About that special master the judge appointed

On first hearing that the judge appointed a special master to review documents the ex-president improperly kept at his residence, the fist thought that popped up was, "Is she a Trump judge?" The answer is yes. Common Dreams writes:

'Unfit for the Bench': Trump-Appointed Judge Orders Halt to DOJ Review of Seized Materials

"This judge is now an active participant in Trump's crimes," said one critic.

Political observers on Monday said U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon "engaged herself in obstruction of justice" by ruling that the U.S. Department of Justice must halt its review of materials seized at former President Donald Trump's Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Cannon, who was appointed by the former Republican president and confirmed after he lost the 2020 election, ruled that Trump "faces an unquantifiable potential harm by way of improper disclosure of sensitive information to the public" if the review of the materials, which included documents marked "confidential" and "top secret" continues.

Political scientist Norman Ornstein noted that lawyers for Trump hand-picked Cannon to oversee the case.

Cannon "has violated her oath and is unfit for the bench," he tweeted, adding that her ruling is "a clear-cut impeachable offense."

Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern said he had been assured that "no judge would take Trump's absurd filing seriously" after the former president sued the DOJ over the FBI raid which was sparked by the department's finding that Trump had taken classified documents from the White House when his term ended in January 2021.

"The problem, of course, is that Cannon is not a real judge, but a Trump judge, and one of the most corrupt of the bunch," said Stern.

Since Trump people are not to be trusted, one can reasonably believe that this judge is complicit and should be impeached. 

What a mess. This is the new normal.

this judge is now an active participant in Trump’s crimes https://t.co/3NMRFAgRJg

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) September 5, 2022

Arguments that Trump Republicans are not fascist

Actual fascists,

I think

Like all sound political conceptions, Fascism is action and it is thought; action in which doctrine is immanent, and doctrine arising from a given system of historical forces in which it is inserted, and working on them from within. It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but it has also an ideal content which makes it an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought. There is no way of exercising a spiritual influence in the world as a human will dominating the will of others, unless one has a conception both of the transient and the specific reality on which that action is to be exercised, and of the permanent and universal reality in which the transient dwells and has its being. To know men one must know man; and to know man one must be acquainted with reality and its laws. There can be no conception of the State which is not fundamentally a conception of life: philosophy or intuition, system of ideas evolving within the framework of logic or concentrated in a vision or a faith, but always, at least potentially, an organic conception of the world. 

Grouped according to their several interests, individuals form classes; they form trade-unions when organized according to their several economic activities; but first and foremost they form the State, which is no mere matter of numbers, the suns of the individuals forming the majority. Fascism is therefore opposed to that form of democracy which equates a nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of the largest number; but it is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and the will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation. Not a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality. 

The Fascist State , as a higher and more powerful expression of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It sums up all the manifestations of the moral and intellectual life of man. Its functions cannot therefore be limited to those of enforcing order and keeping the peace, as the liberal doctrine had it. It is no mere mechanical device for defining the sphere within which the individual may duly exercise his supposed rights. The Fascist State is an inwardly accepted standard and rule of conduct, a discipline of the whole person; it permeates the will no less than the intellect 

After socialism, Fascism trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects both their premises and their practical applications and implements. Fascism denies that numbers, as such, can be the determining factor in human society; it denies the right of numbers to govern by means of periodical consultations; it asserts the irremediable and fertile and beneficent inequality of men who cannot be leveled by any such mechanical and extrinsic device as universal suffrage. Democratic regimes may be described as those under which the people are, from time to time, deluded into the belief that they exercise sovereignty, while all the time real sovereignty resides in and is exercised by other and sometimes irresponsible and secret forces. Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant. -- Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1932 

I keep getting criticized for calling Trump and the GOP fascist because the situation in the 1920s and 1930s that gave rise to Mussolini and fascism are quite different from the situation today. Despite that, my reading of Mussolini’s 1932 description of fascism, “The Doctrine of Fascism” is that there is enough overlap with then and now to be comfortable using the fascist and neo-fascist labels for Trump, GOP elites and most of his deceived supporters. But what do I know? I'm just a simple boy from the Midwest.

