CULTURES: An extremely well-constructed address!

FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2024

A remarkable pundit moment: After last evening's (delightfully) pugnacious address, is there any way President Biden could lose?

In our view, yes—there actually is. In our view, this year's challenge won't be over until it's actually over.

In our view, last night's address was extremely well-written—was extremely well composed.

The speech was pugnacious in a way we don't recall from past State of the Union addresses. We thought the tone was fully appropriate. In various ways, we thought the president was finally appearing on the field of battle after a very long delay.

At times, we didn't think the speech was pugnacious enough! When the president discussed the events of January 6, it seemed to us that he should have stressed the fact that the some o  the events in question had happened right there in this very room, as members of the House from both parties correctly feared for their lives.

We felt he should have mentioned the fact that, quite literally, a gallows had been constructed outside the Capitol building—a gallows constructed by invaders who wanted to take Vice President Pence's life.

Why should the newly arrived candidate for re-election have been that specific? Here's why:

Voters who watch the Fox News Channel are never told about such events. They're never shown the actual footage of police officers being beaten that day. 

They're never told about the gallows which was constructed outside the Capitol building. For them, such information, along with such video footage, has long since been disappeared.

(Red tribe viewers are never told or shown such things. By way of contrast, we blue tribe viewers are never told or shown much of anything else!)

We thought last evening's address speech was extremely well constructed. If President Biden was 61 years old, we'd consider him an overwhelming favorite for re-election. 

That said:

In our view, the fact that he's 81 years old remains as an unresolved possible problem. When he went off prompter last night, it seemed to us that a sense of diminishment still exists. 

Will he be able to campaign in unscripted settings? Will he be able to debate?

We think those questions are still unanswered. Then again, the crazy behavior continued last night from Candidate Donald J. Trump:

Disaster for Trump as Truth Social Crashes at Critical SOTU Moment

Donald Trump may have rage-posted his way through President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Truth Social, but his social media site crashed for many before Biden even entered the House chamber, with technical issues lingering for at least an hour before and into his remarks.

Beginning shortly before 9 p.m. EST Thursday, outages numbered in the thousands, according to Downdetector. The outages peaked an hour later and then began to slowly resume back to normal, according to the monitor.

Around the same time, users on X reported not being able to access Trump’s feed, with some—including former Trump White House Press Secretary Alyssa Farah Griffin—mocking him for it.

“Trump said he’d be live fact-checking Biden’s SOTU but Truth Social appears to be down. Sad!” she wrote on X.

Thus spake William Vaillancourt. at the start of this report for the Daily Beast. The former president had been "rage-posting" again, at least when his site wasn't down.

We were struck by that somewhat unusual term. In the Robert Fagles translation, Book One of The Iliad bears this title:

The Rage of Achilles

Roughly three thousand years later, the rage-posting of Donald J. Trump still helps define the political and journalistic culture within which the red tribe's siege of the Biden White House will be conducted this year.

It's hard to believe that this rage-posting challenger could possibly win in November.  But in the western world's first war poem, Achilles' rage in fact prevails—and rage remains a powerful force in human affairs, all these millennia later.

We regard Candidate Trump as being badly disordered. That said, tens of millions of neighbors and friends simply don't see him that way.

We disagree with their assessment—but they disagree with ours! Meanwhile, it seems to us that Candidate Biden, when he wasn't reading from prompter last night, continued to signal a possible type of diminishment at his famously advanced age.  

All in all, we don't know where this confrontation will end. On balance, we thought last night's address was superb—but will the candidate be able to keep it up when he campaigns off the cuff?

We thought the prepared address was superb. Then too, there was a remarkable pundit moment after last evening's address. 

For those who are prepared to take The Blue Tribe Challenge, it struck us as highly instructive.

The moment occurred at 2:47 a.m. this morning, as live coverage of the address continued on MSNBC. Presumably, nothing will turn on what was said in this fleeting moment—but the moment strikes us as extremely instructive.

Even in the 2 a.m. hour, a panel of three MSNBC contributors were still discussing the speech. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) was on set as their guest.

It may seem hard to believe. But after Rep. Garcia praised Biden's focus on "kitchen table" issues, MSNBC's Symone Sanders-Townsend said this:

SANDERS-TOWNSEND (3/8/24): There were some other things in the speech that were not, I think, written down. You talked about—

We talked off-camera about Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, and the buttons that she had and the outfit that was a violation. 

She—when the president came down the aisle and was greeting folks, she greeted him, gave him a button. There was a point in the speech where he pulls out the button. 

Literally, this speech had everything. It had props.

He pulls out the button and says the name of the young man who was killed in Georgia. I think Marjorie Taylor-Greene and other Republicans were going to use this as a foil. He was killed by an undocumented woman. And so—

But the president used the term "illegal" when he was responding in the heat of the moment. I heard the term "illegal:" There were people in my text messages who heard the term "illegal."

I wonder what you thought about that moment.

Sanders-Townsend was concerned about Biden's use of the term "illegal"—more specifically, about his use of the term as a noun.

She didn't seem to be concerned about the actual killing itself. Beyond that, she didn't seem to know the basic facts about the killing in question, in which a 22-year-old (female) nursing student was allegedly killed by a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally, then had been allowed to stay under a type of "parole."

As he responded, Rep. Garcia called Taylor-Greene a disgrace. He talked about the slogan-festooned outfit she'd worn as if in tribute to NASCAR drivers. He then started to discuss the president's use of the term "illegal,"

Only then did Sanders-Townsen break in to correct her misstatement about the killing in Georgia. To our eye and ear, it appeared that she'd been prompted by someone speaking to her through the button in her ear.

At the age of 34, Sanders-Townsend is a very capable high achiever. Is it possible that she didn't know even the most elementary facts about the killing which took place in Georgia last week—about the killing which had set red tribe networks on fire?

Two nights earlier, a panel of five MSNBC hosts had laughed about the fact that Republican voters in Virginia considered the border to be the most important current issue. 

Within the red tribe world, their laughter had gone viral. In part, the five were blasted for the way they'd laughed about the topic without even mentioning the recent murder in Georgia.

Their laughter in the face of the previous week's killing was widely cited. We aren't sure about this next point, but we think we saw some red tribe critics say that our blue tribe's pundits care about the use of appropriate language more than about life itself. 

At any rate, is it possible that our corporate blue tribe tribunes pay so little attention to matters like this that one of them didn't know even the simplest facts about the murder of Laken Riley, age 22?

That's the way Sanders-Townsend's presentation read to us. It seems to us that this mere possibility teaches us something about our contemporary world, and about the corporate pundits in whom we tend to place our trust.

 We thought last night's address was extremely well-composed. As we contemplate the red tribe's ongoing siege of the White House, we also thought that this morning's brief pundit exchange was a strong teachable moment.

Could Donald J. Trump still capture the White House? In our view, in spite or perhaps because of his rage, imaginably, he still could.

There's still a whole lot more to learn about our blue tribe's corporate pundits—about the role these people have played in getting us where we now are. 

This story dates back more than thirty years. Thanks to decades of group silence, the story has rarely been told.

Red tribe voters never see the videotape from January 6. Blue tribe voters don't see the footage from the southern border—and our blue tribe pundits don't ask us to hear about the killing of Laken Riley, or about the policy breakdowns which apparently led to her death.

Trump was rage-posting again last night. Why are many red tribe voters also enraged?  Also, is it possible that their rage, like the rage of mighty Achilles, could somehow win out in the end?

Yet to come: The role of rage; the attraction to war; the subjugation of women. 

Also, the constant absence of clarity—the never-ending inclination to avoid the pursuit of mere facts.