The Article II Address for 02022
Mar. 2nd, 2022 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThe United States Constitution requires in Article II, Section 3, that "He [the President] shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." By custom, this has become a once-yearly address to a joint session of the Congress, usually with additional dignitaries such as the justices of the Supreme Court, the secretaries of the Cabinet (minus one, the "designated survivor" who is not at the Capitol Building in case there is violence and all of the people who would otherwise be in the line of succession to the presidency are killed), the supreme commanders of the military branches, and any other persons that the President of others invite to the audience.
The speech delivered on 1 March 2022 likely underwent substantial revision from its original form because of the change in politics precipitated by the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. Following along with the NPR report of the prepared remarks, the President took the opportunity in the beginning of the speech to talk about the response of the people of Ukraine and the role that the United States believes it has had in building a strong coalition to oppose the invaders. The President talked about economic consequences for the action quute a bit. Military aid and arms to Ukraine, not so much, as, after all, Russia is still a nuclear power, and being seen to overly aid Ukraine might be seen as an act of aggression past a red line. Instead, the President talked about making sure that the Russian president doesn't think about annexing countries already part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Because it would be unseemly to talk about it in a speech, it is left to the commentators to remember that the first impeachment of the previous administrator was a scheme to try to make military and economic aid to Ukraine conditional on the President of Ukraine investigating the son of his political opponent, the now-current President.
The transition between current affairs and what was probably the beginning of the previous version of the speech hinges on energy costs and measures meant to ease price shocks happening from the decisions made internationally about how much petroleum products from the Russian Federation are going to be bought. The domestic achievement list starts with the American Rescue Plan, a wide-ranging stimulus measure for several parts of the economy, including direct payments to people. Had there been several of those payments happening regularly, asking with other measures, the financial situation of ordinary people might be more secure than it is now, but the first year of this administration has been hampered both by an opposition that, by rights, should be removed from their offices and replaced with persons who understand that the job of being a legislator is to legislate and function, even if there are differences about priorities and methods, and by persons nominally in the same caucus but whose ideological leanings make them much more like the opposition instead of members of an alliance. Many of the measures that are within his power to do as the executive and that would have immense benefit to the ordinary person have not been done yet, possibly because he and the conservative members of the caucus are chasing a figment of bipartisan imagination.
The next achievement is the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which would appear to contradict the previous assessment, until you remember that the BIP was carved out of a much bigger idea, the Build Back Better bill, which could not get passed because of the intransigent opposition and the conservative caucus members. When pressed, those same caucus members said "My dear, young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Cut a few and it will be perfect." And when asked "Which few did you have in mind?" they never could quite come up with what was supposed to go to make it acceptable to them.
And, frankly, that's it for achievements on the economic parts, so the President transitions to the idea of promoting "made in America" versus made in China, about billions of dollars waiting in investments if the Congress passes laws to make it more affordable to make goods in the United States, so that semiconductors, electric vehicles, and other companies will increase and create "good-paying" jobs for United States workers. A lot of Presidents and pundits talk about this as a goal of theirs, but nobody seems willing to put into action plans to make it happen, fearing consumers won't accept the rise in prices that would accompany creating those good paying jobs for workers. (They could cut executive salaries and bonuses instead, but the coalition that would try to cap executive salaries and crack down on all the ways that the people at the top screw over the people at the bottom is unlikely to be elected to all the key places they need to be.) There's also segments of Build Back Better in the speech, such as capping prices, letting the government negotiate the price of prescription drugs, and doing work on controlling the costs of child care and providing pre-K education for everyone.
The President then outlines several other elements that should happen to decrease wealth disparities, like minimum corporate income tax levels, agreements to ensure that moving to a new country isn't a tax break, fraud investigations on relief dollars, and punishing "foreign-owned" businesses that raised prices precipitously in the pandemic. For workers, a $15 / hour minimum wage, national paid leave, making it easier for laborers to form and join unions, and investments in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and community colleges. Which, again, is pretty standard stuff for Democratic Presidents to all for and never get because there's always something in the way (usually an intransigent opposition combined with an almost fanatical devotion to trying to do things by the rules when the opposition has no intention of doing so in return when they hold power.)
