The Crazy on the Left and the Right This Week

A Fairly Innocuous Statement Roils Up Both Sides, and our Response to the SOTU (and Response to the Response of the SOTU)

This past weekend, I posted this:

I thought it was a pretty obvious, objective thing to say; what with Trump pissing Ukraine away to suck up to Putin and the ruinous trade war he was planning on starting this week. There’s also the DOGE catastrophe, which has upended our government altogether and removed from the federal workforce important officials who, you know, actually know how to do their jobs.

The statement I was basically making, wasn’t that Kamala Harris was some great potential President. Far from it. I was arguing that if she had been elected and just done NOTHING, we’d be in a better spot, that Trump is affirmatively making us worse off than we were. Had Harris won, we’d still be backing Ukraine instead of trying extort them. The economy would still be improving at a good clip. Denmark wouldn’t be mad at us over Greenland. Canadians wouldn’t be booing when the Star Spangled Banner was played at hockey games. Biden was dull and boring and like her or not, Kamala is too. In elected officials, that’s not a bad thing. I keep thinking of the old curse “May you live in interesting times.” Well, the next four years are sizing up to be really interesting, and not in a good way. In America, you have to pick one of two choices, and what I was saying was that we’d be better off if Harris won. Pretty simple, huh. I’ll add that among a rising share of the electorate, their eyes are being opened to that fact in fastly growing ways.

So, the day passed and I didn’t think much of it.

And then I got online again and the level of people commenting on this rather anodyne statement was going through the roof again. The last time it happened was with liberals on my “No, it’s not a coup” piece. This time however, it was a combination of two different groups, one left and one right, and both were completely off target.

• The conservative bros of the right were spewing their normal ridicule. Always by some guy with a handle [random guy name][string of digits] with less than 10 followers. They were making the case we were better off now than we were when Biden left office. They actually argued Trump stopped the genocide in Gaza and that he was going to get a Nobel Peace Prize for what he was doing in Ukraine. Some of the comments were outright deranged and loony, as if they didn’t live in reality. The really interesting thing was that these guys were the ones restacking my original post most often, usually with a note laughing or saying simply “Um, No.”

• The liberals either complained about how she was an empty suit as a candidate and didn’t do enough, or that we’d be living in some DEI utopia where the racists and sexists were hiding back in some closets again. They were talking happy thoughts about unicorns and rainbows and how those mean, nasty Republicans would have been put in their places by a strong black woman.

Needless to say, neither of these positions are accurate in any way.

There is a middle ground here,and THAT was what I was trying to touch on. Staying the course and doing nothing out of the ordinary creates smooth sailing. I was no Kamala fan, actually kind of loathed her during the primaries in 2019-20, really disappointed when Biden chose her as VP, but I did endorse her because she was clearly the better option than spazbaby orange cowardly lion. Picking someone who is going to do the least amount of damage seems to be a pretty easy decision in my book. There’s a difference between a minor problem with a pretty standard candidate that can be addressed and being petrified of someone willfully tanking the U.S. economy with a trade war because he doesn’t like the Canadian Prime Minister and wants Ontario as the 51st state.

And let’s be really frank about this. Biden was kicked to the curb because he was foggy, seemed slow, and his time was clearly passed. But if you saw a candidate who was roughly just as old say the things below, you’d call an asylum to see if they were missing anyone:

• The United States should buy Greenland.

• The Panama Canal is run by the Chinese Government.

• We should ethnically cleanse Gaza so we could make Trump Tower Gaza Strip.

• Ukraine started the war in which it was invaded by Russia

• We need a cryptocurrency reserve, because we want to stock up and control a “currency” backed by nothing, whose users shun international regulation of this sort.

• Let’s start a trade war with China, nevermind they buy most of the US Debt.

• Let’s fire all the meteorologists at the NOAA.

• Let’s fire IRS agents responsible for, you know, collecting revenue.

• Let’s put a perceived Russian agent who met with Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Asaad in as Director of National Intelligence.

• Let’s put a vaccine denier as the head of the agency making us safe from diseases.

And the list goes on. Donald Trump has gone from “uncle crazypants” in his first term to “JesusFuckingChristHe’sGoingtoStartWWIII!” In that regard, I can pretty much handle the US having our “First Gentleman” by comparison. To listen to BotBros defend this lunacy was outrageous.