Anyway, it is good to consider counter arguments. It helps keep the mind open and sharp. Boston University Today magazine published an article last February, Are Trump Republicans Fascists?, based on an interview with BU history professor Johnathan Zatlin. He teaches Comparative European Fascism, a class that focuses on Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and similar regimes characterized by violence, racism, and repression. He argues that modern Republicans are not fascist.

1. Could the Republican Party be described as either fascist or fascist-leaning?

Zatlin: From the historian’s perspective, fascism was a response to problems after 1918—the collapse of multiethnic empires, economic crises—that we don’t have today. If we’re experiencing crises, they’re crises that only superficially resemble what was going on in the interwar period: high inflation, the pandemic [of] the Spanish flu. What we’ve been experiencing the last couple of years are just very different situations. And we don’t have a four-year-long war that killed millions and traumatized a whole generation of young people who found it hard to be integrated back into society and work 9-to-5 jobs, then later experienced mass employment and a Depression lasting years. That, plus weak democratic traditions, led many Europeans to conclude that democracy brought crisis and poverty, and that only authoritarian regimes could ensure prosperity and stability.

Fascism was a response to long-term trends and what was going on after 1918. What you see today, what Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene are saying, is completely unoriginal. It is an attempt to resurrect those responses in the interwar period to democratic and liberal rule. It’s not clear to me that you can call them fascists, since fascism was a historical phenomenon. Simply because you think violence is good, and you think racism is good, doesn’t make you a fascist.

There’s a libertarian strand of American politics, going back to 1776, that is used to interpret January 6 as a moment of positive antiauthoritarianism. If you think about Rosa Parks defying bad law, there’s nothing violent about that. Almost all January 6 insurrectionists—I wouldn’t call [them] fascists, because fascists are people who were involved in the interwar period. But there’s no question that they’re violent antidemocrats who are also violently racist. And the Republican Party is in danger of becoming the party of violence, antidemocracy, and racism. If there is any kind of similarity with the interwar period, it’s that you have conservatives willing to collaborate for political reasons with people who are often violent and racist and antidemocratic.

Germaine: Sure, if one defines fascism as a 20th century “historical phenomenon” that involved “people who were involved in the interwar period,” then by golly, Trump and supporters and his party are not fascist. This is definitely not the 20th century, I'm almost certain of that. So, if that is the definition of fascism, then this is a case closed matter. Is that the end of it? No.

One thing to consider is that Mussolini did not define fascism that way. What if one defines fascists as a group of people at any time in history who (1) are comfortable with violence, racism, and repression, and (2) are hard core nationalists, let’s call them something like America Firsters, (3) believes in rule by a few or one person and is explicitly anti-democratic, for example characterized by hostile to free and fair elections, and (4) use decades of ruthless, sophisticated divisive propaganda to the appearance of and widespread false belief in crises akin to those of the early 20th century? 

By that definition, Trump, his supporters and his party sound an awful lot like fascists. Or, is Germaine delusional?

Let's move on to one more Q&A with Zatlin.

2. Some observers argue that local Republican officials and Republican judges thwarted Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, so we aren’t headed for autocracy. Any validity to that argument?

Zatlin: If you look at the interwar period, there’s no question that the civil service—especially in Germany, where democracy was linked to economic crises and the defeat of the [First World] War—was opposed to democracy. And that’s simply not the case in the United States. I don’t think that has anything to do with Republicans, actually; I think it’s that we’ve all been taught that democracy is a really important value.

That said, the last president did try—and it seems Republican parties locally as well as on the state level are trying—to put public officials into office who don’t have democracy as a value, who believe violence is a legitimate part of public discourse, which it obviously isn’t. It’s a form of politics that is deeply disturbing, because it means the Republican Party has allied itself with antidemocratic values, violence, and racism.

Germaine: This bears repeating: “it means the Republican Party has allied itself with antidemocratic values, violence, and racism.”

Gosh, if one ignores Zatlin’s time in history limits on fascism, that sounds an awful lot like fascism as Zatlin himself characterizes it. At least both Zatlin and Mussolini agree that fascism is antidemocratic. In his essay, Mussolini seemed to think that fascism was a timeless and natural thing, at least for 20th century and later societies. He did not specify any time when fascism would poop out and simply go away. He thought it was the best way to do things.

A final thought. Google something like “the definition of fascism” and the hits include this from Wikipedia:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy. 

Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.” Each different group described as fascist has at least some unique elements, and many definitions of fascism have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascism—especially once in power—has historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.

Trump, the GOP elites and most of the rank and file are undeniably autocratic, far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist, deeply concerned about the imminent demise of the White race (and its replacement with those nasty non-White people), and hell-bent on forcibly suppressing political opposition by rigging elections. Jeez, that sounds an awful lot like fascism.

Regardless, I'll probably stop using the label fascist (already stopped with neo-fascist) and go with milquetoast like autocratic, kleptocratic, mendacious, corrupt, Christian theocratic and/or etc.

Q: Is Germaine full of crap, or is there maybe reasonable validity to his belief that Trump, GOP elites and most of the (deceived) rank and file are fascist, or at least neo-fascist whatever the hell that is?

A warning about a new constitutional convention

The constitution can be amended if Congress proposes a constitutional convention by a vote of two-thirds of both houses or if the legislatures of two-thirds of the States call for a convention to propose an amendment(s). Once the states call for a convention, all hell can break loose. The reason for calling the convention can be ignored, and the entire constitution, including all existing amendments, can be completely rewritten. 

That is what happened when the authors of the current constitution did in 1787. They were called to amend the Articles of Confederation, but instead wound up blowing it off and doing a complete rewrite from scratch. That is what the Republican Party wants to do today. It hates the federal government, most civil liberties, consumer protections and environmental protections. The Republicans want to crush all of that into oblivion.

The New York Times writes:

Representative Jodey Arrington, a conservative Texas Republican, believes it is well past time for something the nation has not experienced for more than two centuries: a debate over rewriting the Constitution.

“I think the states are due a convention,” said Mr. Arrington, who in July introduced legislation to direct the archivist of the United States to tally applications for a convention from state legislatures and compel Congress to schedule a gathering when enough states have petitioned for one. “It is time to rally the states and rein in Washington responsibly.”

To Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin and president of the American Constitution Society, a liberal judicial group, that is a terrible idea. Mr. Feingold sees the prospect of a constitutional convention as an exceptionally dangerous threat from the right and suggests it is closer to reality than most people realize as Republicans push to retake control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

“We are very concerned that the Congress, if it becomes Republican, will call a convention,” said Mr. Feingold, the co-author of a new book warning of the risks of a convention called “The Constitution in Jeopardy.”

“This could gut our Constitution,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview. “There needs to be real concern and attention about what they might do. We are putting out the alert.”

While the rise of election deniers, new voting restrictions and other electoral maneuvering get most of the attention, Mr. Feingold rates the prospect of a second constitutional convention as just as grave a threat to democratic governance.

“If you think this is democracy’s moment of truth, this is one of those things,” he said.

Elements on the right have for years been waging a quiet but concerted campaign to convene a gathering to consider changes to the Constitution. They hope to take advantage of a never-used aspect of Article V, which says in part that Congress, “on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments.”  

“We need to channel the energy to restore and reclaim this country’s traditional values and founding principles of limited government closest to the people and individual freedom and responsibility,” Rick Santorum, the former Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has become a convention champion, told a conservative conference this spring in the state.  

But Mr. Feingold and his co-author, the constitutional scholar Peter Prindiville, say the problem is that there is no certainty that the convention could be forced to stick to a defined agenda. They say that a “runaway” proceeding would be a distinct possibility, with delegates seizing the opportunity to promote wholesale changes in the founding document and veer into areas where they would seek to restrict federal power governing the environment, education and health care, among other issues.

“A convention by its very definition is a free-standing, distinct constitutional body,” Mr. Prindiville said. “It would be the ultimate high-risk gathering.”

