![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThe United States Constitution, in Article II, section III, demands that "from time to time" the President make an address to the Congress to give them "Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient[.]" The tradition of such an address has evolved into a once-yearly speech during an administration, although a newly-elected president may skip the speech for the first opportunity they traditionally would have, as they have usually been in office for two months at most when this opportunity appears.
Joseph Robinette Biden, Junior delivered the State of the Union Address on 7 March 02024. I will be using The Associated Press transcript of the speech, including audience interactions and corrections from the speech as delivered in commentary.
It's usually a good sign when the President's first sentence is to crack a joke about quitting while you're ahead.
The first thing up in the speech is about Ukraine, and a certain amount of lambasting the opposition about their inability to provide funding for another democracy trying to fight off an imperialist opponent and how the opposition's leader (or at least their presidential nominee) said aloud that he would prefer that imperialist invade and attack more because he believes, somehow, that other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are not pulling their weight financially. Even though that same organization has now garnered two new members out of concern from that imperialist's actions.
The President also mentioned how many of the people sitting in front of him have done the bidding of the opposition's candidate and minimized the terror, horror, and need to have accountability for the January 6 attack on the Congress.
The President then goes to the other major issue of the last year, the way that Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health has resulted in states banning women from accessing reproductive care in their state, up until the point where the situation has become literally life-threatening to the women, or up until very recently, preventing access to services like in-vitro fertilization in a state like Alabama. (Alabama did fix the error on IVF, having realized that the consequences of the court ruling were gong to be very bad indeed.) The President then points out that perhaps it is a bad idea to aggravate women, quoting the majority in Dobbs that "Women are not without electoral or political power" and that every time reproductive freedom has gone to the ballot, it has won and handily.
There is a reference to the still-ongoing pandemic (although it is not referred to as a still-ongoing pandemic) and how the previous administrator failed to do anything about it. (A member of the audience calls that a lie, but we note what progress there has been on vaccination, care, free testing, and other such things that are meant to make it possible to detect and treat such things has been at much higher speed in the current administration rather than the previous one.) Even though the current administration has also bought into the narrative that the pandemic is over and therefore there is no reason to keep going about like it is going on. The President gets to make political points by saying that we've had a legendary recovery from said pandemic. (At least economically.) The fruits of bowing to capitalism are great, though, with wages up, inflation down, more business people, less of a gap between races, and more people with health insurance than before. (But for that, we should thank the person he was Vice President for, and the Affordable Care Act.) And plenty of projects and investment in the United States, thanks to incentives put in place for semiconductor manufacture and making sure that government contracts and projects use U.S.-made materials as much as possible. (He gets a dig in at those Congresscritters who have consistently voted against all of those projects and investment but who have been promoting the benefits of them in hopes that they will get re-elected by misleading the voters into believing they supported the projects they are taking credit for.)
The President gives much credit to the "comeback" to unions like the UAW, to investments in family farms, to having been on the picket line as well. He says the "middle class" built America, and unions built the middle class. (He also chooses not to demonize Wall Street, even though the vultures who benefit the most from a revived economy are almost universally there and being traded on Wall Street.) From that point, he pivots to the ability of Medicare to neogtiate drug prices, the cap on insulin prices for those on Medicare, and that he wants to give the government greater power to cap prices and keep them down, so that corporations can still be profitable, but we can get drugs at the prices that other countries in the world get them. (This time, he acknowledges the Affordable Care Act and hopes to expand its powers.)
Keeping on the theme, he wants the Congress to pass funding to produce greater research into women's health. Given how much research ignores women or thinks of them as secondary when it comes to testing drugs and procedures, this is money that is sorely needed. Plus, rather than thinking of women's health as something mysterious and unknowable, putting in research will make things even better.