On the matter of the virus that's been holding our attention worldwide, the President says
The next section of the speech is copaganda, and the President believes that the solutions about police violence are to talk about violence done to police and then funding them with the tools they need, instead of defending and abolishing a system that routinely falls to do what it is taken with doing, routinely reinforces white supremacists and heterosexist ideas, and resists every effort made to try and remove racists, sexists, and other power-trippers from their ranks in the name of actually improving public safety. The only thing worthwhile in that section is a call to ban private ownership of assault weapons and high capacity magazines and to remove the liability shield from weapons manufacturers have enjoyed when their weapons are used for the purpose of taking human lives, committing terror, and causing injury.
The speech transitions to a section on fundamental liberties, asking for the enshrinement of voting rights once again, honoring the departing Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer and talking up his nomination to replace him, Ketanji Brown Jackson. (As someone endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police by name along with judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans.) The President then believes there's a pathway forward to "secure the Border and fix the immigration system," which spends more time talking about border security and having other countries house potential immigrants and refugees than about proposed changes to the immigration system, with only the proposal of a pathway to citizenship for children of the undocumented as a concrete idea. It's not as demagogic as the last administrator's calls for walls and fences, but it is certainly not a stance that is interested in reforming the byzantine immersion system to process applications faster and to let in more and different people from everywhere.
There's two sentences devoted to allyship toward the not-straight and not-cis, two toward advocating for those who can get pregnant to be able to choose whether they will get pregnant. Having checked those boxes, it's time for the Unity Agenda, which has four planks:
The opioid part is about changing rules and stopping traffickers, which will be no comfort to anyone hoping that perhaps there would be action on going after the manufacturers and sellers of the drugs, to try and claw back their monstrous profits because of the monstrous results that happened from their involvement, but no.
Mental health focuses on schools and children, urging adults to become mentors and tutors and for more money to appear to hire more teachers, and to prevent social media and technology companies from targeting kids with ads or collecting their personal data, and increase privacy protections. (Things the rest of us could also benefit from, but children are the message, always and forever, when it comes to changing how the Web is built and works.) There's not that much in there about trying to get help for the people who are still suffering, before pandemic and during it, and the stretched capacity of mental health professionals to be able to absorb all of that and still provide care up to their standards.
Veterans gets significantly more coverage, talking about the mental and physical costs of being in a war and the need to take care of veterans when they come home from war and exposure to toxic chemicals and environments, which in this case means the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan. There's expansion of criteria for which veterans can be treated.
As for the last one, fuck cancer forever. The proposal is to create ARPA-H (what, HARPA didn't have the same ring?) as the kind of place that can produce health advancements in the same way that DARPA produced many technological advancements. That certainly could be very useful if it kept producing things that improved health outcomes and then made them available to everyone for minimal costs.
That covers the content person of the speech, so we're down to the patriotic formulae part, about the greatest nation, the bastion of freedom, the declaration that the State of the Union is strong (despite the ever-widening gaps and divisions that cannot be paved over with words and declarations), and so forth.
On the whole, there's not much to celebrate in the speech, in my opinion. Part of that is the lack of victories to point to (because intransigence and a caucus that can't actually achieve anything that's to the left of its most conservative constituents) but also, there's something distinctly anodyne about what's being talked about in the speech. The election of Joe Biden had a lot of "anybody but four more years of HIM" against "Absolutely four more years of him, it's been awesome for me!" energy to it, and it started off okay with some of the things that got passed, but there was an expectation that electing him would mean quietly competent leadership and organization against frighteningly large things going on. It was probably foolish hope to believe that something actually liberal would happen, because that's not who Joe Biden is, nor what he really campaigned on, but I have a distinct feeling the expectations were higher than what's been delivered so far, which leaves liberal voters suck in the quandary of "well, we're not voting for the people who want to actively hurt and kill us, but wouldn't it be nice if we had someone who we were excited to vote for, for a change?" We voted in a centrist (center-right, really) because he was better than the alternative, but it seems like there's still a lot of waiting yet to come before an actual left wing comes to prominence in the United States.
If Joe Biden were interested in a more politically charged speech, he probably could have spent more time on talking about eroded freedoms of voting, of choice, of being able to be the authentic person you are without fear of violence or hate, about the authoritarian aims of the opposition and the work they have already done in their states to harm public health and censor the existence of their populations that don't meet a very specific white Christian cis male idea of who counts as a person. But those kinds of statements are for the campaign trail rather than the joint address, I suppose.