The Republican Party wants to (1) crush the federal government, and (2) replace it with more easily corrupted state governments, rampaging political parties, aggressive big corporations, aggressive unregulated capitalism and aggressive Christian fundamentalism. Most personal civil liberties, honest governance, consumer protections and environmental protections, elections are all going to get shafted real hard. 😵‍💫 But the elites will love it, especially the trickle up of wealth and power. 😊 Actually, it will be a gushing up of wealth and power. 😍

What will save us - the 75% threshold

The barrier to that happening is that three-fourths of the states, 38, have to ratify whatever the convention puts out for ratification. According to the map below, there are about 27 red (20), leaning red (4) and purple (3) states, and 23 blue (20) and leaning blue (3) states. Assuming the convention puts out a far right, autocratic-theocratic-capitalist constitution, it looks like a constitutional convention cannot get ratified unless 11 more states shift far to the right. Unless my state count on this is wrong, that seems unlikely any time soon. 😊

Ranked choice voting is anti-extremism

Most election reformers claim that ranked choice voting (RCV) dilutes extremism, and our current system encourages it. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial says:

Ranked-choice voting diffuses extremism. Which is why it worked against Palin.

Just when America needed some sign that sanity still exists in its politics, Alaska, of all places, delivers. Sarah Palin last week lost a special congressional election there. As the leader of a pernicious populist movement that foreshadowed Trumpism, Palin’s defeat at the hands of a Democrat (and the first Native Alaskan elected to Congress) is good news for democracy.

It was also a key test of ranked-choice voting, a process designed to more accurately reflect voters’ intent while making it harder for extremists to use division and blind partisanship to win. This time it appears, happily, to have worked.

Given her history, Palin’s bid for Alaska’s vacant congressional seat should have been a non-starter, but unfortunately, the Trump era has made her kind of politics newly potent among some voters. Still, she ultimately lost to Democrat Mary Peltola.

The election was Alaska’s first under its ranked-choice system, in which all candidates of all parties face off in the primaries, then the top four vote-getters advance to the general election. Voters then rank the remaining candidates based on their preference, with elimination rounds automatically calculated until someone wins at least half the vote.

In this case, Peltola and Palin were the top vote-getters in the first round of the general election. Peltola got more, but neither of them hit 50%, so the third-finishing candidate, a Republican, was dropped, and his votes were divided between them based on who his voters ranked second. (The fourth candidate in the field had already dropped out.) In the end, Peltola won with 51.5% to Palin’s 48.5%. 

Like clockwork, the MAGA crowd condemned the results under their standing principle that any election they lose is rigged. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, called it a “scam” because “60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican.” That analysis, based on the fact that the third-place candidate was a Republican, only works for those who view party as everything. But enough of the voters who chose that Republican ranked the Democrat as their second choice. In other words, their vote was for anyone but Palin.

Maybe RCV won't always work. But at least the experiment should be tried in more places. It probably cannot make matters worse.

The Long and Winding Road of Biden's Philadelphia Speech

Although Biden's prime-time speech was passed over by the TV networks, and though it wasn't exactly front and center on the Sunday news shows that I saw, an interesting article in The Atlantic shed a very different light on the whole matter. I thought it would be worth sharing here. Though my post here yesterday was critical of the speech, I was considering its value as a warning to the country about the very real threat to US democracy, and an explanation of just what Biden plans to do about it. This Atlantic piece looks at the speech as a tactical political move designed to bait Trump into having a self-destructive fit in the form of a public display, thus insuring the mid-terms will occur in the shadow of Trump's boundless rage and over-the-top insults. The goal, on this view, was to make the elections all about Trump, and not a referendum on Biden's record to date.

David Frum is a Canadian-American curmudgeon, a creature of the old neo-con Right who wrote speeches for George "W" Bush, before his second act in politics as a "never-Trumper." Though I find him to be a singularly humorless and often pompous "pundit," the article he just wrote for The Atlantic looks at Biden's speech from an angle I had not really considered. Frum suggests (and I'm not sure he's right as it seems speculative) that one of Biden's main motivations for giving the speech that he did, where he did and in the style that he did, was not so much to educate or warn the public as to provoke the notoriously thin-skinned and narcissistic Donald Trump to throw a fit that would ensure that the mid-terms would be exactly what the GOP most fears-- a referendum not on Biden, but on Trump. I've seen more than a few Republicans including Lindsey Graham all but beg Trump to stay out of the spotlight for a little while-- or at least talk about the candidates more than himself-- so they can focus on beating Biden by pointing to inflation, Afghanistan withdrawal, and whatever else they think will stick. Here's an example of Graham "advising" Trump on CNN last month. Notice especially his statement, "it's not so much about the people liking us, but based on Biden's performance it's about offering them alternative..."

 

 

 Perhaps Trump just doesn't have the self-control or humility to occupy  any position but center stage. Still, Biden, according to Frum, wanted to bait Trump in such a way that he would explode in public view, reminding one and all of his worst qualities. If so, Frum says, he succeeded wildly.

Frum writes:

Yesterday, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed a rally supposedly in support of Republican candidates in the state: Mehmet Oz for the Senate; the January 6 apologist Doug Mastriano for governor. This was not Trump’s first 2022 rally speech. He spoke in Arizona in July. But this one was different: so extreme, strident, and ugly—and so obviously provoked by Biden’s speech that this was what led local news: “Donald Trump Blasts Philadelphia, President Biden During Rally for Doug Mastriano, Dr. Oz in Wilkes-Barre.”

Yes, you read that right: Campaigning in Pennsylvania, the ex-president denounced the state’s largest city. “I think Philadelphia was a great choice to make this speech of hatred and anger. [Biden’s] speech was hatred and anger,” Trump declared last night. “Last year, the city set an all-time murder record with 560 homicides, and it’s on track to shatter that record again in 2022. Numbers that nobody’s ever seen other than in some other Democrat-run cities.”

Trump spoke at length about the FBI search of his house for stolen government documents. He lashed out at the FBI, attacking the bureau and the Department of Justice as “vicious monsters.” He complained about the FBI searching his closets for stolen government documents, inadvertently reminding everyone that the FBI had actually found stolen government documents in his closet—and in his bathroom too. Trump called Biden an “enemy of the state.” He abused his party’s leader in the U.S. Senate as someone who “should be ashamed.” He claimed to have won the popular vote in the state of Pennsylvania, which, in fact, he lost by more than 80,000 votes.

The rally format allowed time for only brief remarks by the two candidates actually on the ballot, Oz and Mastriano. Its message was otherwise all Trump, Trump, Trump. A Republican vote is a Trump vote. A Republican vote is a vote to endorse lies about the 2020 presidential election.

On and on it went, in a protracted display of narcissistic injury that was exactly the behavior that Biden’s Philadelphia speech had been designed to elicit.

 

 After reminding readers that even before the Biden speech, Trump's barrage of remarks about the FBI, the DOJ, and his insistence that all party members echo his news-grabbing anger as he ventilates, Frum puts forward the claim that Biden thought now would be the perfect time to set a trap for Trump. If he would take the bait, the November elections would inevitably be all about Trump. For this is now what Trump has said. As Frum summarizes Trump's meltdown-speech on Sept. 3, "The rally format allowed time for only brief remarks by the two candidates actually on the ballot, Oz and Mastriano. Its message was otherwise all Trump, Trump, Trump. A Republican vote is a Trump vote. A Republican vote is a vote to endorse lies about the 2020 presidential election." 

The Atlantic article concludes thus:

Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trump’s boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.

Biden dangled the bait. Trump took it—and put his whole party on the hook with him. Republican leaders are left with little choice but to pretend to like it.

 

If Frum is correct about the impact of Biden's speech on Trump leading to a meltdown that the GOP will not be able to ignore, and to statements they must now either denounce (a losing proposition) or else dutifully embrace for the sake of their chosen leader (another losing proposition during midterms), then even if Biden didn't intend to to the damage to Trump that he did, the practical consequences would be much the same. It remains to be seen if, and to what extent, Trump's fury at everything from the city of Philadelphia, to the FBI, DOJ and other targets of his inordinate rage will define the midterms and damage GOP candidates. If it those were Biden's goals, then perhaps, the speech was more politics than profundity, as I concluded in a post here yesterday. But then, if consciously or by accident, Biden has drawn out the most repellent traits Trump has on offer and driven him to eclipse the candidates this year in order to prove that he's the central character behind all the others who are merely "his" bit players and sycophants, then it will have been one hell of an effective political speech  for the Dems. So runs the Frum argument. 

