I Watch Sarah Huckabee Sanders' Reply to the State of the Union So You Don't Have To
Also, please read my New Republic piece on my favorite part of Biden's speech: His proposed quadrupling of the tax on stock buybacks.
Is this the most terrifying smile in American politics?
After last year’s State of the Union address, I turned to my wife and said, “I don’t see how this guy can run again for president in 2024.” Not because of anything he said, but because of President Joe Biden’s weary affect. After this year’s State of the Union address, though, I thought: Maybe this will work after all. Biden was livelier, and the catcalls he received from nutbar Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene (wearing, for some reason, a white fur-lined coat that invited social-media comparisons to Cruella DeVille) gave him a good opportunity to mix it up. As John Harris wrote in Politico, “The Republican honking amounted to an in-kind contribution.”
My latest, for the New Republic, explains why Biden’s call to quadruple the one-cent tax on stock buybacks is an excellent idea that Republicans would be foolish to oppose, even though they almost certainly will oppose it. I bet you didn’t even know there was a one percent tax on stock buybacks. Congress passed it in August, and it was kind of a big deal. Please read my piece here.
I usually don’t watch the response to the State of the Union address, delivered this year by Arkansas Governor, former Trump flak, and nepo baby extraordinaire Sarah Huckabee Sanders, no matter which party delivers it because it’s after my bedtime. This year, though, I was curious because I’d just written a piece for the print TNR (available at fine newsstands everywhere) about the End of (GOP) Ideology, substituting Reaganism for the Marxism to which Daniel Bell bid adieu in his landmark 1960 book. So this morning I watched a replay on C-span. It did nothing to persuade me my thesis is incorrect.
Here are my 15 thoughts about the speech:
Somebody sent Gov. Sanders to smiling school. The results are kind of scary. She should stick to scowling; it’s her more authentic self.
Sanders says her mom was told by doctors she couldn’t have kids, yet here she is. Message: Experts are always wrong! The hell with ‘em!
Woke wokey-woke woke woke woke. Sanders was picked because she is, at 40, the youngest governor in America, and therefore a strong contrast to Biden, who’s 80. But her message—too much sexual freedom and too goddamned many foreigners—is a pitch to the geezers. Nobody is thinking this through.
Sanders says the crucial dividing line is not right versus left but “normal” versus “crazy.” It’s just as I wrote in my piece: Republicans have no ideology anymore, just prejudices.
Huh? The term “Latinx” is “derogatory”? I hold no brief for “Latinx,” a silly term that most Latinos don’t use, but it’s weird that Sanders would attempt a woke denunciation of a woke term. This must be some sort of complicated pitch to Latinos.
Sanders says (without actually saying it) that the ChiCom spy balloon showed Biden was weak. That would be the ChiCom spy balloon we shot down, compared to the three ChiCom spy balloons we didn’t when Sanders’ boss Donald Trump was president. This line of criticism has no future.
“A left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” Wokey-woke. Also dishonest. Culture war over stupid shit like who pees where is the GOP’s best asset right now, and you know that all too well, governor.
Big tech is taking away Americans’ freedom of speech. Oh, please. Big tech gave you nutters a megaphone the John Birch Society could only dream about.
This is a cranky pet peeve of mine but: the word is “strong,” not “shtrong.”
Less smiling as speech goes on. That’s good. I don’t want to be completely negative here. While I’m at it, I kind of like that she named one of her kids “Huck,” even though it was probably more in homage to herself than to Mark Twain. Twain set many of the darker passages of Huckleberry Finn in Sanders’s home state of “Arkansaw,” and once described it as a place “where ignorance, sloth, and drowsiness prevail.”
Sanders is talking a lot about freedom but makes no mention of the GOP’s greatest policy victory in decades: The Supreme Court taking AWAY a woman’s freedom to have an abortion. Doesn’t that rate an end-zone dance? Not when you’re preaching freedom, and definitely not when you want people to vote Republican.
More JFK-style new-generation talk. Gimme that torch, grandpa! Not till you say what you’ll do with it, kiddo.
Don’t say “new ideas,” governor, when you don’t have any.
She drops an anecdote about Trump visiting Iraq troops on Christmas, back when soldiers respected their president, by God. Trump nostalgia is fast approaching its sell-by date.
Sanders ends with that rictus of a smile. I’m going to have nightmares about that smile tonight.
Did I mention I have a new piece up about why a tax on stock buybacks is long overdue? Please read it here.
‘Bout time. What is NEVER discussed is that the % of US GDP devoted to public services/purposes is just about the LOWEST in the advanced world—AND that small % also supports the largest military and space programs, meaning comparatively leaner other public programs. (Look it up at OECD!)
Yes, Sanders is insufferable but I suggest it would be appropriate to insuffer at lower volume. She's beneath you. What was your expectation? She pretty much complied with mine. The whole creepy smile. C'mon. NYSE is terrifically undertaxed at just about every level, from callow traders to the members of the board. Buy-back tax is okay with me but so is a plain vanilla financial transaction tax on every transfer.