The plan is also supposed to help house buyers getting tax credits, removing the title insurance requirements for federally-backed mortgages, and for trying to get landlords trustbusted so they stop raising rents ruinously. Plus preschool for three and four year-olds and tutors and summer schooling so that every child is reading at grade level by third grade. (With an anecdote about business people who were apparently angry at spending on education, but who came around when they realized it was spending to make their workforces better.) On the other side of education, the plan wants more Pell Grants, more support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and to keep doing what he's been doing in reducing student debt.
That flows into his successes on cutting the federal deficit and his desire for the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share, rather than give tax cuts to the wealthiest that allow corporations to pay net zero in taxes and for billionaires to pay a lower net rate than most of the working class. He wants base tax rates for the wealthy to be higher than the ones for the poorest, and for corporations to pay more than the poorest pay in taxes as well. Which would certainly do quite a bit for providing enough funding to the government for expanding programs. (Or, even, if you like, providing aid to other places.) The President contrasts his plans with that of the opposition and their tax cuts an their plan for more, which garners another accusation of being a liar (which he rolls with, given that it's been pretty much the gospel of the opposition that the wealthy and corporations should never have to pay anything in taxes and the government should never have to provide anything to anyone but the wealthy and corporations.) Staying on the theme of corporations, the President urges the Congress to pass a bill that stops price-gouging by allowing something to be sold for the same price that has significantly less of the product inside, and to knock out the "junk fees" that are often charged to people who cannot avoid or dispute them for "administration" of accounts or late fees or other such abuses of power that represent the transfer of wealth from consumers to corporations.
Then comes the break from what was the economy to the matter of immigration, where the President gets to play up that there was a border bill, a bipartisan border bill ready to go, and then the opposition sank the bill and refused to pass it because the leader of the opposition demanded that it be spiked so that the President could not tout a victory on immigration in an election year. At which point a Representative from Georgia demanded that the President acknowledge a murder victim killed by an undocumented immmigrant. Which he does, and even has a button with the victim's name on it, suggesting how prepared the President was for such a remark. (The Representative from Georgia has a history of putting her foot in her mouth or otherwise making herself look loud and foolish in the belief that she can score "gotcha" points by going off on tangents or conspiracy theories, so it's somewhat remarkable that her commentary was relevant to the topic at hand and based in reality. The same representative was in violation of the decorum of the chamber by wearing a hat with a campaign slogan on it.) While there may be aggravation at the President mirroring the language of the Representative to describe the murderer, the Representative helped the President more than hurt him by bringing up this case, because it allowed him to talk about what was in the bill that got spiked and what it could have done to make the border better and how much the opposition should have wanted to pass it, and how they should want to pass it again.
Which leads into the President's requests for passing laws to making voting fair again. And his opposition to book banning, his support for the Equality Act, trans people, worker's rights, and a raising of the federal minimum wage (a thing that is sorely needed, as costs have certainly gone up and almost nobody can make any kind of end meet with a minimum wage job, or even two.)
The President then chooses to spend time on how much crime has fallen during his presidency, the tools he has provided to expunge marijuana possession convictions, to try and drop the rate of domestic violence and to try and stop mass violence in schools and elsewhere. He got a proper dig in against the National Rifle Association, the organization that provided the largest impediment to real gun reform and proclaimed itself to be a major power and is now suffering terribly from the mismanagement of funds and the fleecing of the members, and against the candidate for the opposition who took pride in doing nothing about weapons and told the population to "get over it" when it came to mass shootings. So he wants common-sense reforms, to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and close loopholes regarding background check requirements.
Having primed the audience to hear about violence, the President then goes to the crisis in Gaza, where he makes sure to lay blame at Hamas's feet for prolonging things, but he criticizes Israel's response to Hamas as well, and the widespread destruction Israel has wrought on the Palestinians who are not Hamas. He wants to get aid into Gaza, to establish a humanitarian pier for that aid, and he wants Israel to allow it to happen. He reiterated his support for a two-state solution as the only one that works for peace and stability in the region over time. Which certainly seems like a more stable state than his predecessor's stance. With a little bit about how he wants to have competition with China (that we're totes winning, you know), he winds it down by saying that even though he's old, he recognizes and supports the American story of freedom, democracy, honesty, decency, dignity, and equality rather than the one of resentment, revenge, and retribution. He wants us to build the future together.