But it is just that-- an argument, not the last word on the matter. Let us hope Frum is reading the situation correctly here. There are at least 2 open questions right now: 

1) Will Trump's speech (and doubtless future remarks in the same vein) really eclipse the referendum on  incumbent President (Biden) that midterms almost always represent?

2) If Trump goes full out "King-MAGA" can we be sure that will not lead to such negative impacts as MAGA voters turning up in much higher numbers than otherwise might have been the case and taking key battleground states or his provocations causing increased political violence in the coming weeks or months? 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp8TBoshaUg

 

A Critical Review of Biden's Anti-MAGA Speech

There are many ways to assess a speech that is given to inform the public of an immanent threat to the Nation. There's the content, logical coherence, reception by media and the public,and practical impact i.e. concrete policies/plans/goals to alleviate or reduce the emergency faced. Yet another important measure of significance is follow-through on the part of the speech-giver. If the president warns the country about a tropical storm that could devastate a whole region, but does so only once and then moves on and forgets it, announcing no policies to mitigate the damage, the speech is ultimately looked back on as a failure-- "talk and not action." Only time will tell whether Biden will truly address this very real crisis or go back to a stony and enigmatic silence he's maintained on the topic since his term began.

*****
 

As far as content and logical coherence go, Biden was inaccurate in maintaining the myth that MAGA are a "minority" of the Republican Party, and that he "knows this" because--supposedly-- he has "worked with mainstream Republicans." That's bullshit, sorry. There are almost no non-MAGA "mainstream" Republicans left. Trump non-loyalists (those who refuse to parrot the "Big Lie" or, at a minimum, keep their mouths shut lest they get RINO-hunted) are a tiny, ever-dwindling minority of the GOP in office. MAGA IS the mainstream GOP brand now. Rank and file Repubs mostly support it, as ultra-conservative Liz Cheney's dramatic defeat shows and a slew of other primary results has amply demonstrated (as well as opinion polls). Biden is scared to say it like it is because it appears (coming at this particular election time after saying nothing for nearly 2 years) like a self-serving partisan speech. Maybe it is.

Much of the content was actually the kind you get in campaign speeches (what he's done and how great--um, supposedly-- economic and political prospects now are ("I'm more optimistic than ever." and "this will be another American Century"). Those rosy pronouncements do not cohere logically with the message that we're on the brink if MAGA-GOP gains the upper hand in Washington (as they may). By a) articulating an emergency-level threat to our form of government and then b) offering no concrete policy remedies or changes in law (such as election reform, domestic terror laws etc.) and c) spending much of the time detailing and exaggerating his successes as a basis for optimism that the future will get better and not worse, the content is revealed as at least partly false, and basically incoherent when you try to connect the various dots of the speech logically.

Another measure of an alleged transpartisan, emergency of democracy speech is its reception. I've searched the main media outlets including NYT, WaPo, NBC, CBS etc. Most ignored-- even failed to carry it on TV. There has been little discussion in both major media outlets and even social media outlets compared to coverage and discussion of Trump, or the 1/6 hearings etc. Most people in the media covered 1/6 and Cheney's Trump denouncing concession speech, but see Biden's speech as largely unrelated to the things discussed there, and more an attempt to rally Dems during campaign season.. Partly it's because Biden comes to the topic way too late with a distorted, unduly optimistic, and supposedly "bi-partisan" approach. In that sense, their cold reception is understandable. There's just nothing new in a speech like this, which actually sounds like a very watered down version of what the 1/6 committee has put out there over the summer, and will resume investigating and broadcasting shortly. Biden is *behind* the curve, not ahead of it. He's following the media coverage and not breaking any news. He's not leading on the issue, and he is the primary target of MAGA. If he can't stand up more forcefully and frequently to his own enemies, who will?

