I haven’t been able to look into the Biden’s State of the Union speech from last night yet because I find him so annoying, but I was able to watch the GOP response. The GOP response was very funny, and therefore more watchable.
Republicans are strongly criticizing the response speech which was made by a younger Senator, Katie Britt, for being just cringey and awful. That’s interesting because it really embodies exactly the kind of vibe that MAGA has been promoting for years now in a way that I have not seen before. To me, it was perfect, in fact. Britt’s response speech certainly had a disturbing tone from my perspective, yet criticizing her speech really seems equivalent to criticizing the entire MAGA ethos.
But, if you get beyond the spirit and tone of her speech and look at the substantive issues she spoke on, what is left? Katie and her husband are concerned that the next generation will not have the opportunities and freedoms that they had. OK, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can address either of those things because they are both beholden to ridiculously wealthy elites (just, perhaps, different subsets of those wealthy elites) and Republicans in particular are absolutely uninterested in individual freedom. Rather, Republicans have proven over and over again that they are interested in individual compliance with traditional culture; what they call “freedom” is the freedom to comply or face harsh consequences for going against traditional culture.
“I worry that my children may not get a shot at living their American dreams,” she says. Not “the” American dream, but “their” American dreams. What if their American dreams are gay, Katie? What if their American dreams don’t include having a lot of children?
Side note: My face hurts just watching how much this woman strains her facial muscles.
Britt does the classic right-wing misdirection — after talking about how her children’s American dreams may no longer be attainable, she shifts to the “crisis at the border” implying that this is somehow the cause of the problem rather than the real problem, which is the wealthy leveraging their control of corporations and the government itself to suck all the money (and power) out of normal working people.
The border is a mess, but it isn’t a crisis (Republicans who went down there to try to do something about it in person found this out first-hand) and it wasn’t the “most secure border ever” during the Trump administration. In fact, the Biden administration has been very authoritarian about that border since taking office (to the chagrin of people on the left). Moreover, as I’ve said before, the US economy requires illegal workers to function normally.
The specific things Britt mentions in her speech did not change the security of the border at all. Halting construction is not the same at deconstruction, and the border wall is not effective anyway; but never mind that, Biden actually built more of the border wall! She’s just straight-up lying about that. Announcing plans doesn’t do anything to change the world (it’s a common Democratic party ploy to make their voters think they’re doing something).
Side note: They’re right — she does seem like the drunk mom you ran into in your friend’s kitchen in the middle of the night when you were doing a sleepover in junior high.
I started trying to go over every little detail of her anti-immigrant monologue, but the truth is the whole subject is a distraction from the real issue: the destruction that the global billionaire class is creating in the US, Mexico, and every other country on this planet. If your 70+ year-old relative is having to choose between food and medication, it is the global billionaire class — not the Mexicans — that created this situation. Our dollars do not go as far as they did because of the global billionaire class, not because of immigrants.
Side note: That’s a really cute faucet, Katie. Looks like it might be the Rohl Acqui, which costs over $500. Yikes! If you like that look, Home Depot has some things that are similar (but not exactly the same) for a lot less. FYI.
When she says “the left” (meaning Democrats, who are actually center-right) has coddled criminals and defunded the police, that’s simply not true. There’s nowhere in America where the current funding for police is less than it was before Biden took office. Regarding “coddling criminals” — I can only guess that means releasing them from prison — our American system of institutionalized poverty to benefit the billionaire class does generate a lot of crime, but those who commit serious crimes are staying in prison. It’s only very low-level criminals who are being released back into society.
She claims that small towns as well as big cities are getting more dangerous, but the fact is that small towns are being emptied out by poverty, and overall violent crime has dropped to an extremely low level (probably because those who were most affected by lead exposure became elderly) and has stayed extremely low since 2012. The only way to really get it any lower would be socialism and certainly nothing the Republicans have suggested would decrease violent crime.
She claims that the problem with Biden is that he is “weak” rather than anything about his concrete policy decisions. It’s the standard dominance culture of the right and its standard assumption that if you aren’t promoting and exhibiting dominance culture, you are instead promoting and exhibiting chaos and ruin. There’s no logical thread that makes that assumption work, it’s just an assumption they hold because anything other than traditional culture makes them severely anxious.
Then, she claims that Biden is somehow not keeping his word in terms of foreign policy, which is just plain bunk. Trump is the one who withdrew the US from Afghanistan; Biden just inherited the decision which was already in motion. Nobody is more pro-Israel than Biden, and nobody is more pro-Putin than Trump.
Side note: She’s a bad actor. Her lies should be completely transparent to everyone. Maybe that’s really why Republicans didn’t like her speech.
She apparently wants to go to war with China or at least do a lot of posturing about China. Trump didn’t face foreign policy problems with strength and resolve. He basically offered to blow every dictator out there. Neat how Britt has forgotten that.
It’s true that we are not better off than we were 3 years ago.
It’s true that we are at a crossroads.
It’s true that it doesn’t have to be this way.
The problem, though, is that the Republican party is no more able to do something about it than the Democrats are because both parties are beholden to billionaire donors who get whatever they want. Sure, those billionaires disagree internally about how best to suck the rest of the wealth out of the working class, but they all agree that exsanguinating us is a great idea.
Side note: Katie Britt and her husband have a net worth of between $1 million and $5 million, making her part of the millionaire sycophant class that services and promotes the billionaire class just like a vampire’s bug-eating familiars (per Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Yes, the rest of the US congress is basically the same.
I had to stop watching Britt’s speech at about 13 minutes because the comedy wore off , and then it was just really boring and stupid, but apparently, the Republican party is the party of hard working families and parents. If that were the case, they would support taking some of the money and power away from the lazy billionaire class and putting it back in the pockets of those hard working families. They can’t do that because they serve the global billionaire class just like the Democrats. In fact, they have to strongly oppose anything like that so that the Democrats can pretend to support a more democratic tax system, and then shrug and fail.
Republicans: If you really want to vote for a party that supports hard working families and parents, here you go.