After the State of the Union

I was busy during the State of the Union address last night, so I mostly watched a bit of the MSNBC commentary and read some of what Twitter had to say about it. I did, however, try to watch Sarah Huckabee Sanders' Republican response just to see how reasonable or unreasonable it was.

This headline from one of my local papers gives you the gist:

Ah yes, the party that is banning books and threatening to charge teachers with felonies dares to talk about "American" values. She thinks her party is "normal" and Democrats are "crazy," right after Marjorie Taylor Green stood up and called Biden a liar repeatedly during the speech, while wearing a white fur coat.

As Garry Kasparov, Russian dissident and expat put it on Twitter, "If you tell the people that their choice is 'between normal or crazy,' it should first be obvious which side you are on yourself."

The Washington Post and others pointed out that Huckabee Sanders threw around a bunch of terms that only people within the right-wing bubble would know (CRT, woke mob, banning Latinx) without bothering to define any of them. Quoting the Post's analysis:

Biden, said Sanders, is “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is.”

To be moved by that argument, you’d need to know that “wokeness” refers to a constellation of contested views about race, sex and transgender rights. You’d need to know it’s a ubiquitous right-wing media trope to scoff that liberals can’t define the term “woman.” You’d need to know why this is supposed to be terribly threatening.

That kind of thing didn't work too well for Republicans in the 2022 election, so why did she decide to keep plowing that field?

And as far as I'm concerned (and I know I'm not the independents and middle-of-the-roaders they should be trying to convince), the right's up-is-down, hate-is-love blather makes them look like fools as well as liars. Frightening liars.