Most damning, then, is his his own lack of commitment to *DOING SOMETHING ABOUT
THE PROBLEM* he is finally, and only in a watered down way, flagging as an existential threat to our system of government. He says, "I will not stand by." But that's exactly what he has done during his term so far, and by all indications 3 or 4 days after the "warning speech, what he is still doing. He campaigned with a promise to "put teeth into domestic terrorism laws," but has done nothing. Political violence and credible threats/intimidation have only gone up since then. Death threats are issued against officials routinely nowadays, and there have been ZERO speeches or press statements by Biden on the topic until now. He has flattered conservatives (even McConnell who got an anti-abortion judge appointed by Biden in his state this year) when all of them swear on their upside-down Trump bibles to make sure the Biden agenda fails (actually Biden's "friend" McConnell has explicitly stated as much, and yet has been rewarded for it). The deeply researched book, This Shall Not Pass, shows how obsessed Biden has been with a) bi-partisanship and b) his legacy as another FDR who gets "big things done. If he can't quite claim to be up there with FDR, he didn't shy away from comparing himself to one of the other most popular "great" US presidents who built much of the post war infrastructure (highways, suburban homes, GI Bill stuff etc.) -- i.e. Mr. "I like Ike" Dwight Eisenhower. Imagine pins that say, "I Like Joe" being worn by Dems and Repubs alike! Please. Is he making the speech to "stand up to MAGA" or boast about alleged bi-partisan smash-success stories of his first term?? And is he serious? The Eisenhower yrs were the height of "The Age of American Prosperity." Ours is the age of stagflation, new cold wars and the greatest possibility of a nuclear catastrophe since the Cuban Missile Crisis. See https://www.bbc.com/news/wo... and, as of today, https://www.nytimes.com/202...

I mean, I could keep going. I won't. We're in trouble. So far, and probably going forward, the speech is already a forgotten one most people did not discuss much or take seriously. I think the media judge it to be largely based on the politics of the election because it actually reads that way. It's weak on MAGA. He said nothing to make them uneasy because he announced no measures he will take to curtail the growth of this movement.

At the same time, the lack of interest in the speech also shows how much trouble we're in. At a minimum, it might well have served as a conversation-starter for all its weaknesses. A speech about the threat of MAGA by the President should not be met with apathy if the press really believes what they report based on the 1/6 Committee and other sources. In that sense, the reception reveals much about the denial in which even "liberal" journalists live. They're jaded, and thrive on sensationalism. Trump's statements on "Truth Social" get more attention in mainstream media than Biden's one and only denunciation of MAGA in a prime time speech. No matter how weak the speech, there's really no good excuse for underplaying the *topic*, even if Biden did approach it largely as an awkward combination of a dire warning and a jingoistic campaign speech for Dems this year.

But ultimately, the buck stops with Biden. He treats our number 1 short term existential crisis as a problem in the minority of the GOP, then says nothing about how to stop it and goes on to brag ostentatiously about the infrastructure bill etc., before saying that 'the best is yet to come" and "we're in for another American Century" blah, blah. Nah. Useless imo. He did not wake anyone up who wasn't already awake as far as I can tell. But he put some of those who are awake to sleep with his milquetoast and jingoistic presentation of a deadly serious problem.

Though I hate Liz Cheney's policies, I'd listen to her speeches on Trump and MAGA anytime before enduring more Biden speeches like this one. She has been a force for MAGA to reckon with, not a denier of the total capture of MAGA on her party. She has played a historic role in bringing the worst elements of the Trumpist coup to light. She shows insight into the dark machinations of MAGA-GOP--probably, in part, because she KNOWS the players very well and does not underestimate the problem, as when she says, flatly, "The GOP right now is in very bad shape" and doesn't pretend there are mostly good "mainstream Republicans" in Washington or the States, as Biden does.

When The Lincoln Project, and people like Liz Cheney make Biden sound like an apologist for the GOP, I think we can safely say we're up the creek without a strong and focused leader on this critical issue. We can only hope that for reasons other than this dud of a speech, Democrats surprise all of us by taking both chambers this fall. That would give us *just enough time* to take the steps we should have been taking after 1/6 and stop whistling past the graveyard of democracy. The first task (one Biden didn't even mention and hasn't been working Congress on) is passing the ECA Reform Act currently one vote short. Without that, 2024 may be the year our electoral system fails to prevent the kind of overturning Trump tried in 2020. It gets almost no attention anywhere except among specialists in constitutional law.

(Note: This was originally written as a comment in response to Germaine's OP on the speech, but since it is prohibitively long for a comment, I posted it here.)