But the flip side was just as odd. Crying tears for a bad candidate who never established herself in four years as Vice President. People wondering “Where is she now?” as if she could do anything to stop the crazy, now that she has zero job in government. Talking about how she could be the “Rebel Leader” of a great coming “resistance movement” that was the whole reason people in the middle didn’t vote for her in the first place. It was like the left just doesn’t get how politics works, and how this level of hopium completely clouds their judgment.

I subscribe to the “Tom Nichols” rule of online comments. To paraphrase, the rule is that if it is obvious by the comment that you will never have a half good conversation with someone, mute or block. RandoStingofDigits with their crude stupidity more than qualified for blocking outright. I was very liberal with the mute function this past week with others. A lot on the left I just muted—I don’t mind them crying crocodile tears as much as I hate bros respond to the collapsing DJIA with “But…Transgender Athletes!” I wasn’t really up for listening to either of them really.

I will say that the directionless, aimless Democratic Party right now is doing it no favors (yet again). Come 2026 or 2028, I’d like to support something other than the least bad option available.

PurpleAmerica’s Take on the State of the Union

Everything I said above was completely evident in Trump’s State of the Union speech, the Democrats’ embarrassing behavior, and the spin by both camps afterward and since.

Trump was, well, Trump. He was a beligerant asshole of the highest degree, as he always is. He went on forever (90 minutes!), he rambled, gave himself pats on the back of such ridiculous magnitude you couldn’t help but shake your head in disbelief. Even Republicans in the crowd, who had spent more times standing and sitting than they do squats at the gym, were tired of the stupidity and ignorance. Nobody watched it, at least not after the first 20 minutes. Nobody would want to.

Democrats, for their part, had to do NOTHING. The State of the Union (or in a President’s first year, the “Joint Address to Congress”) is a perk of the job of being President. Congress is a sacred forum. All Democrats needed to do was sit there, scowls on their faces, shaking their heads in silence and refusing to stand at every ovation. You’d think they could do that, but no. Instead, they brought pre-made signs like it were a campaign rally. Representative Al Green shook his cane and yelled “Get off my lawn” at the President, resulting in his being kicked out off the floor of the House. The more liberal members audibly commented and sighed and ridiculed. It was a testament to how far decorum had come ever since Joe Wilson responded to President Obama “You Lie!” in a joint session regarding the Affordable Care Act. That was an outrage that many Republicans at the time thought to admonish. After years of MTG and Lauren Boebert, of Rashida Tlaib and Al Green, it’s become the norm. It’s a sad statement on the current state of American politics when everything HAS to be a protest of some kind, everyone HAS to demonstrate some form of disobedience, every event HAS to be a show of disapproval, even if the focus is not to be on them. Even our most basic forums, those that are meant to bring people together to discuss the differences reasonable and amicably, have turned into nightmares of posturing to cameras for social media likes and fundraising emails. There’s a time and a place to protest, and the SOTU is not one of them. Take it outside and then scream at the news cameras, but don’t make a joke out of an annual Constitutionally required event.

As for Elyssa Slotkin’s Response to the State of the Union, I’ve said repeatedly that the Response to the State of the Union is the most pointless, useless speech in politics. The whole idea should be scrapped, as it takes away from the immediate spin following the main show, of which the opposition could be much better to offer. A genuine response could be given the morning after instead. A year ago, I wrote this, which was a generic response to the SOTU that could be created Mad Libs style. Although Slotkin did an OK job, nothing deviates from the script I wrote last year that much. It was as pointless a speech as any other response of the SOTU.

But most of my ire goes to the legions of partisan armchair hacks online the morning after. To them, either Trump’s speech was a triumph or the coming of Beelzebub. Al Green was either a hero, or a disgrace worthy of censure. Everything was either one of the best SOTUs ever (or as Trump put it, his administration was doing more than George Washington!) or was a monumental train wreck of a disaster.

It was actually none of those things. It was just boring dribble easily forgotten.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

One of my subscribers responded that “A 10 year old would have been a better option than Trump at this point.” Aside from the fact that you have to be 35 to run for election, he’s right.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff