Old Man Yells at Cloud https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/old-man-yells-at-cloud/ excerpt The big news in the speech is that Biden wants to nuke the filibuster he backed throughout his career, up to as recently as six months ago when he warned, “You will throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done.” Doing so would also likely cost several vulnerable Democrats their seats in that body, which is why Mark Kelly and Maggie Hassan are starting to act like they’re clay pigeons who have just been invited to a shooting party. “I support changing the Senate rules,” said Biden, “WHICHEVER WAY THEY NEED TO BE CHANGED TO PREVENT A MINORITY OF SENATORS from blocking action on voting rights. Cough.” Yeah, but Mr. President, maybe consider that the reason this monumentally dumb idea is dead is that “YOUR OWN PARTY DOESN’T BACK YOU.” Also, there’s no constitutional provision that says CONGRESS SHALL DEFER TO THE PRESIDENT WHENEVER HE SHOUTS. It seems clear enough that Biden’s is going to be the second straight presidency destroyed by Twitter; Biden actually thinks that the activist obsessions of political alcoholics on social media are an important indicator of where the country is heading. Poll after poll shows that Americans rate the economy, inflation, the ongoing Covid crisis, and (the void of) leadership as their main issues of concern, and the alleged end of democracy and the voter-rights crisis are down there in the lint trap of issues alongside “Do something about the entry fees at the national parks.” “That’s not hyperbole,” Biden thundered, as he offered one ludicrous chunk of overstatement after another. “Will we choose democracy or autocracy?” he asked, as though the issue in Georgia is a czarist movement rather than an ID requirement for absentee voting. “I’m TIRED OF BEING QUIET!” he shouted, slapping the lectern, making everyone sigh who voted for him on a “maybe he’ll restore calm” theory. Reeling off names from the Civil Rights Hall of Fame, he added, “I’m so damn old, I was there as well!” Unless “there” means “the Sixties,” this was meaningless tosh, because he sure wasn’t among the Freedom Riders, nor at Selma. “Ya think I’m kiddin,’ man seems like yesterday, the first time I got arrested.” So our Pop-Pop of the Potomac is under the impression he was arrested more than once in civil-rights protests? Somebody should refresh him with the truth. He was AWOL from the civil-rights battles and was still bragging about earning the blessing of George Wallace as late as 1987. Good thing Biden’s reputation as a liar is one of the best-established facts in Washington, or people might have started to wonder whether maybe Joe had lost a step. “The next few days,” the president claimed, “when these bills come to a vote will mark a turning point in our nation’s history.” No, they won’t. Because nothing will happen. “Nothing happened that day” doesn’t make for a very scintillating chapter in the big book of History. Voters don’t care about Jim Crow 2.0 because they know it isn’t happening. Bare shelves, on the other hand, they notice. Biden has been around politics a pretty long time, but he still doesn’t grasp that when it comes to achieving salience in the voters’ minds, real problems tend to beat fake problems. more at the link
Althouse: January 13, 2022 Did the week-long commemoration of January 6th boost Joe Biden's popularity? No. Multiple polls have measured opinion post-Jan. 6, and the ratings continue to decline. Posted by Ann Althouse at 9:18 AM
[Premium Post] Biden may be the most ineffective leader in our lifetime. Unable to Get Approved Voting Rights Act Build Back Better Vaccine Mandate Disastrous Situations Inflation rates for food, gasoline, and other necessities COVID infections Foreign relations, most notably Russia Border security
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-follows-the-trump-playbook-voting-rights-elections-georgia-lies-speech-2022-2020-11642114705 Biden Follows the Trump Playbook His Georgia speech’s demagoguery echoes his predecessor’s from just over a year ago. By Kimberley A. Strassel Jan. 13, 2022 6:27 pm ET If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Joe Biden is an admirer of his immediate predecessor. The president’s Georgia speech was as close as they come to a Donald Trumpspecial. Mr. Trump went to Georgia just over a year ago to rally voters for the Senate runoff elections. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Democrats of undemocratic aims, and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Mr. Biden this week went to Atlanta to rally support for two federal voting bills. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Republicans of undemocratic aims, and pre-emptively attacked the legitimacy of the 2022 election. Now who’s the wrecking ball? Where are those Washington Post “fact checkers” when you need them? They were on the hop for the Trump speech, documenting some 90 “untruths” in the course of that campaign rally. Mr. Trump rolled out his claims that Georgia’s vote-counting system was rigged, beset by disappearing drop boxes and floods of absentee ballots cast by dead people, felons, nonresidents and teens. Georgia election officials disproved all this. Mr. Biden’s speech was every bit as divorced from facts. He baldly claimed Georgia Republicans enacted an election law designed purely to put up “obstacles” to voting. He said the law made it “harder for you to vote by mail” and limited “the number of drop boxes and the hours you can use them.” These changes, he asserted, were designed to create “longer lines at the polls,” causing hungry voters to give up. He promised the state GOP would “subvert” future elections with a provision allowing it willy-nilly to “remove local election officials” it doesn’t like. The law overall, he claimed, enables Republicans to get “the result they want—no matter what the voters have said, no matter what the count.” These claims are as wild as any Mr. Trump made—even if the fact checkers have gone conveniently deaf. The Georgia law leaves in place no-excuse absentee voting—and actually makes it stronger, by getting rid of signature matching. It expands weekend early voting and sets minimum Election Day voting hours. It enshrines in law the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes—which didn’t exist in Georgia before their temporary pandemic use. Yes, the state Legislature can remove officials, but only after proving “malfeasance” or “gross negligence” over at least two elections. And Georgia’s broader electoral safeguards remain in place—the exact checks and balances in place when Mr. Biden carried the state last year. The president’s claims are straight-up fiction. The broader Biden-Democratic claim that election-integrity measures make it “harder to vote” is one big untruth. California has among the loosest election laws in the country, New Hampshire the toughest. California routinely ranks at the bottom for presidential election-year turnout, New Hampshire at the top. As Hans Von Spakovsky and John Fund document in their recent book, “Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote,” Georgia’s decision in 2008 to impose a statewide voter ID law (suppression!) has actually produced record-high registration and turnout, especially among minorities. Just as Mr. Trump in Georgia accused “left-wing, socialist, communist Marxists” of “stealing” an election so as to impose “unchecked, unrestrained, absolute power” over Americans, Mr. Biden branded Republicans segregationists, traitors, and domestic “enemies” while predicting national collapse if he doesn’t get his way. The coming vote on his federal election takeover would mark no less than a “turning point in this nation’s history,” the choice between “democracy” or “autocracy,” and whether the GOP obtained the “kind of power you see in totalitarian states.” Really? He failed to mention the other, likely possibility: that his bills fail, and the states carry on with their highly successful 246-year tradition of holding fair and free elections. Most astonishing—and most cynical—was Mr. Biden’s decision to match Mr. Trump in sowing doubt on electoral outcomes. Presidents ought to reassure Americans their votes count, that they have a duty to get to the ballot box. Mr. Biden instead bluntly told his followers that if his bills failed, “your vote won’t matter,” because Republicans will simply “disenfranchise” you. Mr. Trump’s rhetoric helped the Republican incumbents lose the Georgia runoffs by depressing GOP turnout, and it’s an odd strategy for a Democratic Party facing a midterm. That is, unless the White House is expecting a blowout loss and is already engineering an excuse. If the Democrats who have mismanaged Covid, inflation and foreign policy can’t win on the merits, they will pre-emptively delegitimize the coming election by accusing Republicans of stealing it. Never mind the damage this will have on American trust in institutions. Mr. Biden ran on a promise to lower the temperature, and what a joke that has been. It turns out Democrats and the media have no real problem after all with a hyperbolic, name-calling, factually challenged president. Just so long as that president is their guy. Write to kim@wsj.com. Appeared in the January 14, 2022, print edition.
There's a key difference here. Trump was talking about an election that happened while Biden is talking about future elections in light of new bills being made. This get's back to a odd argument that is being made if the previous elections were fine and it was horrible that Trump was undermining them as this Op-Ed is saying then what is the point of GA changing their voter laws? This Op-Ed and Senate Republicans are arguing that Biden is undermining faith in elections that had happened while ignoring that these are arguments made about elections that will take place under laws that have now been changed. If the argument is that we shouldn't change election laws because that would undermine faith in elections then shouldn't GA and other states be criticized for undermining faith in their own elections by changing their laws.
I highly doubt that any Democrat could do a better job of uniting the country or getting voting legislation passed. I don't think there are many Democrats who could've gotten what Biden has gotten passed already.
All these people are dumb Can’t we get smart people like Jeff Bezos and Elon or Dave Chappelle to run the country ?
