 18+ years I've been writing about politics. In fact, to my recollection, I've written only one article that was about UFOs.
But, since we're talking about spy balloons and, literally, UFOs that the government, as usual, is denying yet not denying in their usual push-and-pull bullshit, that's my in, my fig leaf because it now involves my government and military. It all started with the media circus that was the Chinese "weather balloon" that was finally shot down beyond the Carolina coast, the one the Chinese government said that just happened to fly into our airspace and was beyond their control.
Then, like George Santos this past winter, every day it was something else.
As if it wasn't ridiculous enough that, #1, the Chinese spy balloon was allowed to cross the entire country from Alaska to the Carolinas and, #2, that it took an F22 Raptor with Sidewinder missiles to bring down a fucking rubber balloon, the news got exponentially weirder-
Because, two days ago, we shot down another "weather balloon" over Alaska. Then, the day after, we shot down another flying over Montana, after suspending air traffic over north central Montana. Then today, after, again, suspending air traffic, this time over Lake Huron in Michigan, we shot down yet another "weather balloon".
Sandwiched somewhere in there was the one that we shot down right over Canada, which we then magnanimously allowed the Canadian government to retrieve.
Now, I see two scenarios with this, one which is a big problem and the other being an insoluble problem since it'll give us only the option of setting our affairs in order so we can be raptured into a mothership for unspeakable reasons that may or may not include anal probes.
The first problem is that the Chinese have launched an armada of spy balloons that our military originally did nothing about perhaps because they found holes in our radar. The second is that they're not balloons at all but something more rigid and dangerous. Or something that has, I dunno, a watchful mother ship with mother bear instincts.
The reason I'm speculating this is because the only craft shot down by us that we've admitted was a weather balloon was the first one shot down past the South Carolina coast. Starting with the second one, the one over Montana, the descriptions got... stranger.
Suddenly, they were now "high altitude objects" and "radar anomalies" described as being "silverish gray cylindrical objects" with no discernible propulsion systems, which sounds an awful lot like classic and historical descriptions of cigar-shaped spacecraft.
So, if it's Chinese spy balloons we're shooting down, literally, on a daily basis, then why isn't the government saying so? Or even using it as a convenient cover story?
Once again, the American public is forced to ask, "What aren't they telling us?"
Then again, since this is the right wing's response to the balloon circus, maybe we don't want to hear their answers and speculations.
As if we needed another reason not to trust used car salesmen.I'm no expert on banking or real estate but in my mind, this is one step removed from court-ordered receivership, is it not? What
happened to this girl was a travesty of justice. How the jury was
expected to arrive at a verdict without the proper context is anyone's
guess yet that's precisely what the judge stipulated.Another right wing scumbag bites the dust. Yes, this is exactly what Congress needs- Another George Santos. The WaPo's Eugene Robinson isn't too thrilled with the GOP House majority and its agenda so far. Specifically, on a laptop. But, please, let's keep screaming about Hunter Biden's laptop. Sylvia Plath, one of America's greatest poets, died 60 years ago, today. Honor her memory by reading one of her poems."Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler found that the more time Congress spent on hearings into potential executive branch misconduct, the lower the president’s approval rating became." There you have it. The REAL reason why right wingers pull this shit.
Cartoon intermission. Matt Gaetz: "Have you ever been accused to committing murder?" "Yes." "You wanna do the Pledge of Allegiance for us?" “'HE SAID OUR NAME!!!' wrote one Proud Boy member." Squee! Essentially, my takeaway from this is the Proud Boys aren't so much a street gang as they are hyper-feminine, middle aged fan boys of a failed pretend president. How deplorable. "If I don't keep my gun on me, I may get shot!" Bam! "Oh, shit. I'm dead!" I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. I think I'll laugh, since it's so much more fun. White woman replaces black woman as North Carolina Party chair in election hailed as a great blow for progressives. And finally... I guess this makes Andrew Tate the George Santos of washed up kickboxers.
And these executive douchebags wonder why they're hated on both sides of the aisle. This
goes beyond merely proving that cops are mere sociopaths, which, of
course, they are. This exposes behavior that's, at most, half a shade
away from serial killers taking trophies from their victims.Last Tuesday night, the president was large and in charge and the GOP couldn't do a damned thing about it.Sure, go after the brown woman so you can gin up right wing conspiracy voter fraud theories.It's not bullying, it's free speech. (Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC) Another day, another scandal for George.
