Peter Doocy Just Asking: Why Is Joe Biden Trying To Cancel Christmas?
Why, Santy Claus? Why?
It's late October, so you know what that means: War on Christmas! In keeping with the times, this year's festive rightwing panic is focused on demanding that Joe Biden fix all the weirdness of the world's pandemic economy right now, especially disruptions to the global supply chain. If he doesn't, maybe Christmas just won't come at all! For a particularly eye-rolling example, here's Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) insisting that people are calling 2021 "Biden's Blue Christmas." You've heard that, haven't you? Of course you have; Joni Ernst just said it.
the cringe factor is absolutely off the charts https://t.co/LsQV3ISwMm— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1634751881.0
Ernst added that she sure hopes the supply chain problems, caused by Joe Biden personally, don't extend all the way to the North Pole, or a lot of good little boys and girls will be very sad.
We're calling it now: The big wingnut trend this Christmas, whatever the economic reality by December, will involve rightwing parents telling their little children, "Sorry honey, Santa couldn't find the toy you wanted, and it's Joe Biden's fault. Here's a block of scrap two-by-four, maybe you can pretend it's a doll or a truck or a video game. This is what happens under socialism. Santa was cancelled."
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy is doing his part to spread Christmas fear. During Thursday's daily press briefing, he invoked the specter of empty store shelves and sad little children crying because mean Joe Biden wouldn't lift a finger to make sure this year's hot toy, whatever it is, is under the tree (which also is missing, having been burned up because Joe Biden didn't rake the forests). And maybe nobody can afford Christmas anyway, because isn't runaway inflation making it impossible for anyone to afford this year's roast beast?
Here's video of Doocy dropping his usual Doocy, this time with Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. We've cued the video up to his brilliant economic question: If prices are up, isn't that exactly like raising taxes? (Spoiler: no, it actually is not.)
DOOCY: You guys say that President Biden does not want to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year, but there's a new Fox poll that finds 83 percent of registered voters are noticing bills for groceries and everyday items increasing. So how is that any different than a new tax? [...]
The supply chain is all backed up; there are bottlenecks — empty shelves, prices going up. People are paying more. And so, how is that any different than a new tax?
Empty shelves! Just like the B-roll of empty Brexit shelves that rightwingers keep tweeting as "Biden's America," please disregard the prices in pounds. It's like Soviet Russia here, and Joe Biden just doesn't care, apart from how he's been meeting with leaders from the retail sector, the shipping industry, and port officials to get things moving again.
Jean-Pierre acknowledged that yes, the pandemic has led to all sorts of disruptions, and that sucks. Maybe Doocy heard of the pandemic, and how it's been playing hell with things for a year and a half? She pointed out that of course Biden understands that's causing prices to go up, and that the administration has been "using every tool in our tool belt to make sure that we deal with that in a real way."
And no, kinks in the supply chain don't point to disaster; they mean that as the US economy recovers, there's more demand than can be met, which is inconvenient for people wanting a new couch, but temporary. She noted that the economy has, on average, been adding 600,000 jobs per month, and that unemployment is going down, with nearly five million new jobs added in the last eight months. So heading into the holiday season, the US is in considerably better shape than it was in 2020.
Doocy had a whattabout, referring to a letter from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy calling on Biden to halt any work on the Build Back Better reconciliation bill until all the problems with the global supply chain are fixed, which Jean-Pierre wasn't especially impressed with: "Okay. Yeah, wonderful letter." She noted that under Trump and McCarthy last year, job growth was struggling, and that under Biden, we're in far better shape, with all those new jobs and such:
Americans have money in their pockets, and they're spending it, resulting in record volume of good — goods through our ports, and our roads and rails.
A lot of that improvement, she said, was due to the American Rescue Plan, which she noted didn't get a single Republican vote.
Doocy was ready with a really stupid follow-up: Wait, things are actually terrible and Biden's killing Christmas!
Are you saying that you — as you compare holiday season this year to holiday season last year, are you saying that if Christmas gifts don't get delivered this year — because the supply chain is backed up, because of bottlenecks — that people are going to blame Donald Trump, or are they going to blame Joe Biden?
Jean-Pierre wasn't having any of that, no way:
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we're in a different place than we were a year ago. And the reason why is because the president took action. The reason why is Democrats came together and they passed the American Rescue Plan, put checks into pockets, made sure that we were dealing with issues that pushed women out of the workforce, which is the Child Tax Credit, childcare — all those things that really benefited everyday people who were being left behind. [...]
She also noted that Biden has indeed been working on the supply chain issue, by meeting with private sector leaders and labor, and by persuading the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to start operating 24/7. And again, she noted, this is a short-term problem. It's not Soviet North Cuba, for fuckssake.
But Karine, what about the empty shelves and the Christmas presents that won't be under the tree? What about all the jing-jinglers, and the floo-floobers, and the tar-tinkers still sitting on container ships off the coast of California? How can we have Christmas without our Who-whoobas and gar-ginkas?
Somehow, we suspect, Christmas will come, and we'll all just fah-hoo rah-hoo as much as we want, and since vaccines for kids aged five to 11 are on the way in the next few weeks, we can gather together and enjoy our Who Hash without it being a superspreader event.
[White House transcript / Reuters]
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F*ck Around And You Gonna Find Out, Fa-La-La-La-La, La-LOCK HIM UP
SING ALONG!
As Wonkette said in a recent post explaining the ins and outs of the Steve Bannon contempt subpoena, Bannon was about to go through some things. And that starts now, as long as the Biden Department of Justice and the US Attorney's office in DC aren't total chickenshits.
The full House voted yesterday to hold Bannon in contempt for failing to cooperate with subpoenas from the January 6 Committee. The vote was All Democrats Plus Nine Republicans vs. a bunch of rotting garbage that thinks white Republicans shouldn't have to follow laws. (The vote was 229 to 202.) There is absolutely no argument that says Bannon had any legal justification for blowing Congress off. None. And Congress made this vote happen real damn fast.
Now it goes to the DC US Attorney's office, which will have to decide whether Congress is allowed to do its job, or if there are serious separation-of-powers issues to be considered between the House of Representatives and whatever rancid steam smells waft off of Steve Bannon's voluminous grundle mound.
In congressional testimony yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland told the House Judiciary Committee regarding the Bannon situation that his DOJ "will apply the facts and the law and make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution," whatever that means. We hope it's just a really WORD NERD way of saying "LOCK HIM UP." If it somehow ends up not being, oh boy, laws mean nothing anymore.
These are the nine Republicans who voted with the Democrats:
Nine House Republicans voted to hold Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for defying a congressional subpoena: Chene… https://t.co/Loh6vg3T3j— Melanie Zanona (@Melanie Zanona) 1634848352.0
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, of course, are on the committee. The others are familiar names when it comes to acknowledging that January 6 happened.
Of course, don't call any of them up and invite them to your slumber party, because literally all of them voted against voting rights.
Anyway, the point is lock him up. But if possible, try not to put him in the same jail with the charged Capitol terrorists, as we hear they've started a new white prison gang, we guess because the skinheads weren't good enough. Anyway, they're liable to interpret Bannon as the new messiah and Jesus, we bet that would just be the stinkiest religion in the entire history of mankind.
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Let's Watch Angus King's Barn Burner Speech On Voting Rights!
'We are at a hinge of history.'
Yesterday, Senate Republicans blocked the bipartisan Stop Republicans From Cheating bill that Joe Manchin had worked so hard to craft in a way that would win approval from Republicans. This is because Joe Manchin is far more committed to the fiction of bipartisanship than to any objective reality. For all Manchin's absurd fantasies that Republicans might vote to prevent their own party from cheating, the bill itself is actually quite good, and it really ought to become law.
Tuesday, with that vote still pending, Sen. Angus King, the independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, delivered one hell of a speech on why we need the bill — and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — to protect democracy from some very real threats. It was passionate in all the right ways, invoking the long struggle to make democracy work, and pointing out just how easy it is for democracies to fail. If you have 24 minutes to feel inspired about saving American democracy, give it a watch, and if you don't read what we wrote about it below!
King pointed out that American Democracy is a fragile thing, an "anomaly" among systems of government, not because America is uniquely good or right or exceptional, but because we've spent nearly two and a half centuries trying to make it work, even if it's only really become a government for all Americans since sometime after the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Now, King argued, we're facing the greatest threat to the Republic since 1860, thanks to the efforts by Donald Trump and his supporters to negate the 2020 election.
Two interrelated things are happening right now with regard to this system that are unprecedented in my lifetime and that are profoundly dangerous to our fragile republic; one is the breakdown of trust in the system itself, and the other is an overtly partisan attempt to use this loss of trust as a pretext to change the results of future elections by limiting the participation of voters deemed unworthy (although this is rarely said out loud) or unlikely to vote for your particular political party.
All the talk of "election integrity" and the need to stop "voter fraud," King pointed out, is nothing more than a cynical ploy to make elections less fair, less inclusive, by suppressing the votes of people who might thwart one party's desire to stay in power. Bills passed in the name of "election integrity," he says, aren't addressing any real problems in the electoral system. There just isn't any substantial "voter fraud" to root out, and even bogus efforts like the Arizona "audit" couldn't find any. "The only fraud," King said, "is the allegations themselves."
Even worse than the efforts to suppress the vote, which is pretty damned bad, the manipulation of election laws by Republican state legislatures actually worsens the problem they're supposedly fixing, spreading a "massive and unprecedented erosion of trust in the electoral system itself, the beating heart of our democracy."
King appealed to very recent historical precedents:
It's important to remember that most failures of democracy started with legitimate elections, but once in office, the leader manipulated the electoral process to consolidate their hold on power, just as was attempted here last winter. And once power is seized, the control and reach of the modern surveillance state is truly terrifying. Ask the Uighurs in China, or members of the opposition in Russia, if you can find any alive.
Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary are examples of the slide into authoritarianism just in our lifetimes; those countries still have elections, but they don't mean much.
Worse, he said, it can happen here. Republican state legislatures are already passing laws that would allow it:
And what if the current wave of voter suppression legislation succeeds and keeps tens of thousands of people from voting, or what if in 2024 a partisan legislature in a swing state votes to override the election results and send its own set of electors to Congress? Then it won't just be Republicans who distrust elections, and we will be left with a downward spiral toward a hollow shell of democracy, where only raw power prevails and its peaceful transfer becomes a distant memory.
There has been a great deal of talk in recent months of a possible constitutional crisis in 2022 or 2024; Madame President, we don't have to wait that long; we are in the midst of such a crisis right now. One of our great political parties has embraced the idea that our last election was fraudulent, that our president is illegitimate, and that they must move legislatures across the country to "fix" the results of future elections.
A substantial proportion of our population has lost faith in our democratic system and seems prepared to accept authoritarianism; all but the most extreme sources of information have been devalued; and violence bubbles just below the surface.
But it doesn't have to be that way. There's still the chance to stop it, by protecting everyone's right to vote. Democracy, King said, is fragile, relying not only on the Constitution and the law, but "even more so on the trust our people place in our democratic system — and in us."
Deliberately undermining that trust for short-term political advantage — which is exactly what is happening right now — is a tragic and dangerous game. No election, no endorsement, no Senate seat, no presidency is worth it.
Well sure, easy to say if you know that if everyone is allowed to vote, they'll prefer your ideas. How are Republicans supposed to compete on a crazy basis like that?
For good measure, King invoked the Battle of Gettysburg, noting that the Union's survival was "a near thing," and said that the challenge of protecting democracy today is nearly as great, particularly if we want to avoid a similar national catastrophe. He said that he truly believes America is "at a hinge in history," when the "fate of the American experiment hangs in the balance."
So like we say, good speech. Not enough to change any Republican minds, but plenty to energize the next phase in the fight to save voting rights. Last night, following yesterday's Republican filibuster of the bill, King appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and explained that, for all his prior skepticism about ending the filibuster, he absolutely supports passing an exception that would allow protections of the vote to pass with 51 votes.
The filibuster, he noted, isn't in the Constitution, and in the face of the GOP's "pure unadulterated obstruction," we're in a crisis of democracy, and "now, I say, you know, democracy has to trump a rule."
Here's hoping Angus King can schedule a lunch date soon with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
[Angus King speech transcript / Maddow transcript]
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That's Not Jen Psaki, That's Karine Jean-Pierre!
Live on WonkTV!
It's true, Jen Psaki has the day off or something, like that is even allowed, so today it's Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Watch it. Learn things.
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