The commentators favorable to the President on the speech have mostly mentioned that the President's speech was pretty sharp, aggressive, at a quick clip, and that he was able to communicate that even though he's older, he's still pretty on top of things, compared to his opponent and his opponent's clear issues with speech and documented inability to keep names straight.
As is customary, the opposition party tapped one of their own to deliver an official response to the material in the State of the Union address. The opposition selected Katie Britt, the junior senator from Alabama, to deliver the response, and this link is to the AP Transcript of the speech.
The response is delivered from the house of the Senator, and she begins with things that are easily dispoven on the facts that families are worse off, communities are less safe, and the country is less secure, because "real families" are apparently facing issues with getting to the American Dream. Why is this? Supposedly, it's because after inheriting "the most secure border of all-time[,]" the President then "suspended all deportations, halted construction of the border wall, and announced a plan to give anmesty to millions." Which is certanily a claim to make, given the border bill the President mentioned that was killed by the opposition because the leader of that party demanded it die so as to deny a political victory to the President.
The Senator continues on with an account of someone who was trafficked by drug cartels, and then talks about the same victim that the Representative from Georgia mentioned during the speech, with the idea that this murder could have been any of us because of the supposed border crisis. (The Senator surely has been briefed that immigrants are, as a whole, less likely to commit major crimes and have been for years, compared to those born in the United States.)
The Senator pivots to blaming the President for "reckless spending" that resulted in major inflation and the "highest credit card debt in history," and making mention of mortgage rates and childcare costs as reasons why families are struggling to make ends meet. (Would the Senator be interested, perhaps, in examining who is buying all of those houses and apartment complexes and setting the prices to what they are, or in determining what the shortage might be of affordable child care?)
The Senator repeats a talking point that the left is soft on crime (without any figures, because the figures would disprove her), and says that the President hasn't been good at keeping his word because…he executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan that the previous administrator brought into being, and because he has apparently not had a spotless record in defending against Iranian attacks, and because China has been buying land, and Tiktok is popular. (The strongest argument the Senator has here is "Tiktok's banned for government employees, but the campaign has Tiktok accounts," which makes perfect sense from a "got to reach the voters" idea, but also, theoretically, at least, the campaign people and the government people are sufficiently separated that if Tiktok does in fact turn out to be a mass surveillance program for China, which seems farcial, nothing would be obtained, assuming everyone respected the ban and behaved accordingly.)
Invoking Ronald Reagan's famous line about being better off than you were a few years ago, the Senator believes that it's obvious the answer is no, but the Senator is fighting an uphill battle there, both in perception and in statistics.
The Senator winds down with what she thinks is a useful set of comparisons, but they do a much better job of showcasing how far out of touch her party is.
A belief that thinks of the U.S. as Terra Nullis, somewhere that didn't already have indigenous people there, but instead conceives it as empty for the taking.
The United States joined the war effort much later and only officially after being attacked directly, and there were more than a few propaganda efforts underway to try and get the United States to see Hitler and the Nazis as the people who were in the right and that fascism was the way of the future.
You and your party are unworthy of Dr. King's words, given that you have not been on the right side of history regarding Black men and women ever since the party tried to pivot to capture the white racist vote more effectively than the Democrats were.
And how many other landers have arrived there, even if they have all been unmanned to this point?
Every recession disagrees with you, and so does the fact that January 6th was able to happen and there has not been swift trials of all those who were involved or who gave aid, comfort, or cover to those who participated or assisted in the plot.
And many of them continue to be knocked down because of the people that you want to give more control to, or give the power to take away more freedoms to, or otherwise who have stood back up again in defiance of what you and yours have been trying to do to them for generations.
