It's Their Party and They Can Cry If They Want To

 

     Three States of the Union. Three Republican rebuttals by three different women, three Speakers of the House.

     One president, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. President Biden and VP Harris have been the only common denominators during the last three States of the Union.

     Each time, we heard screaming and hysterics from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the world's highest-paid bleacher bum, and who got thrown off her committee assignments, then out of her marriage because she slept with her weightlifting coach behind her husband's back. Last year, she came to the State of the Union literally dressed like a Chinese weather spy balloon. Last week, she dressed like a typical red state Trump rally-goer and, word was, no one wanted to sit next to her. The year before, she and Lauren Boebert did a creditable impression of a pair of howler monkeys in heat.

     The State of the Union has two purposes- One is to give the nation, well, the state of union. The other is to give broad strokes for the president's policy positions, tout the administration's accomplishments and to advance its vision for the future. The invariable consensus on the left side of the aisle is that the president knocked it out of the park. 

     I'll refrain from jumping on the hyper-partisan bandwagon but as far as meeting the expectations of a State of the Union, Mr. Biden did his job and did it well. Save for a couple of verbal miscues, which every president makes in the course of a long speech, President Biden was eloquent, well-prepared and passionate. And he met the right wing hysterics with grace and aplomb.

     Then came Katie Britt.

     Britt came off looking and sounding like a drama school dropout off her lithium. She laughed, she cried, as the drama critic trope goes, and all at the wrong times. Sitting in her bizarrely barren kitchen, the very setting for her rebuttal alone set women back to June Cleaver's day. She was going for passion and achieved only hysterics. The president pulled it off. Britt couldn't.

     And, in the act of doing so, Britt willingly turned herself into a stereotype of the kind of woman whom Republican men say are too "emotional" to hold high political office.

     She seemed to tie Biden to the sexual predation of what was a Mexican girl, now a young woman in her 30s. The fact is, that same woman testified before Congress nine years ago about sex trafficking at or near the Southern border and the crimes committed on her person were not in the United States but in Mexico and between 2004 and 2008, at a time when Biden held no higher office than a senator from Delaware. Bush II was the White House during that time.

     It took a little skullduggery from journalist Jonathan Katz to turn up her lies and to confront her about it. The most he got from Britt's communications team was what George Conway called "a non-denial denial".

     Let's face facts- Biden is about a decade past his shelf life. He's old and, yes, sometimes he stumbles when he gives a speech and sometimes even when he's climbing the stairs getting on Air Force One. And the fact that he's in the White House shows the dysfunction of a Democratic Party who couldn't or wouldn't field a better candidate in 2020.

     But he's still running the country. The economy is stronger than it's been in years. Unemployment is at record low numbers. 15,000,000 new jobs were created in the last three years and even right wing pundits were crowing about the February jobs report. And yet, the Democrats, as always, dealt us from the bottom of the deck and Biden is the hand we were dealt and the one we have to play whether we like it or not.

     And, let's face it, it was fear of the alternative that put Biden in the White House, why over 81,000,000 of us voted for him. We put Biden in the White House because we were credibly told that if we didn't, 2020 would be the last election in US history. Four years later, we're being told exactly the same thing, the surest indication right there that both parties are failing us spectacularly. The Democrats have had over three years to shore up, repair or build those guardrails to prevent a fascist takeover from happening. So why haven't they?

     Yeah, Biden's doing a decent job running the country but we can do so much better than an octogenarian who can barely get up a flight of stairs without stumbling. We should have a better choice than an elderly fascist or a gerontocracy.

     But for now, we cannot be fooled by the hysterics and Biden Derangement Syndrome on the far right (actually, the mainstream right) who have nothing but method acting and lies to give us.