...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Since the topic everywhere today is the 2-hour shit-stain of a State of the Union delivered on Tuesday night by the decomposing remains of the Dear Leader, I feel sort of obliged to talk about the subject.
However, since I took one for the team by watching the whole, grotesque spectacle (and the godawful pre-freakshow pundit vamping, and the excellent post-SOTU response from Virginia's new governor, Abigail Spanberger) in order to be able to speak intelligently on the matter on both The Bob Cesca Show and The Bradcast, I don't feel particularly in the mood to spelunk into that particular midden pile again.
Let us all agree that the bard nailed Trump's SOTU tour de farce 420 years ago with these lines from Macbeth, because Trump is indeed:
a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
And his 2-hour long crime against democracy and rhetoric was indeed:
a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Yes, it has been more than a minute since the events of the Fake Tea Party's alternative State of the Union which they held off delivering for an hour so the actual Republican party could deliver it's own terrible alternative State of the Union, which followed President Obama's State of the Union on Jan 26, 2011.
What's of interest to me about that night is that I would wager that not one in a hundred of you politics nerds can remember a single word of Paul Ryan's (remember Paul Ryan!) official GOP rebuttal, other than, perhaps, a general and correct impression that while the zombie-eyed granny starver (h/t brother Charlie Pierce) acknowledged that Obama had walked into a "severe fiscal and economic situation", the balance of Ryan's speech was spent scolding Obama for not dealing with the worst economic catastrophe in 74 years using the only tools in the Republican's bag.
And what tools are those?
If you guessed massive budget cuts, plus a strong suggestion that taxes were too darn high, give yourself a round of applause.
It was weak and dull and forgettable, and honestly he only reason I remember it at all is that "Economic Situation" was the name I DJed under during the late 1980s.
However, I'd also wager that a whole lot of you do remember at least part of Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann staring past the camera for six straight minutes while delivering some batshit Tea Party nonsense in her aggressively cheerful robot Jesus voice.
The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle were not terribly different from the zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting. ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop! OMG, Lookit them deficits! And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers! Under George W. they were never like this.
She even had this giant graph behind her showing how much better Bush was than Obama at the jobs thing. And people remember it because it was something oddball. Something new. From The Guardian, January 26, 2011.
Michele Bachmann's state of the union response reveals state of US right
Tea Party leader made surprise intervention after official Republican reaction to Barack Obama's address
A televised attack on Barack Obama's state of the union address by one of the Tea Party's leading lights broke with convention last night and showed just how fractured rightwing opposition has become in the US.
Michele Bachmann, leader of the rightwing movement and a congresswoman from Minnesota, made a surprise intervention after the official Republican response to Obama's second state of the union speech, from congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Bachmann attacked "a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy", and used a graph to illustrate that while there had been " unacceptably high" deficits under the Bush administration, these had now "exploded".
She followed a call for a new "miracle" with a reference to the US's 1945 victory at Iwo Jima and the famous picture of soldiers raising the US flag, which she said symbolized "all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor".
Bachmann, who is seen as a possible presidential contender in 2012, said she was not seeking to compete with official Republican remarks – her response was made for activists from the Tea Party Express but screened live by CNN – but her approach differed from the more conciliatory remarks made by Ryan...
Bachmann was already under fire for her views on US history, particularly as revealed at a recent Tea Party event in Iowa, when she said the founding fathers "worked tirelessly" to abolish slavery.
Republicans had insisted before Obama's address that they were not worried by a Tea Party view getting airtime. Michael Steel, spokesman for the House of Representatives' Republican speaker, John Boehner, had said in an email: "Whether it is through a press release, Twitter, the internet, on television, radio, via Facebook, or by other means, virtually every member of Congress will share their thoughts on the president's state of the union."
Not everyone was understanding, however. Columnist Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post said: "Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008. She ended her speech, delivered distractingly while looking off-camera, by saying, 'We the people …' Yeah, we the people want to know what that response was all about.
Please not for future reference those last two paragraphs, because what we were seeing – and what many of us were warning about – was MAGA Republicanism in its adolescent state.
By this point it was already fully nuts and drunk on absurd conspiracy theories. And when Jonathan Capehart said that Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008, that wasn’t the half of it. She didn’t just ignore the Great Recession: she pretended it never happened.
During her speech she had a giant graph behind her “proving” to the bigots and imbeciles how much better Bush was than Obama at the whole jobs thing. The X-axis represented years, and the Y-axis represented the unemployment rate.
Except the X-axis only showed every other year. 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and so on.
And in her thoroughly whitewashed and rewritten Tea Party version extremely recent history through which the whole world had lived, inn 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate under Bush was very low, but just a few months after Obama took office, the rate jumped way, way up!
Clearly Obama is destroying America! Period. Full stop.