As is tradition for the State of the Union address, the opposition chooses one of their own to give a response to the speech. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was selected to deliver the response, with the text available at the link.
Mirroring the lead on the matter of Russia and Ukraine, but choosing to spin it as weakness of the President is an extremely common talking point among the opposition, but it invites comparisons to the fawning admiration for the Russian president and other authoritarian figures the last administrator had and continues to have, and the way that the opposition party didn't exactly fight him over that matter or over many other matters, once he was elected. There are likely as many of the opposition as there are who are willing to agree openly with the idea that the United States should become an authoritarian regime, theocratic or not, was there are those who agree, but don't want to say so openly.
Hypocrisy is a common political tactic as well, although the opposition party has refined it, and not being bothered by it, to a very high level. It's how a Governor of a party that is all about tax breaks to truck people can say with a straight face that millionaires and billionaires shouldn't get tax benefits. Maybe it's less hypocritical, though, because she says the quiet part out loud about how it should only be the millionaires and billionaires in states governed by Democrats that should not have tax benefits. The spectre of inflation is used to explain why your purchasing power has gone down, because government spending on social programs that might benefit the poor or the disabled is clearly the cause for less purchasing power of a dollar. Nothing to see here about a minimum wage that hasn't risen in decades, the record corporate profits happening right now, or any other explanation. (And if someone is against government spending for inflation purposes, cut the military and police budgets, then. They're usually a really big chunk and that money would be very much appreciated by everyone else.)
Of course, from there were have much of the standard playbook of the hypocrite of accusing your opposition if doing something that your own side is doing (and usually to a worse degree.)
The hypocrisy block has lots of statements that are, on their face, true, but that take very sour notes when spoken by a Republicans accusing Democrats. For example:
Which means that the Governor is extremely upset with Texas right now, with the state legislator demanding to know how many of the state's libraries had books on a list of what he claimed were "obscene" materials. And the Texas Attorney General who issued his opinion that gender-affirming care for under-18s should be classified as child abuse and all mandated reporters required to alert child protective services if they observe a child who might be getting gender-affirming care from their parents (what he means is, any child who might be visibly transgender or gender non-conforming). And the entire legislature there that engineered a way to ensure that if you said the word "abortion" around someone who might have subsequently gone on to get one, you could be sued, with the presumption that you were guilty, and required to pay ten thousand dollars to the person who sued you if you were found guilty.
And she should be extremely mad at herself for signing a bill that says trans women and girls can't compete in women's or girls' sports a few days after declaring that she doesn't want the givens dictating belief. But, of course, anything a Republican says only applies to Democrats if it's negative.
There's also a dig at a picture of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her boyfriend eating and drinking outside, without masking, in Florida, in December. You know, in a situation where even stricter masking states would generally say it's lower risk and okay to do. But facts are often the first thing to be discarded when trying to make a rhetorical point, or to try and blur the idea that a child, indoors and next to a lot of other people who could be infectious, is in the same risk category as an adult in the outside who is away from any person who isn't in their immediate bubble. Of course, it took far longer for you to read the explanation and consider it than it did for the outage machine to create a whole "scandal" or snide jokes about AOC enjoying "freedom" from overly restrictive mandates.
And if your racism animus want already stoked by this point, we get to the patently false idea that violent criminals and the undocumented are running free (and unvaccinated) while liberal prosecutors look the other way and the Democrats demand the police be defunded. (Well, that's certainly not the President you're trying to catch in the smear.) Of course, of you were looking for violent criminals in the news lately, surely you would notice the insurrectionists getting prosecuted and jailed, the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery getting a second set of life sentences for their racially-motivated killing, people calling in bomb threats to HBCUs, that sort of thing. And, of course, the increasingly prolific amount of footage captured of usually white police officers being violent to non-white people. But do go on with your rhetoric designed to evoke an image of a scary Latine gang member committing crimes and dealing drugs with abandon, all the whole slipping back and forth over a porous border that has no checkpoints, sentries, or other people assigned to try and catch them when they do it.