For someone who was willing to wield a "bless his heart" against the President because in her alternate reality, things are much more "Demolition Man" than what things are like on Earth-1, the Senator finds herself lacking the ability to sprinkle even a gesture at statistics or other proof, but instead hopes that the voter will go by feelings rather than facts. (Which, to be fair, is a valid approach, given how well it worked to elect the opposition's candidate the last time he ran.) (Memo From Your Future Self: After having had time to digest both the content and the delivery form, the Slacktivist explains why everyone who wasn't already firmly in the world the Senator comes from was off-put by that speech: the poor acting, the lie sufficiently bold as to be not only easily found to be a lie, but a decades-old lie, and the tone and delivery of the speech that sounded the alarm bells for anyone who knows that cadence that Senator Britt is almost certainly in the same circles as Michelle Duggar and has been taught that the way to appeal to men and her husband is to portray herself as a submissive and meek, but sexualized, woman-child who needs a big strong man to protect her.
It's certainly shaping up to be an interesting Presidential race, where one of the major parties' candidate is multiply-indicted, seems to be having cognitive difficulties, and has already said repeatedly that he intends to be a dictator and disregard the democratic process, even if he claims to only want to do so for a day. The other one is the President. In most other years, the party putting up the multiply-indicted, cognitiviely-addled, dictator-friendly candidate would be an embarrassment to the party, but this is also the party that yanked a Speaker for the crime of working with the other party, who had one of their members expelled for being a serial fabulist, who had other members of their party defy Congressional subpoenas while expecting others to respect theirs, and whose party members in the states have busily been trying to criminalize reproductive care, send migrants to other places through trickery and deceit, and outlaw any mention of not-straight, not-cis people, as well as their existence. There are still eight months before the election in the United States, and while the major candidates have been set (now that Nikki Haley has exited as a challenger to the previous administrator), all that means is that we now have the "privilege" of eight months of campaign advertisements, and perhaps the small hope that some of those indictments will be able to go to trial and have a conclusion before the election comes to pass.
Joseph Robinette Biden, Junior delivered the State of the Union Address on 7 March 02024. I will be using The Associated Press transcript of the speech, including audience interactions and corrections from the speech as delivered in commentary.
It's usually a good sign when the President's first sentence is to crack a joke about quitting while you're ahead.
The first thing up in the speech is about Ukraine, and a certain amount of lambasting the opposition about their inability to provide funding for another democracy trying to fight off an imperialist opponent and how the opposition's leader (or at least their presidential nominee) said aloud that he would prefer that imperialist invade and attack more because he believes, somehow, that other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are not pulling their weight financially. Even though that same organization has now garnered two new members out of concern from that imperialist's actions.
The President also mentioned how many of the people sitting in front of him have done the bidding of the opposition's candidate and minimized the terror, horror, and need to have accountability for the January 6 attack on the Congress.
The President then goes to the other major issue of the last year, the way that Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health has resulted in states banning women from accessing reproductive care in their state, up until the point where the situation has become literally life-threatening to the women, or up until very recently, preventing access to services like in-vitro fertilization in a state like Alabama. (Alabama did fix the error on IVF, having realized that the consequences of the court ruling were gong to be very bad indeed.) The President then points out that perhaps it is a bad idea to aggravate women, quoting the majority in Dobbs that "Women are not without electoral or political power" and that every time reproductive freedom has gone to the ballot, it has won and handily.
There is a reference to the still-ongoing pandemic (although it is not referred to as a still-ongoing pandemic) and how the previous administrator failed to do anything about it. (A member of the audience calls that a lie, but we note what progress there has been on vaccination, care, free testing, and other such things that are meant to make it possible to detect and treat such things has been at much higher speed in the current administration rather than the previous one.) Even though the current administration has also bought into the narrative that the pandemic is over and therefore there is no reason to keep going about like it is going on. The President gets to make political points by saying that we've had a legendary recovery from said pandemic. (At least economically.) The fruits of bowing to capitalism are great, though, with wages up, inflation down, more business people, less of a gap between races, and more people with health insurance than before. (But for that, we should thank the person he was Vice President for, and the Affordable Care Act.) And plenty of projects and investment in the United States, thanks to incentives put in place for semiconductor manufacture and making sure that government contracts and projects use U.S.-made materials as much as possible. (He gets a dig in at those Congresscritters who have consistently voted against all of those projects and investment but who have been promoting the benefits of them in hopes that they will get re-elected by misleading the voters into believing they supported the projects they are taking credit for.)