Well Jeez oh Pete, does anyone out there in our studio audience remember anything else besides Barack Obama being terrible that might have happened on Bush’s watch – say, around December of 2007– that might have accounted for this sudden spike in the unemployment numbers.
From Federal Reserve History:
The Great Recession – December 2007-June 2009
Lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, this economic downturn was the longest since World War II.
The Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, which makes it the longest recession since World War II. Beyond its duration, the Great Recession was notably severe in several respects. Real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 4.3 percent from its peak in 2007Q4 to its trough in 2009Q2, the largest decline in the postwar era (based on data as of October 2013). The unemployment rate, which was 5 percent in December 2007, rose to 9.5 percent in June 2009, and peaked at 10 percent in October 2009.
The financial effects of the Great Recession were similarly outsized: Home prices fell approximately 30 percent, on average, from their mid-2006 peak to mid-2009, while the S&P 500 index fell 57 percent from its October 2007 peak to its trough in March 2009. The net worth of US households and nonprofit organizations fell from a peak of approximately $69 trillion in 2007 to a trough of $55 trillion in 2009.
As the financial crisis and recession deepened, measures intended to revive economic growth were implemented on a global basis. The United States, like many other nations, enacted fiscal stimulus programs that used different combinations of government spending and tax cuts. These programs included the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Oh yeah. That's right. On Bush's watch, the entire world economy imploded and it was only thanks to the massive (if maddeningly imperfect and inadequate) recovery assistance rendered by the Obama administration that the world was saved from a second Great Depression, and the permanent collapse of, among other things, the United States auto industry.
There were and are literally hundreds of articles on the Great Recession at the fingertips of anyone who gave a damn about the truth. For example:
The New York Times “The Recession’s Hidden Victims”: Stories about homeowners who lost their homes and how families coped with foreclosure.
Los Angeles Times “Lives on Hold”: A multi-part series following individuals who lost jobs and struggled to rebuild their lives.
NPR “A Decade Later, the Great Recession’s Human Costs Linger": Audio stories and written accounts of people still feeling the effects years later.
The Atlantic: “The Lost Decade: What the Great Recession Did to American Families”: A deep look at how long-term unemployment reshaped communities and family structures.
ProPublica “In the Shadow of the Recession”: First-person, in-depth reporting on people dealing with medical debt, housing instability, and job loss.
These are stories about real families who were evicted or forced to downsize after losing income. Real workers who lost not just jobs, but their careers and their identity. Young adults delaying homeownership, marriage, or kids. Communities devastated by factory closures and foreclosures. The long-term damage done to people' mental health and sense of financial insecurity.
But all of this Michele Bachmann just hand-waved away. Instead, in her Tea Party Republican version of history, unemployment was all Obama’s fault.
Then Bachmann pitched a fit over all the money Obama is just throwing away for no good reason.
The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle was not terribly different from the zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop! OMG, Lookit them deficits! And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!
Under George W. they were never like this.
This is from her speech that night.
And what did we buy with all that money? A leaner, more efficient government? No. We bought a bureaucracy that tells us which lightbulbs to buy and put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's healthcare bill.
Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether. Unless, of course, you're one of the more than 222 privileged companies or "unions" that's already received a waiver under Obamacare.
In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government run coverage. And that could have a devastating effect on our national debt for even generations to come.
For two years, president Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make this evening. Yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices, and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing!
For those of you who were there at the time and paying attention this should cause a shudder of recognition at all that it foreshadowed.
Then all the golden oldies came a'tumblin' out.
Gotta gut the "job destroying" EPA.
Pass a balanced budget amendment.
Drill baby drill!
Get rid of some unspecified number of "regulations" which may cost our economy one hundred million dollars.
And Obama should repeal Obamacare immediately and support "free market solutions".
Tort reform!
Allow suckers to buy crap insurance out of the back of a van!
Kick out all the big spending scum!
And this is just the beginning, because we swept to power in the midterms!
The Alert Reader will have noticed by now how neatly Michele Bachmann's "Obama ruined everything and Bush was awesome" lies from 15 years ago prefigure Trump's "Biden ruined everything and I was awesome" lies in his speech on Tuesday.
And going back to the 2011 Guardian article, the Alert Reader may have also noticed how Michael Steel’s blasé attitude towards the Fake Tea Party prefigured the downfall of the Conservative elite.
All the pieces that would grow at lightning speed into a full-grown fascist threat to American democracy led by a corrupt, lying sociopath were there. All you needed to do was look. The pre-MAGA Republican willingness to repeat big stupid, easily-debunked lies. Demonizing Democrats as nearly destroying the country. Casting themselves as the lone saviors of the republic. And establishment Republicans like Steel not taking the internal threat seriously.
So for our recently-former Republican Never Trump "allies" who definitely read
his little blog o' mine, I'll leave you with these wise words from Peter
Clemenza:
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