The reviews are in, and from what I've read so far, they're damned near unanimous: Joe Biden totally "brought it" to Tuesday night's State of the Union (SOTU) spectacle. That means he did good, especially since everybody's who's anybody was bracing for disaster. Some concerned critics were even resurrecting his advanced age in order to pre-excuse him and urge him not to run again. Others pre-blamed his stuttering issue on what was feared to be a gaffe-a-thon.
But as the New York Times emotively reported over the weekend, Biden had practiced for this event really, really hard. The cinematic "King's Speech" pathos is nothing next to Biden's own epic verbal struggles.
His TelePrompter came complete with dashes for when he should pause, slashes for when he should raise his voice, and smaller font for when he should lower his voice. (OK, so I was only kidding about that last bit.) According to the Paper of Record,
“This is a guy who has been remarkably consistent over a very long career both in the values he brings to the job and the way he articulates those values,” said Jeff Nussbaum, a former Biden White House speechwriter. “When you’re writing for Joe Biden, you’re a session musician for a band that has already released 20 albums.”
But, Mr. Nussbaum added, there was a reason behind the consistency, which he said had led the president’s list of legislative victories: “Joe Biden has to say the same thing a thousand times before the world catches up to him.”
Preparations for Mr. Biden’s State of the Union speeches begin weeks in advance. Several aides described a process in which the president demands that sentences be written clearly — no acronyms! — and illustrate his legislative accomplishments in terms real people can understand. He spends weeks working on each speech with his writers, reading over and over again, top to bottom, and out loud.
I admit it, readers. I caved and watched the whole spectacle. I didn't even flinch when the camera panned to Bono sitting in the first lady's box. Stuttering was not that big of a deal. Rather, it was the slurring of his words, many of which were what the Times has delicately euphemized as exaggerations and uncontextualized - as opposed, let us say, to outright lying. All politicians lie, after all. Some of them, as Izzy Stone observed, even inhale the same hashish that they peddle to the masses.
It is only now, after nearly a half-century of calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, that Joe Biden has suddenly taken to verbally championing these programs and projecting his own historical position right onto the Republicans. When he remarked in his speech that "some but not all" Republicans in the audience wanted to let the programs sunset, there were howls of outrage from the likes of a fur-clad Marjorie Taylor Greene, who yelled out "Liar!" They took Biden's bait, whereupon he smugly announced that all the nutjobs in the chamber were now officially on record as opposing the cuts, after all. Point, Uncle Joe. According to the refs in the media, he handled the heckling like a true champ.
Of course, he never defined his terms. No politician ever uses the word "cut" when they talk about imposing pain and austerity on the masses of people. Rather, these programs must be modernized, improved, reformed, and protected for future generations, Just because no self-serving politician will ever reduce benefits for current recipients doesn't mean that they won't agree to raise the retirement age beginning in, say, 2035.
So what if Biden made a big show about vaguely taxing the wealthy? He didn't actually come right out and suggest that we scrap the cap on FICA contributions as a way to render Social Security solvent into perpetuity.
Later in the speech, when Biden introduced the grieving parents of Tyre Nichols, the Memphis man beaten to death by thugs with badges, he quickly -- too quickly, in my view - pivoted right from police brutality into restoring the ban on assault weapons. He slurred and he blurred state-sanctioned violence straight into a condemnation of renegade civilian violence Perhaps it was to keep people from remembering that it was Biden himself who spearheaded the militarization of local police departments with his COPs legislation, which moved such surplus hardware as tanks and grenade launchers and assault weapons into even relatively small and extremely untrained police departments.
Let’s come together to finish the job on police reform.
Do something. Do something.
That was the plea of parents who lost their children in Uvalde — I met with every one of them. Do something about gun violence.
Thank God, thank God we did. Passing the most sweeping gun safety law in three decades.
That includes things like that the majority of responsible gun owners already support: enhanced background checks for 18- to 21-year-olds. Red flag laws keeping guns out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves and others.
His alleged disgust at weapons in dangerous hands at home does not extend to keeping them out of dangerous hands elsewhere. As a matter of fact, he has quietly allowed unqualified civilians at home to become freelance arms dealers, to supplement the billions of dollars in weaponry already appropriated by Congress for the US's proxy war on Russia in Ukraine.
The New York Times told the tale recently of a limo driver and a doctor with no prior experience in arms trading who partnered up and got almost instant permission from the Biden administration to pursue a lucrative $30 million weapons deal. Such an endeavor would normally take months of government vetting and subsequent stringent tracking, but in this and other cases, approval came within hours. The driver and the doctor apparently were not even subject to a mental health check or other requirements which are sometimes imposed on run-of-the-mill gun purchasers who buy a weapon or arsenal for their own direct, personal use. From the Times article:
Weapons sold through private brokers are far more likely to end up on the black market and resurface in the hands of American adversaries, according to government advisers and academics who study the trade. Recent experience in Afghanistan and Syria shows that, without strict tracing policies, weapons can end up with terrorist groups or hostile military forces....
“It’s the Wild West,” said Olga Torres, a lawyer who represents arms exporters and serves on the federal Defense Trade Advisory Group. “We are seeing a lot of people who were previously not involved in arms sales getting involved now because they see the opportunity.”
It's capitalism, after all. And Joe Biden did find it necessary in his SOTU speech to once again remind folks that, despite the crazy GOP smears of socialism leveled against him, he is indeed a diehard capitalist.
All the speech previews I'd read had also predicted that Biden would not be so crass as to brag about shooting down that Chinese spy or weather balloon this past weekend. But once again, stalwart Uncle Joe proved the pundits wrong. Because when it comes to bellicose chest-thumping, even aged leaders are miraculously transformed into virile young studs whenever they order a phallic missile deployment:
if China’s threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did last weekend.
And let’s be clear: winning the competition with China should unite all of us. We face serious challenges across the world.
I wish someone would explain to me why shooting down a balloon is a sign of winning some "competition. Maybe Joe thought he was throwing darts at balloons in a carnival booth, or maybe he was fomenting a new cold or hot war.
Whatever his meaning, how exactly would conflict with China "unite all of us?" Because the only picture I'm getting in my head right now is a nuclear bomb melding everyone and everything on Earth into one great big gruesome blob of flesh and ashes.
The congress-critters in Biden's audience certainly were united in their own impervious and titillated reaction to death and destruction, however. The prospect of war gets them amorously excited every single time. They all stood up as one great big orgasmic mass of session musicians, and broke right into that standard SOTU favorite:
"USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!"
