Wonder of blunders
Republicans got their tails kicked by an old man they’d ridiculed as feeble. Then they responded with a bizarre young Alabama woman who parodied modern Republicanism.
Katie Britt presumed to share with all of us her personal screen test for Donald Trump. She performed in over-emoting overdrive and affixed the non sequitur of a beaming smile to personal and political viciousness.
I’ll say this for the Arkansas version of Britt: When Sarah Sanders is vicious, she sneers appropriately.
Altogether, Thursday evening offered the best entertainment for national Democrats since Lauren Boebert did not quite have sexual relations with that man in that theater at “Beetlejuice.”
For two very sound reasons, I hadn’t intended to watch the “State of the Union address.”
One was that the event has become, like the eerie woman from Alabama, a self-parody.
One side of a once-important congressional chamber—before Marjorie Taylor-Greene was allowed in—behaves as a jack-in-the-box. Members spring up and plop down on every presidential utterance that is suspected of being intended as a campaign-designed applause line. The other side stays seated and sullen except for an occasional “liar” yelled to remind viewers of a country so coarsened that a minor-league mud-wrestler could get the second-most votes ever in a presidential race.
The other reason I hadn’t intended to watch is that I tend to get over-embarrassed for people in anticipation of their worst. I did not want to see Joe Biden trip and fall, or walk the wrong direction, or misread the teleprompter or, worst of all, ad-lib. I’d have ample opportunity to behold that on
YouTube after hearing about it.
But a friend—who happens to have been saying for years that there was no way Biden, at his age, would be the re-election nominee—texted to say, wow, Joe is knocking it out of the park.
Alas, I was going to have to switch off Episode 3 of Season 1 of “Resident Alien,” and tune in.
Joe wasn’t knocking it out of a bigleague park. But he was not striking out. He was hitting a few doubles, winning a “B-minus” on a steep grading curve. He was getting through it with enough vigor and feistiness— and a few jabs that landed on ever-extended Republican chins—to qualify as competent at least for the night.
He performed more-or-less normally for the banal occasion, crediting himself with good accomplishments and outlining great things he intended yet to do.
He read too speedily and thus slurred words at times, as if sharing my prayer that the ordeal would end soon. But that was the worst of it. Would I like to have, when I reach Biden’s age in 11 years, the level of cognition and competent vigor seen in this speech? I think so.
We’ll just have to wait and see what kind of column I pull together in 2035 on President Katie Britt’s seventh State of the Union address. I jest, I pray.
This is probably going to be sexist, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s what I was thinking as this young woman hammed her way through a “Saturday Night Live” dress rehearsal. It was that she probably would make the five finalists in the Miss Alabama contest but would be first out as the fourth runner-up based on the transparency of wanting it too much.
I know. I would never say such a thing about a man. But it’s the “Miss” contest. And I would never say it about Trump because he couldn’t make the top five of anything except an American presidential race. The only way he gets near a beauty pageant is to buy it on credit and stalk the dressing room.
Inever would have thought the Republicans would blunder so spectacularly that Biden’s performance would be a subhead the next day. I also thought Republicans were adept enough at lies to keep them more subtle. But no.
Britt plainly left the intended bogus impression that Biden was to blame currently for a sex-trafficking rape atrocity taking place when George W. Bush was president, and occurring not in the United States, but Mexico.
Why would you bother exaggerating Biden’s border vulnerability?
They say Britt is still on Trump’s short list of running-mate prospects. He surely did not recognize or care about the dishonesty, numbed as he is by listening for nearly 80 years to his own bellowing.
Some Democrats thought Biden did well enough to make an open question of whether he should risk a debate with the minor-league mud-wrestler.
I’d have Joe bow out and say, “Scared of him? Not at all. I just think America is sick of both of us, and I only have the power to spare them a primetime evening with one of us.”