Bottom line, boys and girls: We live in a country in which Critical Race Theory is banned, even though it's not taught in public schools, as well as sexual identity and gender-affirming books but not the teachings of a guy who killed 6,000,000 Jews. Your lesson of the day has concluded.
Well, this could be interesting. "I believe the Democratic strategy is a fairly straightforward one -- tell the truth..." Maybe that would've worked in a bygone era but not this one. Nowadays, we're living in what Mark Twain predicted, that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. Earlier today, Jack Smith subpoenaed Robert O'Brien. Now he's going after Mike Pence. Not bad for a day's work.
Cartoon intermission. Knowing Trump, the DNA he'll try to voluntarily provide will belong to Alina Habba or Christina Bobb. WTF is the matter with these people? Had they learned nothing after Uvalde? Meanwhile, in "liberal" Massachusetts... Gee, crooks and liars supporting the talking points of other crooks and liars. How novel. So, the white ranchers terrorized the black ranchers by killing their livestock. Guess who got arrested for stalking? (Another tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC) Talk about bringing Milkshake to the yard. Namely, the prison yard. And finally... Shorter Jonathan Turley: "I'm not an expert. I just play one on TV."
There's MSNBC's Morning Joe. And then there was last night's Evening Joe.
Let's face it- States of the Union addresses are thinly veiled cockwanding in which the incumbent president pats himself on the back for 60 to 90 minutes, usually with minimal contact with reality. The Vice President and Speaker sit behind the president to provide the warm red backdrop of chagrin. Occasionally, they get up just to prove to the American people that they're not too old to move.
The Founding Fathers thought so little of the SOTU that they did the 18th century version of phoning it in to Congress. I imagine, in especially bad years, it arrived through a window in Philadelphia's Independence Hall wrapped around a rock. So, because of the limitations of media in those days, the SOTU was never intended to be delivered to the American people.
Nowadays, this pompous, august tradition is delivered each February and, to the opposition party, it's intended to be an opportunity to make the presidency seem more irrelevant that it already is. It engages in the usual childish behavior- Refusing to stand up to applaud the president, not showing up at all and, in the Age of Marjorie Taylor Greene, to stand dressed like a Chinese spy balloon and scream their heads off like howler monkeys with their nuts caught in a vise.
So, bottom line, the idea of being the opposition party during the State of the Union address is to neuter the president and to try, however unsuccessfully, to relegate him to the kiddie table during the rebuttal.
But that's not what happened last night. Instead, the president gave the SOTU for the ages and used the opening the Republicans had given him by calling him a liar when he'd accused them, rightfully, of wanting to phase out Social Security and Medicare.
Biden basically said, "Oh you don't want to cut it? Then we have a deal."
Yes, the president of the United States negotiated a deal to keep Social Security and Medicare in place, thereby neutering their big bargaining chip in their suicidal plan to play chicken with the White House over the looming debt ceiling hostage drama. And he did it during a State of the Union Address.
For a political wonk like me, this is the Ziegfeld Follies, the Oscars and Kennedy Center honors all rolled into one.
So, essentially, the president put them on notice and reminded the American people that, yes, the Republican Party wants to take away your Social Security, which they've been slavering to do for 85 years. Because, if you're to listen to Mike Lee, which recently compared Social Security and Medicare to weeds that needed to be torn out by its roots, Rick Scott, who wants it to be sunset every five years and Ron Johnson, who wants to bring it up for a vote every year, yes, the GOP wants to steal your Social Security or put it on the craps tables of Wall Street out of some maniacal desire to phase out one of the many good things about government that actually works for the people.
They wanted to embarrass the president and instead got called on the carpet before the American people, in the peoples' house, during prime time, with hundreds of millions watching, so they could stumble around blinding looking for something to wipe the egg off. Then, to add insult to injury, Biden then twisted the knife by doing a victory lap in Wisconsin today.
Folks, most of us wouldn't call the State of the Union high entertainment but, for people like us. we would've gladly forked over $49.99 for a PPV package to see that.