The President gives much credit to the "comeback" to unions like the UAW, to investments in family farms, to having been on the picket line as well. He says the "middle class" built America, and unions built the middle class. (He also chooses not to demonize Wall Street, even though the vultures who benefit the most from a revived economy are almost universally there and being traded on Wall Street.) From that point, he pivots to the ability of Medicare to neogtiate drug prices, the cap on insulin prices for those on Medicare, and that he wants to give the government greater power to cap prices and keep them down, so that corporations can still be profitable, but we can get drugs at the prices that other countries in the world get them. (This time, he acknowledges the Affordable Care Act and hopes to expand its powers.)
Keeping on the theme, he wants the Congress to pass funding to produce greater research into women's health. Given how much research ignores women or thinks of them as secondary when it comes to testing drugs and procedures, this is money that is sorely needed. Plus, rather than thinking of women's health as something mysterious and unknowable, putting in research will make things even better.
The plan is also supposed to help house buyers getting tax credits, removing the title insurance requirements for federally-backed mortgages, and for trying to get landlords trustbusted so they stop raising rents ruinously. Plus preschool for three and four year-olds and tutors and summer schooling so that every child is reading at grade level by third grade. (With an anecdote about business people who were apparently angry at spending on education, but who came around when they realized it was spending to make their workforces better.) On the other side of education, the plan wants more Pell Grants, more support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and to keep doing what he's been doing in reducing student debt.
That flows into his successes on cutting the federal deficit and his desire for the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share, rather than give tax cuts to the wealthiest that allow corporations to pay net zero in taxes and for billionaires to pay a lower net rate than most of the working class. He wants base tax rates for the wealthy to be higher than the ones for the poorest, and for corporations to pay more than the poorest pay in taxes as well. Which would certainly do quite a bit for providing enough funding to the government for expanding programs. (Or, even, if you like, providing aid to other places.) The President contrasts his plans with that of the opposition and their tax cuts an their plan for more, which garners another accusation of being a liar (which he rolls with, given that it's been pretty much the gospel of the opposition that the wealthy and corporations should never have to pay anything in taxes and the government should never have to provide anything to anyone but the wealthy and corporations.) Staying on the theme of corporations, the President urges the Congress to pass a bill that stops price-gouging by allowing something to be sold for the same price that has significantly less of the product inside, and to knock out the "junk fees" that are often charged to people who cannot avoid or dispute them for "administration" of accounts or late fees or other such abuses of power that represent the transfer of wealth from consumers to corporations.
Then comes the break from what was the economy to the matter of immigration, where the President gets to play up that there was a border bill, a bipartisan border bill ready to go, and then the opposition sank the bill and refused to pass it because the leader of the opposition demanded that it be spiked so that the President could not tout a victory on immigration in an election year. At which point a Representative from Georgia demanded that the President acknowledge a murder victim killed by an undocumented immmigrant. Which he does, and even has a button with the victim's name on it, suggesting how prepared the President was for such a remark. (The Representative from Georgia has a history of putting her foot in her mouth or otherwise making herself look loud and foolish in the belief that she can score "gotcha" points by going off on tangents or conspiracy theories, so it's somewhat remarkable that her commentary was relevant to the topic at hand and based in reality. The same representative was in violation of the decorum of the chamber by wearing a hat with a campaign slogan on it.) While there may be aggravation at the President mirroring the language of the Representative to describe the murderer, the Representative helped the President more than hurt him by bringing up this case, because it allowed him to talk about what was in the bill that got spiked and what it could have done to make the border better and how much the opposition should have wanted to pass it, and how they should want to pass it again.