Hypocrisy done, the Governor turns to how she and others have handled the virus, framing the idea that they've been "listening to the science" specifically on the matter of whether children need to be in person learning or not. Which is the lead into the larger "pro-parent, pro-family" idea about schools, which, at least in this condensed form, is about making sure that parents have power over teachers and curriculum.
I want those parents very far away from having any say at all in what their children are being taught. They can know, and they can try at home to teach the alternatives they want their children to learn and believe, but in my school system, I want children to learn the truth and the real history, not a convenient fiction meant to turn them into cogs in a capitalist machine built specifically to discriminate and harm anybody who isn't a white cis man. You know, I want those kids to have an education.
After this, we go back to the well of the unsecured border and the dangerous neighborhood before landing in the patriotic platitudes section, about individuality and freedom and the power of the people being great instead of the government being great. There is one thing we both agree on, though, even though we don't agree at all about what it means.
I really wish that the opposition, when they say these words, think about what they mean, and then behave accordingly, to try and be the efficient and technocratic government they're espousing, instead of trying to use the government's power to interfere in things that, by rights, should be private matters, or to impose the will of their group on all the other groups. Barring that kind of recognition, I hope every time they try to interfere in those kinds of affairs, they get read the bus schedule and told where to get off.
So, another speech for another year, with disappointment at the lack of fire on one side and the usual contempt for the other. It's going to be another year.
The speech delivered on 1 March 2022 likely underwent substantial revision from its original form because of the change in politics precipitated by the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. Following along with the NPR report of the prepared remarks, the President took the opportunity in the beginning of the speech to talk about the response of the people of Ukraine and the role that the United States believes it has had in building a strong coalition to oppose the invaders. The President talked about economic consequences for the action quute a bit. Military aid and arms to Ukraine, not so much, as, after all, Russia is still a nuclear power, and being seen to overly aid Ukraine might be seen as an act of aggression past a red line. Instead, the President talked about making sure that the Russian president doesn't think about annexing countries already part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Because it would be unseemly to talk about it in a speech, it is left to the commentators to remember that the first impeachment of the previous administrator was a scheme to try to make military and economic aid to Ukraine conditional on the President of Ukraine investigating the son of his political opponent, the now-current President.
The transition between current affairs and what was probably the beginning of the previous version of the speech hinges on energy costs and measures meant to ease price shocks happening from the decisions made internationally about how much petroleum products from the Russian Federation are going to be bought. The domestic achievement list starts with the American Rescue Plan, a wide-ranging stimulus measure for several parts of the economy, including direct payments to people. Had there been several of those payments happening regularly, asking with other measures, the financial situation of ordinary people might be more secure than it is now, but the first year of this administration has been hampered both by an opposition that, by rights, should be removed from their offices and replaced with persons who understand that the job of being a legislator is to legislate and function, even if there are differences about priorities and methods, and by persons nominally in the same caucus but whose ideological leanings make them much more like the opposition instead of members of an alliance. Many of the measures that are within his power to do as the executive and that would have immense benefit to the ordinary person have not been done yet, possibly because he and the conservative members of the caucus are chasing a figment of bipartisan imagination.
The next achievement is the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which would appear to contradict the previous assessment, until you remember that the BIP was carved out of a much bigger idea, the Build Back Better bill, which could not get passed because of the intransigent opposition and the conservative caucus members. When pressed, those same caucus members said "My dear, young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Cut a few and it will be perfect." And when asked "Which few did you have in mind?" they never could quite come up with what was supposed to go to make it acceptable to them.
And, frankly, that's it for achievements on the economic parts, so the President transitions to the idea of promoting "made in America" versus made in China, about billions of dollars waiting in investments if the Congress passes laws to make it more affordable to make goods in the United States, so that semiconductors, electric vehicles, and other companies will increase and create "good-paying" jobs for United States workers. A lot of Presidents and pundits talk about this as a goal of theirs, but nobody seems willing to put into action plans to make it happen, fearing consumers won't accept the rise in prices that would accompany creating those good paying jobs for workers. (They could cut executive salaries and bonuses instead, but the coalition that would try to cap executive salaries and crack down on all the ways that the people at the top screw over the people at the bottom is unlikely to be elected to all the key places they need to be.) There's also segments of Build Back Better in the speech, such as capping prices, letting the government negotiate the price of prescription drugs, and doing work on controlling the costs of child care and providing pre-K education for everyone.
