I’ve never been a fan of Marco Rubio, but he gave an intelligent and logical interview on the Chinese balloon incident last weekend. He didn’t blow his top and rave about what the Biden administration was or wasn’t doing about it the way the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene Jim Jordan or Marc Gaetz would have but made lucid comments about what happened and what should be done. We need more Republicans to behave like this at least some of the time. He was followed by Admiral Mike Mullen who pointed out that this obvious provocation, was probably initiated by the Chinese military, with an aim to stop further communication between our governments as its goal. This concept, while pointing to serious conflict within the Chinese governing structure, does leave the question of how strong is the military in the hierarchy of that country’s Communist Party? Is it in a position to make aggressive moves without the permission of the civilian part of the government?
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Chris Christie, who himself appears to be a presidential candidate for 2024 stated that Biden didn’t win but that Trump lost in 2020, and yes, there is a difference. Trump, despite his resiliency, will more than likely lose again if he runs, even if he runs against Biden who he is currently leading in a new poll. Christie may be right, but this observer sees another pitfall for Biden.
There was a time when politics was all about what politicians said. That time is long gone. It began to fade when JFK appeared on the scene almost 60 years ago and devastated Dick Nixon with his personal charm and charisma. It took an octogenarian to make the point brilliantly vivid.
Joe looks ancient, he speaks with physical insecurity, and he still makes the stammers and mistakes he always has only now, when added to his visual presentation they paint a picture of age induced inability. If you have the time or the acumen to look at what he has achieved in two plus years this should be easily dismissible.
It is undeniably clear to anyone who has taken the time and done the research that Biden has driven a machine that has accomplished far more in two years than any President since FDR. There is an argument against every statement in politics but if you want to even approach fair, you have to admit that with the help of a friendly congress his work has been amazing for a man of any age. But most people aren’t fair and more than most don’t have time for politics in their busy lives. So, they glance at the tube, see a man who looks at least his age or more, hear his insecure vocal presentation and decide he just can’t cut it anymore. Even though he is cutting it like an ax through butter.
The Democrats must recognize the situation and so must Biden. If Trump runs Biden should as well because Trump will find a way to lose, and Biden will still be a better president than any alternative. But if Trump doesn’t run someone like Sununu, Christie or DeSantis might beat Biden and that would be too bad for America because even though Joe had two years left to fix what a whole line of former presidents fucked up, there is always more to do, and Biden is better at “doing” than anyone we have had in a hell of a long time.
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So, after all the noise about how he looks and how he speaks, on Tuesday night Joe Biden stepped up and delivered his State of the Union speech. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t expecting much. His speeches to this point haven’t been exactly scintillating. This one, he hit out of the park. He was specific, precise, bold, and forceful. He laid out what his administration had done so far and what they planned to do in the future. He ignored or played over the crass interruptions by an ill informed and lying GOP cabal led by the unfortunately certifiable Marjorie Taylor Greene and a small coven of duplicitous co-conspirators.
This was the best State of the Union in decades, to a great extent because it was honest. He told us what he has done without exaggeration, and he told us what he plans to do if he can get the help of the few honest Republicans left in that ravaged party.
And of course, as if to prove every negative that has been said about them, the standard bearers of the degenerate far right emerged in force waving the banners of untruth and bad manners and battling to prove that they could be more insane than any raving maniac.
The rebuttal was by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Governor, no big surprise, of Aransas, who accused Biden of lying about everything on which he had told the truth. It was a laughable plunge into waters far too deep for Sarah and it was obvious she had someone write the rebuttal long before Biden ever took the stage. It was, however, the NY Post fulfilling its role as supporter of the insupportable that really outdid itself. Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp. and the real publisher of the Post has done his best to prove why honest journalists have fought for a law that will limit the ownership of communications platforms to American citizens. Here we have a foreigner that has already destroyed the newspaper system of Great Britain and now we are giving him an opportunity to do the same here. The Post is a rag with a decent sports page, enough tits and ass to make up for the lack of quality writers and a philosophy that excludes the truth in order to make any scurrilous point its publisher deems rewarding to him. On Wednesday, The Post screamed lies from almost every page and all of them about Biden’s speech but it’s one thing to accuse, it’s quite another to prove and everyone who has ever read the Post with a logical eye knows of what I am speaking. If you saw the State of the Union, this year you do too. As Joe Biden threw back at his hecklers. “Look it up!”
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Mike Tuner, “R” Ohio, GOP Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lost no time attacking Biden over the Chinese balloon. It’s obvious that he has somehow managed to drive from his consciousness any remembrance of the three or more times it happened during the Trump administration. This is a significant oversight considering that he seems to feel it is in the same general area of importance as a nuclear strike. Turner is so full of shit it’s running out of his ears.
Look, we all know that it’s a politician’s job to attack the other party when something happens that is out of the ordinary, but it’s also an offence against reality to frighten the generally uninformed public over something as insignificant as this. The Chinese military already assumed that we wouldn’t shoot it down because we didn’t shoot the previous balloons down. They were partially right. We didn’t shoot this one down until it had already crossed America and arrived at the ocean. It’s hard to understand how this balloon was able to get more information than the dozens of satellites that are constantly flying the same routes and which we leave alone so that they will leave ours alone.
We will now test and measure every miniscule part of this machine and we will learn something, just as the Chinese will have learned something from their pictures. Will it amount to anything? Probably not. We already know too much about each other. It’s no longer the time for discovery. It’s now the time for diplomacy.