Which leads into the President's requests for passing laws to making voting fair again. And his opposition to book banning, his support for the Equality Act, trans people, worker's rights, and a raising of the federal minimum wage (a thing that is sorely needed, as costs have certainly gone up and almost nobody can make any kind of end meet with a minimum wage job, or even two.)
The President then chooses to spend time on how much crime has fallen during his presidency, the tools he has provided to expunge marijuana possession convictions, to try and drop the rate of domestic violence and to try and stop mass violence in schools and elsewhere. He got a proper dig in against the National Rifle Association, the organization that provided the largest impediment to real gun reform and proclaimed itself to be a major power and is now suffering terribly from the mismanagement of funds and the fleecing of the members, and against the candidate for the opposition who took pride in doing nothing about weapons and told the population to "get over it" when it came to mass shootings. So he wants common-sense reforms, to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and close loopholes regarding background check requirements.
Having primed the audience to hear about violence, the President then goes to the crisis in Gaza, where he makes sure to lay blame at Hamas's feet for prolonging things, but he criticizes Israel's response to Hamas as well, and the widespread destruction Israel has wrought on the Palestinians who are not Hamas. He wants to get aid into Gaza, to establish a humanitarian pier for that aid, and he wants Israel to allow it to happen. He reiterated his support for a two-state solution as the only one that works for peace and stability in the region over time. Which certainly seems like a more stable state than his predecessor's stance. With a little bit about how he wants to have competition with China (that we're totes winning, you know), he winds it down by saying that even though he's old, he recognizes and supports the American story of freedom, democracy, honesty, decency, dignity, and equality rather than the one of resentment, revenge, and retribution. He wants us to build the future together.
The commentators favorable to the President on the speech have mostly mentioned that the President's speech was pretty sharp, aggressive, at a quick clip, and that he was able to communicate that even though he's older, he's still pretty on top of things, compared to his opponent and his opponent's clear issues with speech and documented inability to keep names straight.
As is customary, the opposition party tapped one of their own to deliver an official response to the material in the State of the Union address. The opposition selected Katie Britt, the junior senator from Alabama, to deliver the response, and this link is to the AP Transcript of the speech.
The response is delivered from the house of the Senator, and she begins with things that are easily dispoven on the facts that families are worse off, communities are less safe, and the country is less secure, because "real families" are apparently facing issues with getting to the American Dream. Why is this? Supposedly, it's because after inheriting "the most secure border of all-time[,]" the President then "suspended all deportations, halted construction of the border wall, and announced a plan to give anmesty to millions." Which is certanily a claim to make, given the border bill the President mentioned that was killed by the opposition because the leader of that party demanded it die so as to deny a political victory to the President.
The Senator continues on with an account of someone who was trafficked by drug cartels, and then talks about the same victim that the Representative from Georgia mentioned during the speech, with the idea that this murder could have been any of us because of the supposed border crisis. (The Senator surely has been briefed that immigrants are, as a whole, less likely to commit major crimes and have been for years, compared to those born in the United States.)
The Senator pivots to blaming the President for "reckless spending" that resulted in major inflation and the "highest credit card debt in history," and making mention of mortgage rates and childcare costs as reasons why families are struggling to make ends meet. (Would the Senator be interested, perhaps, in examining who is buying all of those houses and apartment complexes and setting the prices to what they are, or in determining what the shortage might be of affordable child care?)
The Senator repeats a talking point that the left is soft on crime (without any figures, because the figures would disprove her), and says that the President hasn't been good at keeping his word because…he executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan that the previous administrator brought into being, and because he has apparently not had a spotless record in defending against Iranian attacks, and because China has been buying land, and Tiktok is popular. (The strongest argument the Senator has here is "Tiktok's banned for government employees, but the campaign has Tiktok accounts," which makes perfect sense from a "got to reach the voters" idea, but also, theoretically, at least, the campaign people and the government people are sufficiently separated that if Tiktok does in fact turn out to be a mass surveillance program for China, which seems farcial, nothing would be obtained, assuming everyone respected the ban and behaved accordingly.)