The President then outlines several other elements that should happen to decrease wealth disparities, like minimum corporate income tax levels, agreements to ensure that moving to a new country isn't a tax break, fraud investigations on relief dollars, and punishing "foreign-owned" businesses that raised prices precipitously in the pandemic. For workers, a $15 / hour minimum wage, national paid leave, making it easier for laborers to form and join unions, and investments in Historically Black Colleges and Universities and community colleges. Which, again, is pretty standard stuff for Democratic Presidents to all for and never get because there's always something in the way (usually an intransigent opposition combined with an almost fanatical devotion to trying to do things by the rules when the opposition has no intention of doing so in return when they hold power.)
On the matter of the virus that's been holding our attention worldwide, the President says
I know some are talking about "living with COVID-19". Tonight – I say that we will never just accept living with COVID-19.but he's talking about lifting mask mandates and offering tools on how to live with the virus: vaccinations, masks, and treatments, all of which will be offered at low or no cost. There's nothing in the speech about the need to keep masking, ora promise to find a way of creating and enforcing mask mandates that will survive the inevitable Supreme Court challenges that insist the public health must be subordinated to individual freedom to do whatever they like and not suffer or inflict consequences for it. Instead, the President wants us to stop seeing each other as bitter partisans about how we've been handling the virus and instead as a people working together. Kendra Wells at The Nib summarizes what that kind of messaging feels like for all the people who can't put aside their differences and instead have to, y'know, stay alive in a pandemic.
The next section of the speech is copaganda, and the President believes that the solutions about police violence are to talk about violence done to police and then funding them with the tools they need, instead of defending and abolishing a system that routinely falls to do what it is taken with doing, routinely reinforces white supremacists and heterosexist ideas, and resists every effort made to try and remove racists, sexists, and other power-trippers from their ranks in the name of actually improving public safety. The only thing worthwhile in that section is a call to ban private ownership of assault weapons and high capacity magazines and to remove the liability shield from weapons manufacturers have enjoyed when their weapons are used for the purpose of taking human lives, committing terror, and causing injury.
The speech transitions to a section on fundamental liberties, asking for the enshrinement of voting rights once again, honoring the departing Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer and talking up his nomination to replace him, Ketanji Brown Jackson. (As someone endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police by name along with judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans.) The President then believes there's a pathway forward to "secure the Border and fix the immigration system," which spends more time talking about border security and having other countries house potential immigrants and refugees than about proposed changes to the immigration system, with only the proposal of a pathway to citizenship for children of the undocumented as a concrete idea. It's not as demagogic as the last administrator's calls for walls and fences, but it is certainly not a stance that is interested in reforming the byzantine immersion system to process applications faster and to let in more and different people from everywhere.
There's two sentences devoted to allyship toward the not-straight and not-cis, two toward advocating for those who can get pregnant to be able to choose whether they will get pregnant. Having checked those boxes, it's time for the Unity Agenda, which has four planks:
- Curb the opioid problem
- Invest in mental health
- Support veterans
- End cancer
The opioid part is about changing rules and stopping traffickers, which will be no comfort to anyone hoping that perhaps there would be action on going after the manufacturers and sellers of the drugs, to try and claw back their monstrous profits because of the monstrous results that happened from their involvement, but no.
Mental health focuses on schools and children, urging adults to become mentors and tutors and for more money to appear to hire more teachers, and to prevent social media and technology companies from targeting kids with ads or collecting their personal data, and increase privacy protections. (Things the rest of us could also benefit from, but children are the message, always and forever, when it comes to changing how the Web is built and works.) There's not that much in there about trying to get help for the people who are still suffering, before pandemic and during it, and the stretched capacity of mental health professionals to be able to absorb all of that and still provide care up to their standards.
Veterans gets significantly more coverage, talking about the mental and physical costs of being in a war and the need to take care of veterans when they come home from war and exposure to toxic chemicals and environments, which in this case means the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan. There's expansion of criteria for which veterans can be treated.
As for the last one, fuck cancer forever. The proposal is to create ARPA-H (what, HARPA didn't have the same ring?) as the kind of place that can produce health advancements in the same way that DARPA produced many technological advancements. That certainly could be very useful if it kept producing things that improved health outcomes and then made them available to everyone for minimal costs.
