Team Biden believes that they can deflect attention from his and their party’s failures by working up some new insult comedy.
Team Biden believes that they can deflect attention from his and their party’s failures by working up some new insult comedy.
S harper elbows? Yeah, that’s what will rescue Joe Biden, according to Joe Biden. He and his staff think it’s time to get tough on the Republicans. So far, according to the legend they are telling themselves, he’s been notoriously conciliatory, bipartisan, and moderate.
Also, they say the media are being unfair.
We learn these hilarious fantasies from a Politico piece in which Biden attributes to Republican fever his inability to get anything done despite enjoying unified Democratic Party control of the federal government. The highlight of the piece is this gem: “Privately, Biden has expressed frustration with media coverage of his administration and believes that the press — and Americans at large — have been too quick to gloss over the damage Trump did to the country.” Yes, remember how tempered and restrained the media were as they famously underplayed the actions of Donald J. Trump? Who among us has not thought, over the last few years, “Say, when are the media finally going to stop genuflecting before Trump?”
Team Biden believes that they can deflect attention from his and their party’s failures by working up some new insult comedy. Here’s what they decided on: to try to make “Ultra-MAGA Republicans” a favorite catchphrase. It’s already come up so many times that it’s on the verge of becoming a national joke: Trying the same dumb thing over and over again to diminishing effect is making Biden the More Cowbell president.
Staffers who cheer the new, flame-throwing Biden seem not to have been paying attention. Do none of these flunkies, nor the Flunker in Chief, recall any of the incendiary remarks he has been hurling at the Republican Party throughout his administration?
On March 25, 2021, in the third month of his presidency, Biden called voting regulations favored by Georgia Republicans “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” “un-American,” and “an atrocity.” He said, “This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country, is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience.” He said “this makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” called the legislation “pernicious,” and said “this is gigantic, what they are trying to do.”
On July 13, in the course of comparing the Republicans’ rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler by saying they were perpetrating “the big lie,” Biden said the opposition was making a “concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote” and added, “Have you no shame?” He said state voting laws enacted by Republicans constitute “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole, since the Civil War.”
On October 6, when Republicans refused to go along with a debt-ceiling increase because they noted, accurately, that Democrats could simply pass the measure by budget reconciliation (which they instead wanted to use to pass a gigantic social-spending bill), Biden called the GOP “hypocritical,” “dangerous,” and “a bit disgraceful,” accused it of a “cynical, destructive, partisan ploy,” and said the GOP was in effect inviting “a meteor . . . to crash into our economy.”
So according to the Biden who was supposedly far too gentle on Republicans, the seasoned institutionalist of six months or a year ago who believed Washington, D.C., was a place where the parties could hash out their differences while remaining civil, the Republican Party is a kind of Jim Crow Hitler meteor.
Today Biden is thinking: “No more Mr. Nice Guy. I really need to amp it up!” The knob doesn’t go past 10, Mr. President. Once you’ve called people Nazi racists who are dragging us back to something comparable to the Civil War, the rhetorical earth has been well and truly scorched, like toast cooked in a jet engine.
Moreover, none of this stuff worked. The more Biden supposedly turned up the heat on Republicans, the less it meant. His approval ratings dropped last March (55.4 to 53.7). They dropped in July (52.3 to 51.3). They dropped in October (45.2 to 42.7). Yet the Biden whisperers are saying it’s time for him to do what we have been doing and that time is every day.
On January 11 of this year, Biden said that anyone who didn’t back his doomed bill to federalize state elections, or agree with him that the filibuster should be eliminated to ease its passage, was on the side of Bull Connor, Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, and autocracy. But now he vows to start calling Republicans names? What names are left? Perhaps Biden’s next gambit will be to start calling the Republicans degenerate mouth-breathing poopy heads who like Nickelback. He’d be better off acknowledging that he is the one voters are angry with, because voters don’t like $4.50 gasoline.