Invoking Ronald Reagan's famous line about being better off than you were a few years ago, the Senator believes that it's obvious the answer is no, but the Senator is fighting an uphill battle there, both in perception and in statistics.
The Senator winds down with what she thinks is a useful set of comparisons, but they do a much better job of showcasing how far out of touch her party is.
We walk in the footsteps of pioneers who tamed the wild.
A belief that thinks of the U.S. as Terra Nullis, somewhere that didn't already have indigenous people there, but instead conceives it as empty for the taking.
We now carry forward the same flame of freedom as the liberators of an oppressed Europe.
The United States joined the war effort much later and only officially after being attacked directly, and there were more than a few propaganda efforts underway to try and get the United States to see Hitler and the Nazis as the people who were in the right and that fascism was the way of the future.
We draw courage from those who bent the moral arc of the universe.
You and your party are unworthy of Dr. King's words, given that you have not been on the right side of history regarding Black men and women ever since the party tried to pivot to capture the white racist vote more effectively than the Democrats were.
And when we gaze upon the heavens, never forget that our DNA contains the same ingenuity that put man on the Moon.
And how many other landers have arrived there, even if they have all been unmanned to this point?
America has been tested before, and every single time, we’ve emerged unbowed and unbroken.
Every recession disagrees with you, and so does the fact that January 6th was able to happen and there has not been swift trials of all those who were involved or who gave aid, comfort, or cover to those who participated or assisted in the plot.
Our history has been written with the grit of men and women who got knocked down. But we know their stories because they did not stay down. We are here because they stood back up.
And many of them continue to be knocked down because of the people that you want to give more control to, or give the power to take away more freedoms to, or otherwise who have stood back up again in defiance of what you and yours have been trying to do to them for generations.
For someone who was willing to wield a "bless his heart" against the President because in her alternate reality, things are much more "Demolition Man" than what things are like on Earth-1, the Senator finds herself lacking the ability to sprinkle even a gesture at statistics or other proof, but instead hopes that the voter will go by feelings rather than facts. (Which, to be fair, is a valid approach, given how well it worked to elect the opposition's candidate the last time he ran.) (Memo From Your Future Self: After having had time to digest both the content and the delivery form, the Slacktivist explains why everyone who wasn't already firmly in the world the Senator comes from was off-put by that speech: the poor acting, the lie sufficiently bold as to be not only easily found to be a lie, but a decades-old lie, and the tone and delivery of the speech that sounded the alarm bells for anyone who knows that cadence that Senator Britt is almost certainly in the same circles as Michelle Duggar and has been taught that the way to appeal to men and her husband is to portray herself as a submissive and meek, but sexualized, woman-child who needs a big strong man to protect her.
It's certainly shaping up to be an interesting Presidential race, where one of the major parties' candidate is multiply-indicted, seems to be having cognitive difficulties, and has already said repeatedly that he intends to be a dictator and disregard the democratic process, even if he claims to only want to do so for a day. The other one is the President. In most other years, the party putting up the multiply-indicted, cognitiviely-addled, dictator-friendly candidate would be an embarrassment to the party, but this is also the party that yanked a Speaker for the crime of working with the other party, who had one of their members expelled for being a serial fabulist, who had other members of their party defy Congressional subpoenas while expecting others to respect theirs, and whose party members in the states have busily been trying to criminalize reproductive care, send migrants to other places through trickery and deceit, and outlaw any mention of not-straight, not-cis people, as well as their existence. There are still eight months before the election in the United States, and while the major candidates have been set (now that Nikki Haley has exited as a challenger to the previous administrator), all that means is that we now have the "privilege" of eight months of campaign advertisements, and perhaps the small hope that some of those indictments will be able to go to trial and have a conclusion before the election comes to pass.