That covers the content person of the speech, so we're down to the patriotic formulae part, about the greatest nation, the bastion of freedom, the declaration that the State of the Union is strong (despite the ever-widening gaps and divisions that cannot be paved over with words and declarations), and so forth.
On the whole, there's not much to celebrate in the speech, in my opinion. Part of that is the lack of victories to point to (because intransigence and a caucus that can't actually achieve anything that's to the left of its most conservative constituents) but also, there's something distinctly anodyne about what's being talked about in the speech. The election of Joe Biden had a lot of "anybody but four more years of HIM" against "Absolutely four more years of him, it's been awesome for me!" energy to it, and it started off okay with some of the things that got passed, but there was an expectation that electing him would mean quietly competent leadership and organization against frighteningly large things going on. It was probably foolish hope to believe that something actually liberal would happen, because that's not who Joe Biden is, nor what he really campaigned on, but I have a distinct feeling the expectations were higher than what's been delivered so far, which leaves liberal voters suck in the quandary of "well, we're not voting for the people who want to actively hurt and kill us, but wouldn't it be nice if we had someone who we were excited to vote for, for a change?" We voted in a centrist (center-right, really) because he was better than the alternative, but it seems like there's still a lot of waiting yet to come before an actual left wing comes to prominence in the United States.
If Joe Biden were interested in a more politically charged speech, he probably could have spent more time on talking about eroded freedoms of voting, of choice, of being able to be the authentic person you are without fear of violence or hate, about the authoritarian aims of the opposition and the work they have already done in their states to harm public health and censor the existence of their populations that don't meet a very specific white Christian cis male idea of who counts as a person. But those kinds of statements are for the campaign trail rather than the joint address, I suppose.
As is tradition for the State of the Union address, the opposition chooses one of their own to give a response to the speech. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds was selected to deliver the response, with the text available at the link.
Mirroring the lead on the matter of Russia and Ukraine, but choosing to spin it as weakness of the President is an extremely common talking point among the opposition, but it invites comparisons to the fawning admiration for the Russian president and other authoritarian figures the last administrator had and continues to have, and the way that the opposition party didn't exactly fight him over that matter or over many other matters, once he was elected. There are likely as many of the opposition as there are who are willing to agree openly with the idea that the United States should become an authoritarian regime, theocratic or not, was there are those who agree, but don't want to say so openly.
Hypocrisy is a common political tactic as well, although the opposition party has refined it, and not being bothered by it, to a very high level. It's how a Governor of a party that is all about tax breaks to truck people can say with a straight face that millionaires and billionaires shouldn't get tax benefits. Maybe it's less hypocritical, though, because she says the quiet part out loud about how it should only be the millionaires and billionaires in states governed by Democrats that should not have tax benefits. The spectre of inflation is used to explain why your purchasing power has gone down, because government spending on social programs that might benefit the poor or the disabled is clearly the cause for less purchasing power of a dollar. Nothing to see here about a minimum wage that hasn't risen in decades, the record corporate profits happening right now, or any other explanation. (And if someone is against government spending for inflation purposes, cut the military and police budgets, then. They're usually a really big chunk and that money would be very much appreciated by everyone else.)
Of course, from there were have much of the standard playbook of the hypocrite of accusing your opposition if doing something that your own side is doing (and usually to a worse degree.)
The hypocrisy block has lots of statements that are, on their face, true, but that take very sour notes when spoken by a Republicans accusing Democrats. For example:
Americans are tired of a political class trying to remake this country into a place where an elite few tell everyone else what they can and cannot say. What they can and cannot believe.
Which means that the Governor is extremely upset with Texas right now, with the state legislator demanding to know how many of the state's libraries had books on a list of what he claimed were "obscene" materials. And the Texas Attorney General who issued his opinion that gender-affirming care for under-18s should be classified as child abuse and all mandated reporters required to alert child protective services if they observe a child who might be getting gender-affirming care from their parents (what he means is, any child who might be visibly transgender or gender non-conforming). And the entire legislature there that engineered a way to ensure that if you said the word "abortion" around someone who might have subsequently gone on to get one, you could be sued, with the presumption that you were guilty, and required to pay ten thousand dollars to the person who sued you if you were found guilty.
And she should be extremely mad at herself for signing a bill that says trans women and girls can't compete in women's or girls' sports a few days after declaring that she doesn't want the givens dictating belief. But, of course, anything a Republican says only applies to Democrats if it's negative.
There's also a dig at a picture of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her boyfriend eating and drinking outside, without masking, in Florida, in December. You know, in a situation where even stricter masking states would generally say it's lower risk and okay to do. But facts are often the first thing to be discarded when trying to make a rhetorical point, or to try and blur the idea that a child, indoors and next to a lot of other people who could be infectious, is in the same risk category as an adult in the outside who is away from any person who isn't in their immediate bubble. Of course, it took far longer for you to read the explanation and consider it than it did for the outage machine to create a whole "scandal" or snide jokes about AOC enjoying "freedom" from overly restrictive mandates.
And if your racism animus want already stoked by this point, we get to the patently false idea that violent criminals and the undocumented are running free (and unvaccinated) while liberal prosecutors look the other way and the Democrats demand the police be defunded. (Well, that's certainly not the President you're trying to catch in the smear.) Of course, of you were looking for violent criminals in the news lately, surely you would notice the insurrectionists getting prosecuted and jailed, the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery getting a second set of life sentences for their racially-motivated killing, people calling in bomb threats to HBCUs, that sort of thing. And, of course, the increasingly prolific amount of footage captured of usually white police officers being violent to non-white people. But do go on with your rhetoric designed to evoke an image of a scary Latine gang member committing crimes and dealing drugs with abandon, all the whole slipping back and forth over a porous border that has no checkpoints, sentries, or other people assigned to try and catch them when they do it.
Hypocrisy done, the Governor turns to how she and others have handled the virus, framing the idea that they've been "listening to the science" specifically on the matter of whether children need to be in person learning or not. Which is the lead into the larger "pro-parent, pro-family" idea about schools, which, at least in this condensed form, is about making sure that parents have power over teachers and curriculum.
Republicans believe that parents matter. It was true before the pandemic and has never been more important to say out loud: Parents Matter.That would be those same parents who are demanding that curricula still use old racist "classics" from the canon of white men and a token white woman. The same ones who are entirely fine with cis people existing and being romantic in school library collections, but insist that trans people existing or being romantic be restricted to older teens or removed entirely. The ones who are completely untrained as educators and how children learn but insist upon putting cops in schools and who think the higher suspension frequency given to not-white children had to do with the quality of not-white children. Who whisk away their child for private education the moment something that might challenge their beliefs about race, history, or religion appears. Who believe teachers are overpaid and shouldn't be allowed to unionize and are generally hostile to the thought that a child might have to think, or might learn something other than the established hagiography in school. Or that many of the problems they learned about in school are still happening today, instead of safely tucked away in the past.
They have a right to know, and to have a say in, what their kids are being taught.
I want those parents very far away from having any say at all in what their children are being taught. They can know, and they can try at home to teach the alternatives they want their children to learn and believe, but in my school system, I want children to learn the truth and the real history, not a convenient fiction meant to turn them into cogs in a capitalist machine built specifically to discriminate and harm anybody who isn't a white cis man. You know, I want those kids to have an education.
After this, we go back to the well of the unsecured border and the dangerous neighborhood before landing in the patriotic platitudes section, about individuality and freedom and the power of the people being great instead of the government being great. There is one thing we both agree on, though, even though we don't agree at all about what it means.
You shouldn't have to wake up every morning and worry about the next thing the government is going to do to you, your business, or your children.
If we, as elected leaders, are doing our job, then the government is working well but operating in the background. It's supporting the ingenuity and spirit of our people, not drowning them out. It's keeping them safe, not restricting their freedom.
I really wish that the opposition, when they say these words, think about what they mean, and then behave accordingly, to try and be the efficient and technocratic government they're espousing, instead of trying to use the government's power to interfere in things that, by rights, should be private matters, or to impose the will of their group on all the other groups. Barring that kind of recognition, I hope every time they try to interfere in those kinds of affairs, they get read the bus schedule and told where to get off.
So, another speech for another year, with disappointment at the lack of fire on one side and the usual contempt for the other. It's going to be another year.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 10:35 pm (UTC)